Talk:duritierum

RFD discussion: October 2019–March 2020
According to textbooks and linguistic literature that I have read, Latin nouns of the fifth declension other than dies and res have no attested genitive plural forms. Likewise, ablative/dative plural forms ending in -ebus are attested for dies and res (diebus, rebus), but apparently not for other nouns. In the nominative/accusative, plurals are apparently attested for a few more fifth declension nouns, but not for many others; however, the form is identical to the singular, so no pages would have to be deleted for those cases. The defectiveness of fifth declension nouns is mentioned in Allen and Greenough §98, which gives the following as marginal forms mentioned by grammarians: faciērum, speciērum, speciēbus, spērum, spēbus. So those should be kept, but I think it safe to get rid of bot-generated entries for nonexistent forms like duritierum, pauperierum, pueritierum where a web search only turns up hits from other online Latin dictionaries with automatically generated declension tables.--Urszag (talk) 18:03, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Here are a few uses of congerierum in Late Latin texts:, , . And here a few uses of fidebus: , , (pdf). I suppose many more such forms that were shunned by Classical Latin authors are attested in Late Latin texts. So perhaps, rather than deleting these forms, add an asterisk with a note “* Not attested in Classical Latin”?  --Lambiam 21:36, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Stop ignoring the fact that Latin was used after it died. Textbooks and linguistic literature don’t know what is attested afterwards, they only look into L&S, Gaffiot, Georges, TIL, and so on, which end in the sixth century. Also their not being attested does not mean they weren’t used in antiquity either or that the paradigms were “defective”; there is nothing odd about them to Roman ears, I claim to the contrary, like that linguistic literature claims baselessly that the words were “defective”. If you search for missing forms of other-than frequent words you search for coincidences of transmission and there can be no conclusion about the absence of such forms. But you would have to know that in the whole paradigm the form is uncertain to mark it as reconstructed. There is no expectation of the reader that every single form is attested and that we make inflection tables patchy by starring or removing forms. And so why wouldn’t there be forms like ? No reason at all, and I find plenty of texts with, from crystallographical or chemical literature (various degrees of hardness?). Philosophers can pluralize all abstracta. is not likely because of the meaning, but should we exclude plurals from such words based on the meaning? A matter of taste. Fay Freak (talk) 22:50, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I think we should have entries for Latin words from any time period. But because words in this declension have been specifically noted to often lack certain plural forms, I think the entry for those forms should only exist if the forms are attested. I agree that absences of attestation can be coincidental, but I'm not sure that Latin speakers would have actually felt free to use all such plural forms; I'll try to read more about what grammarians say about the listed words. I messed up with "duritierum"; you're correct that there are some attestations of that form. I guess I should go through the words one-by-one and suggest specific unattested forms for RFV.--Urszag (talk) 23:55, 13 October 2019 (UTC)


 * No action taken. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:17, 23 March 2020 (UTC)