Category talk:English plurals ending in "-es"

RFD discussion: July 2023
These categories were added manually by User:BD2412 about 10 years ago. This means they're unmaintained and totally out of date, and in some cases they're also wrong; e.g. just on first glance I can see that anciens régimes and anemones are in the former category when they should not be. I honestly don't see the point of categories like this as the rules for when -es and -ies are used are pretty regular, and if we are to keep them, they absolutely need to be generated automatically (which is currently possible using the "category function" functionality in Module:form of). Benwing2 (talk) 05:26, 10 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Delete, I struggle to imagine a reason for needing these categories. These are hardly irregular, nonstandard or surprising plural endings. This, that and the other (talk) 07:21, 10 July 2023 (UTC)


 * As far as I recall, my intent in creating these was to counter the awkwardness of having only the irregular plural categories for certain classes of plural nouns that could be arrived at through multiple means of formation. For example, "axes" is the regular plural of "axe", the regular spelling through a different formation of the Americanism, "ax", and the irregular plural of "axis". I have no strong feeling about whether the broader category structure should be kept, but something should be done to call out these rare weird circumstances where the same word is both a regular plural and an irregular plural. bd2412 T 14:34, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
 * These sorts of cases exist (cf. also arses, apses, bases, eclipses, ellipses, lexes) but I'm not sure I see the connection to Category:English plurals ending in "-es". If we want to categorize them, it might have to be done manually; the only way to automate it is to parse the page source for calls to plural of (although User:Theknightwho is working on a parser that might make this easier). Benwing2 (talk) 23:54, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I am thinking more specifically of the axis --> axes/ax --> axes/axe --> axes, or fairie --> fairies/fairy --> fairies situation, where you can have multiple ways to end up with the plural from, but only one category in the entry indicating what kind of plural it was. bd2412 T 03:37, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I think you meant to ping me. Categories are not intended to be used for this purpose; the contents of the category is what is interesting, not the mere presence of the categories on certain pages. If you want to specifically call out cases where a given word can be the plural of different lemmas, we could have a category for this purpose, rather than trying to shoehorn this very specific purpose into general categories like Category:English plurals ending in "-es". Benwing2 (talk) 05:59, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm not pushing to keep these, just explaining the rationale. I tend to assume that for non-English speakers at least, the rules of pluralization can be confusing at first, and categories can serve as mechanisms to clarify the formation of words. I agree that this can be handled by an appendix, or a much more narrowly drawn category. bd2412 T 15:39, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Also, yes, I meant to ping you. bd2412 T 15:40, 12 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Delete -es and -ies are standard plural endings in English, unlike -i, etc. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:02, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Deleted by Benwing after emptying. Ultimateria (talk) 17:40, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks, indeed I did that :) ... I figure if we really need to it's easy to auto-generate these categories. Benwing2 (talk) 19:13, 14 July 2023 (UTC)