Category talk:Catalan noun forms

Deletion debate
See Requests for deletion/Others for my logic. — [ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 23:27, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * For this category (but not for the Spanish one above), it would be sufficient to change Template:ca-noun-form, with a possible rename along the way. The proposer might wish to have a look at the history of that template first ;) Physchim62 23:54, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Show me a Catalan grammar that says "these feminine nouns are forms derived from the masculine forms and should not be treated as individual nouns" and I'll back off some, but until then, Spanish and Catalan do not have noun forms, they have plural nouns :) — [ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 00:12, 14 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep Can't say about the grammars per se, but show me a Catalan dictionary that has a separate entry for instead of merging it into the entry for .  Except where the feminine form has a sense other than "female ___" they don't have separate entries.  Not only that, but as can be seen with with  and  in both the GDLC and DIEC2, the feminine sense of a noun (in this case a female leftist (i.e. red), is found in the entry for roig, the masculine form, while the other noun senses of roja, (such as a plant that is used to make a red dye [Rubia tinctorum], and a species of beetle whose larvae infest olive trees [Hylesinus oleiparda]) are the ones found at roja, and no mention is made of female socialists at roja. — Carolina wren discussió  01:35, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't have much in the way of formal Catalan grammars, but what I have was written by Pompeu Fabra, so maybe that evens it out! The mestre says: Cada nom comú sol tenir dues formes distintes: l'una d'elles és la que usem quan parlem d'un sol individu; l'altre és la que usem quan parlem de dos o més individus. In translated summary, Catalan nouns have two forms: singular and plural.
 * I don't think the comparison with printed dictionaries is valid: dead-tree works have economic constraints that Wiktionary can mostly escape. I have the GDLC on CD-ROM, and that version gives separate entries for jutgessa and metgessa; I have DIEC in the paper version, and those nouns are listed under jutge and metge respectively, for obvious reasons of space. It's actually one of the very few differences between the two works! There is still only a single entry for roig/roja on the CD-ROM, btw. Physchim62 01:52, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't draw any conclusions from jutgessa and metgessa. Judging from a distance -essa doesn't appear to be productive in modern Catalan any more than -ess is in Modern English.  They also have both have senses other than "female judge" or "female physician" respectively.  In any case, following the usual pattern seen with adjective forms jutge and metge  would normally not have feminine forms, and if they did the standard feminine forms would be *jutga and *metga.  (Note, a Google search came up with 16K Catalan hits for "la metgessa", 4K hits for "la metge", 190K hits for "le metge" and 0 hits for "metga".  No way of knowing how many, if any, of the hits for "le metge" were for female physician, but the large number of hits for "la metge" in colloquial usage argues against considering metgessa as the feminine form of metge, any more than dona is the feminine form of home.)
 * In any case to the degree that Catalan can be considered to have feminine noun forms, if a noun for a female something doesn't use the standard "-a" feminine marker then I wouldn't consider it a feminine noun form, but an independent noun. — Carolina wren discussió 05:40, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * We really ought to have a general discussion about this issue for all Iberian languages (and French, Italian?) in the Beer Parlour, and decide on a uniform and consistent category structure, if possible. It's better to address all the languages in one go than do them piecemeal. --EncycloPetey 22:48, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Agreed. BTW, Carolina, you can't have metga and jutga in Catalan, because you need the "e" after the "g" to keep the pronunciation homologous. Still, the -essa ending isn't restricted to these cases, you can find it in mestressa as well, as a distinct noun from mestra (no doubt from the influence of French, that one). Physchim62 11:55, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete per nomination. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:46, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Kept, this is a polciy issue, not a deletion one. Please use WT:BP or WT:ACA. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:55, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Category:Catalan noun forms
Catalan seems to be the only language that uses Category:Catalan plurals and Catalan noun forms for the same words. Spanish for example, only uses noun forms, French only uses plural. I admit we have nothing even close to policy on this. Now would seem to be as good a time as any to start. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:38, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Adding to the debate, as it's only function is too fill this category up. I don't think removing it (the template) from pages would be all that difficult using MglovesfunBot. For pretty much every single page, you could use . Mglovesfun (talk) 08:07, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * The template also generates the inflection line, and formats one or two genders as given. There's no reason to delete the template, though a decision could modify it to categorize the entry "correctly" depending on the outcome of the discussion. --EncycloPetey 02:34, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * We could rename to I guess. But I can see that failing and RFD later on anyway. I'll volunteer to replace it personally, if that helps. Mglovesfun (talk) 07:50, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think there's a reason to have both categories. However, it seems strange to use one category for some languages and another for others. Couldn't we just use 'noun forms' for all of them?
 * The fact that there is a specific template for the inflection line is really because we don't generally use on form-of entries, and this is because we don't want non-lemma forms ending up in categories like, and we also generally do not include inflections in such entries. However, I have used  quite often in this fashion, by providing only the language and the gender. So then  would become . This format could (should?) be standardised for other languages as well.
 * A related problem that is being discussed somewhere I think (can't remember where) is that does not distinguish noun from adjective plurals. I think it would therefore be useful to make it clear what POS it is meant for, and perhaps introduce an alternative version for adjectives.  and ? —CodeCat 11:53, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes all good points. I'd be happy to use noun form for every language, the French Wiktionary does. We have a rule of thumb that highly inflected languages use noun forms and lesser inflected languages - not least English - uses plurals. Yes, also plurals of proper nouns go in Category:English plurals. However, I don't think you've advance this specific debate much, just the general ones. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:56, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps we should create a new generic template based on . This template would then be tweaked for form-of entries, so that for example  would automatically categorise the entry under . The same could then be done for all other languages as well (assuming we want all languages to have a '(lang) (pos) forms' category for all possible parts of speech). And following on from that, just as we encourage languages to create their own inflection line templates if they become more than trivial, we could recommend the same for languages that systematicall require more information than  provides. This would occur far less than with  though, so we can expect the new template to be used in a much greater proportion of form-of entries. —CodeCat 13:51, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Edit: Wow, seems I wasn't the first one with that idea. —CodeCat 13:53, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Kept the category and the template: Various good ideas, no consensus. (In addition, a number of other, more recent, discussions and polls just don't display a consensus for the wider subject of the roles of plurals and noun forms for many or all languages at once, which was mentioned here too.") --Daniel. 14:24, 21 May 2011 (UTC)