Talk:bathing


 * 1) It is confusing to lump together the gerund and present partcipile together under the umbrella term "verb form". The gerund may be formed from a verb but acts as a noun. The present participle can be used as a verb in the continuous tenses, or as an adjective.
 * 2) The example under "adjective" is actually not an adjective! It is a noun used attributively. Remember that a gerund is a noun, and it's a gerund being used in the comound noun "bathing machine", meaning "machine for bathing". If it were an adjecitve, it would mean "a machine taking a bath". &mdash; Hippietrail 14:56, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Hi, um, right now the heading is "Modifier" - was that "adjective" when you wrote that in February?


 * I think somebody tried to help by changing Adjective -> Modifier. That doesn't help at all. &mdash; Hippietrail 00:29, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Regarding #1, I agree. It is also my preference to put the gerund form under "Noun" and the present participle under "Verb."


 * Well a gerund is a verb become a noun, a participle is a verb become an adjective. In languages with gender or number agreement between nouns and adjectives, participles also have to agree. Spanish participles have 4 forms. Verbs never have to agree. But it gets confusing because the participle are also used with an auxiliary verb to create compound tenses. In this case some languages still try to find something to agree with but I think it's a bit literary. Italian does this but Spanish doesn't. &mdash; Hippietrail 00:29, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Regarding #2 again, (since you are complaing about the example sentence, not the Adjective's definition) would this work better:
 * In America, people wear bathing suits, in the UK, they wear bathing costumes.

? Or does bathing not have a true adjective sense at all? (For some reason, I thought bathing suit was a noun, even though it's two words.) --Connel MacKenzie 11:47, 9 May 2005 (UTC)


 * I really don't think it has an adjective sense at all apart from the participle in the transparent sense: "The man on the sand is fat but the bathing man is skinny".
 * bathing suit and friends are all just nouns. What some people here label "noun phrases" but I think that's disingenious and unhelpful. English compound nouns can be written as one word or two words either with or without hyphenation depending on what's regarded as good spelling. Intonation is the same no matter how they are spelled and it's the intonation which gives away a compound. &mdash; Hippietrail 00:29, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Hrumph. As an American, the Italian I know is limited to Mamma Mia! whereas my knowledge of Spanish is much better...I know gracias and Si! and kay-pass-uh. That is to say, a better-than-average stereotypical American ignorance of most other languages.

That is to say, you've lost me. SemperBlotto also expressed some frustration, as to not knowing what the desired target should be. Could you please clean this article up as per your initial two suggestions? It might be easier to then follow what you've explained above. I hope. --Connel MacKenzie 04:31, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

RFD discussion: August 2022–January 2023
Doesn't look like a true adjective Almostonurmind (talk) 12:48, 30 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete. Not gradable and not usable with become, but perhaps RFV is technically the more correct venue for this kind of inquiry. &mdash; Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 12:12, 2 September 2022 (UTC)


 * The different adjective senses have different translations to Czech: koupající se and koupací. But is this argument strong enough? For a translator using the dictionary, this could be quite nice. I don't see the adjective in dictionaries. From monolingual perspective, this is probably not worth it, but it is perhaps worth it from multi-lingual perspective. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:18, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's tricky when languages' parts of speech don't line up: I know there are also cases where languages have adjectives for things English only has attributive nouns for, like cork. IMO, it's probably best to treat each language in a way that's accurate to it, though. We don't relabel Chinese or Indonesian "classifiers" as nouns just because in English they'd be nouns (and English doesn't have "classifiers" as a part of speech), because in Chinese and Indonesian they are classifiers. So, for an English word, I think the parts of speech have to be based on what parts of speech the English word is attested in, not what parts of speech other languages have. Sometimes, like with cork, it's possible to mention the other languages' adjectives in the attributive noun's translation table (with appropriate qualifiers). - -sche (discuss) 11:07, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I think the parts of speech do line up since the adjective senses of bathing are attested in adjectival uses, so it is probably not quite like Chinese. As a grammatical category (part of speech in a sentence), not lexical, these uses are adjectival. The problem is that a participle sense is, by definition, intending to cover multiple parts of speech: that is what makes it a participle. So one can claim that a participle for bathing automatically covers noun uses and adjective uses, even plural noun uses. That is the problem: should the attested adjectival senses be subsumed by the participle or not, and what is better for the user. When an English speaker sees an adjective sense in an -ing participle, they are not harmed in anyway since they can think, oh well, an adjective, that's just the participle anyway; but a translator is helped. Two asides: 1) a participle is a Participle, not a Verb, as for part of speech since by definition it covers multiple parts of speech, which is why it is called "participle"; 2) since noun uses are called "gerund" rather than "present participle" by multiple sources, the single unified sense line should better read "gerund or present participle" or the like; e.g. M-W says that participles in English act as verbs and adjectives but does not say that they act as nouns and says that gerunds act as nouns. Some pages: Appendix:English -ing forms, Appendix:English gerund-participles. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:55, 3 September 2022 (UTC)


 * As Fytcha says, this is properly an RFV question (seeking cites that are adjectival: they do not seem to exist, so an RFV would lead to deletion, but it is an RFV question because they could exist), but as it stands the first sense's only usex "a bathing child" is the verb, and the second sense's usex "Victorians changed in a bathing machine" is the noun (or gerund, for which another usex is currently under the verb header). Adding English present participles/gerunds as a separate part of speech header or at least revising the language of English present participles' definitions to clarify that they can be used in adjective-ish and noun-ish ways, is an interesting idea that might merit discussion in the Beer Parlour. - -sche (discuss) 19:17, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
 * We should just acknowledge that English gerunds exist. It's weird that we don't. Theknightwho (talk) 17:04, 4 September 2022 (UTC)


 * RFD-out-of-scope: now in RFV. One could argue that the RFV-treatment is not based on policy, and it isn't, but as long as editors do not protest against subjecting -ing adjectives to RFV requirements not based on policy and not traced to authoritative sources, things are acceptable. Although it looks like a minor finding against the project for having an operational process that does not trace to evidence of consensus or at least authoritative sources supporting the ideas of the process. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:33, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

RFV discussion: September 2022–February 2023
RFV of the adjective: was listed at RFD, but is properly an RFV question of whether citations demonstrating adjectivity exist. (The current usexes are the verb and noun, respectively.) - -sche (discuss) 19:27, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Of the 2 usage examples given the first is just the participle, and the second is the attributive noun. Leasnam (talk) 05:11, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Added bathing machine. DonnanZ (talk) 19:57, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I dont believe this is an adjective either. Last thing I want to is rekindle the debates down below with  etc, so I've held off from this, but I think it's been here long enough that it needs attention.  — Soap — 14:25, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

RFV Failed Ioaxxere (talk) 22:41, 9 February 2023 (UTC)