Talk:borrowin'

RFD discussion: March–December 2020
Test case for -in' endings. Any -ing word (at least, of more than one syllable) can be written like this to indicate dialect or defective pronunciation. This is a rule that people can learn, and not expect to be able to look up every one of thousands of possibilities individually. Mihia (talk) 23:36, 17 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Keep Why borrowin' and not borrows and borrowed? I'd argue that there's more reason to have borrowin' than borrows, since people can learn the rule about changing -ing to -in', but they will have learned the rules of basic verb conjugation in English by the time that they encounter borrows.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:28, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Take to RFV; keep it it can be attested in a CFI-compliant way, otherwise delete. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:17, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep (if attested); I just don't see the harm in these, although I don't think I'd oppose hard-redirecting as many as possible (i.e. any where there's no other, idiomatic sense, or other-language term spelled the same way). Frankly, we could do that for all inflected forms, but we've opted to provide information on the nature of the inflection, and I don't see why we wouldn't do that here. (Although the utility is marginal, I do think there's utility to having entries for the inflected forms, including obsolete/archaic ones like "thinketh", so anyone looked them up or copypasting them into search reaches the definition after a click or two.) - -sche (discuss) 03:43, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep. Cited, per Mahāgaja's comment, back to 1858 (and probably earlier). One interesting note, possibly of relevance here. Citations before that tend to show the same usage for "borrowin" without the apostrophe at the end, which would at least be an obsolete alternative spelling. E.g., 1834, Seba Smith, et al., The Life of Andrew Jackson: President of the United States, p. 233: "...I thou't a spell on the borrowin of the post-office, and the necessity of havin interested who wou'd shell out the kett tu keep power in their hands. The borrowin tu electioneer from the Bank at Nashvil, reconcil'd you tu state banks...". It would be interesting to determine how the apostrophe was gained. bd2412 T 04:12, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Useless. PUC 22:13, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete - this is a transformation which is arbitrary and can equally be applied to lots of words without changing their meaning but only changing their pronunciation. At most redirect to the word being transformed. - TheDaveRoss  14:04, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
 * We should at least be keeping records of citations for these forms somewhere. bd2412 T 03:59, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I would put them on the citations page for the transformed term, just like a letter-case variant. - TheDaveRoss  13:37, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Either keep (or rather make entries for) all of 'em, or not go there at all, thus a delete (in this instance) - once upon a time when I was creating a spellchecker to spellcheck a corpus of literature, I ended up having to include "-in'" forms for every single continuous participle in the base dictionary because these "dropped G" forms are ubiquitous in representations of speech in literature. One way to look at them is that they are available and regular (albeit nonstandard) orthographic forms of the words. We could presumably programmatically create entries for all that simply had a def along the lines of "(in representations of speech) a form of XXX indicating an unvelarised pronunciation". Personally, I think there would be no problem with this. Wiktionary is not a dictionary of only standard English (or other lang), after all. - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 03:52, 24 March 2020 (UTC)


 * The Northern Irish always seem to drop their g's, but I wouldn't create a load of g-less entries because of that. DonnanZ (talk) 09:07, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete for nominator's reason. Also, we already have ; that should suffice. — SGconlaw (talk) 12:40, 6 April 2020 (UTC); updated 16:33, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep - kinda - Actually, we need to go further - I think we should use a bot to automatically create pages for "dropped-g" forms of all -ing suffixed words. Once when I had to create a spellchecker to check a corpus of literature (mostly novels and poetry) for new words I had to add dropped-g forms for every -ing word so that the spellchecker would accept the countless cases throughout the corpus. It is a regular orthographic variant form of the English language, just nonstandard. - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 12:54, 29 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I see this as a terrifyingly weird and narrow view basically predicated on stopping the spell-checker producing errors! (Hey let's also turn all my typos into keywords so that my C program will compile.) As I stated below, any "corpus of literature" will contain strange and unusual spellings because any great author will probably bend the rules of language on purpose, knowing that they are deliberately writing things that are not words. I mean have you ever picked up James Joyce? Equinox ◑ 15:44, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I think you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say. Forms like "runnin'" and "jumpin'" are not typos, nor are they Joycean inventions. Also, importantly, they are not errors, but deliberate authorial choices that are used to indicate reduced pronunciations common in connected speech. I mentioned that corpus work I had done only to point out that dropped-g forms are not "strange and unusual" but rather the opposite, they are commonplace in literature. As far as I can see, "runnin'" is to "running" as "rock'n'roll" is to "rock and roll" - a variant that indicates pronunciation. We wouldn't want to leave "rock'n'roll" out, so neither should we omit "runnin'". But, I don't particularly care either way. If Wiktionary doesn't cover the dropped-g forms, then it is not the end of the world. No other dictionary does either. But, then again, Wiktionary is no other dictionary. - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 05:38, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes "runnin'" is not a typo. However once the author makes that "authorial choice" to try to spell out speech phonetically, rather than using normal spellings (see e.g. Iain Banks Feersum Endjinn [Fearsome Engine] where half the book is written this way) then they have stepped beyond the bounds of a dictionary. A dictionary lists words as they are spelled, not as they are sounded. We are not a lookup service. Equinox ◑ 12:57, 24 September 2020 (UTC)


 * I would disagree that any great author will deliberately write things that aren't words. I'd say it's a distinct and rare stylistic choice, and the fact that you name James Joyce, a very distinct author, helps make the point. Yes, they will use word forms that are unusual at times, but only rare authors like Joyce would use a word form that doesn't communicate something to their readers, that is, a word by just about any definition.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:17, 17 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Delete This is not comparable to existing entries such as borrows, borrowed, and so on because it's not a separate word .... its just a respelling of an existing word. All such words should be deleted UNLESS they have gained a specific meaning for the new spelling, as perhaps with obscene words (and even that is questionable). — Soap — 16:23, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
 * So we canonize one spelling as correct? By that logic, we should delete "color" as just a respelling of an existing word. Borrows was chosen as a response to the nominator, not to your argument, novel to this discussion. Is borrows really a separate word? It's just "borrow" with a grammatical marker tacked on; it's only English orthography that leads you to believe they're one word.--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:56, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with you about borrows.... a traditional dictionary wouldnt have an entry for borrows either ... Im not sure why we do, perhaps it's to reduce the effort at looking something up or making a link. However such a convenience doesnt really apply to words with -in' which are seldom used in print and do not represent a grammatical form distinct from -ing words.  As for color/colour, I would agree with you there too if there were duplicate forms for every single noun in the language, but there aren't ... this spelling variation applies to just a subset of nouns, whereas the ing ~ in' variation applies to every English language verb.  — Soap — 16:44, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
 * For "equal" spellings such as colour/color, we should have one article titled e.g. "colour or color". I certainly would not advocate extending this to "borrowing or borrowin'"! Mihia (talk) 00:50, 23 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Delete but I don't like this "test case". Start the proper discussion. Equinox ◑ 15:37, 16 September 2020 (UTC)


 * P.S. I suppose the best keep argument I can think of is that "this is the normal way to say it in my dialect" (cf. people complaining that Scots is just weirdly spelled English, but also see ). If it's just "oh look, you can drop the g, then yeah, guess what, we can also drop the initial h from every word beginning with h, as Dickens knew  when writing Cockney characters in the 1800s. Or various other cuteisms mimicking speech habits, like ze being how a French person says "the". Can we get these people another hobby? Yachting? Equinox ◑ 15:42, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * What about borrowes, then? bd2412 T 19:22, 17 September 2020 (UTC)


 * As a g-dropper when I was younger: Keep -- Dentonius (my politics | talk) 13:34, 4 October 2020 (UTC)


 * No consensus (an even split between keep and delete) after nine months, including two months passing since the last !vote, so not deleted at this time. - -sche (discuss) 07:40, 6 December 2020 (UTC)