Category talk:Proto-Indo-European verbs

RFM discussion: October 2010–May 2017
Propose merging into Category:Proto-Indo-European roots because PIE roots are essentially roots of verbs. This was proposed (way back) by Ivan Štambuk on my talk page (User talk:Anypodetos). --ἀνυπόδητος 13:13, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Hmm, if often wondered if proto languages have parts of speech. As you say, don't all parts of speech share the same roots? Mglovesfun (talk) 13:32, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes. Roots are semantic, they have no real grammatical quality in them, other than that certain roots formed certain parts of speech in actual practice. I believe that PIE roots inherently had a 'primary' part of speech that others were derived from through various forms of derivation. However, it is certainly not true that all roots are verbs, that's just nonsense. —CodeCat 14:19, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * But then what is the difference between these two categories? Cat:PIE verbs contains roots from which verbs are formed (and other parts of speech as well, as *snígʷʰ-s "snow" from *sneygʷʰ- "to stick, to snow". Cat:PIE roots mostly contains such roots as well, with some exceptions like *pel- "grey". --ἀνυπόδητος 16:07, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * IMHO, in cases such as *sneygʷʰ- both the root and derivations should be grouped on a single page, where they can be discussed all together without resorting to redundancy and impracticality of disconnected treatment on separate pages. Only "cleanly" reconstructible nouns/adjectives should get their own pages. --Ivan Štambuk 20:41, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Non-verbal roots are not interesting and don't get separate PoS sections and categories, but only as complete words (nominative singular [masculine]). root means "verbal root" here and deals with verbal reflexes (meanings & paradigms) in the daughters. Since PIE had no infinitives, there is really no other way to lemmatize verbs other than bare roots. These two terms are synonymous in usage here. --Ivan Štambuk 20:41, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * 1) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support Ivan Štambuk 20:41, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Sure you can lemmatise them. Use another verb form, like the 1st person singular of whatever aspect the verb has as its basic form. If all the roots we have pages for are verbs, then we can easily make proper verbs out of them. But I don't see the point in restricting roots to verbal roots only. —CodeCat 20:46, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The problem with PIE verbal paradigms is that they are in most cases not completely reconstructible and no "basic form" is reachable. If we chose some arbitrary inflected form of e.g. present stem as a lemma, there would be in most cases several variant forms to chose from on the basis of attested reflexes, and giving precedence to any of them would be a value judgment on the "importance" or "authenticity" of a particular reflex. By using a root-only form in e-grade, we can simply ignore the issues of paradigms, ablauts, enlargements etc. and deal with all that neutrally within the appendix itself. PIE verbs are traditionally lemmatized as roots and to my knowledge no dictionary ever used something else. We should simply follow the established practice, using roots as synonymous with verbal roots. Derived nouns/adjectives should go on separate pages, or on the same page in some special cases, but then they will clearly be separated with different headers and citation forms in the inflection line from the verbal part. --Ivan Štambuk 22:20, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * If that's the case, then I think to avoid confusion we should avoid using 'root' to mean specifically 'verbal root'. Because it certainly confused me, since I think of a root as a base for the formation of any part of speech. So we should list those roots that are verb roots as verbs, if that's what they are. The fact that they are roots (denoted by the trailing dash) should then indicate that the inflection is unknown or uncertain. —CodeCat 22:38, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * They are translated as English verbs ("to X"), they have verbal inflection and morphological variations in the inflection line...it's pretty obvious that we're dealing with verbal roots. Although some of those currently in that particular category refer to nouns and ought to be renamed. I have no problem if we use ===Verbal root=== instead as a header name. --Ivan Štambuk 16:31, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, Ivan, such things are obviously verbs. How about the simple header ===Verb===, then? The listing will be just as for any other verbs we have here, except its root will be used as the lemma form instead of one of the inflections. I think it's fairly obvious from the presence or absence of a dash at the end whether the root or a full form of the word is being displayed. – Krun 20:41, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

(unindent) So which name should we use for the category? I still prefer "PIE roots" because "PIE verbs" isn't exactly correct (after all, there are nouns derived from these roots). Another possibility would be "PIE verbal roots" but that's needlessly complicated in my opinion. The confusion about those being verbal roots could hopefully be resolved by adding a lead section to the category. --ἀνυπόδητος 18:48, 29 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Archiving as stale. - -sche (discuss) 20:20, 13 May 2017 (UTC)