Talk:haantje de voorste

Which spelling as main article
Shouldn't we take haantje-de-voorste als main lemma? Both "haantje de voorste" en "haantje-de-voorste" seem to be common, but "haantje-de-voorste" is the standard spelling. Morgengave (talk) 14:08, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * My impression from Google Books was that the hyphenated spelling was a lot less common than the spaced spelling, especially if you omit mentions. I initially thought the difference was a factor 10, but that does not seem quite right. However I'd be surprised if the official spelling is even half as common as this one. On the other hand it's of course not a systemic method at all, because I don't know a search function that differentiates the two spellings and can leave out mentions. Personally I don't care much for the official spelling standard and will only prefer it if the ratio between an unofficial spelling and the official spelling is less than around 1.2; my view is that we should mostly go with what is the most common within a reasonable time period and just indicate what's official with qualifiers and labels. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk)  14:30, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think that Google books can be used to make a comment on overall modern usage as it is f.e. biased to historical usage which seems to favor the unhyphenated form (and often even capitalizes "haantje"), and only covers one sub-part of written usage. For certain, the hyphenated form is not uncommon (also visible when you select 21st books on Google Books or just if you do a random Google search). Any objections if I remove the "uncommon" claim to the hyphenated form? Morgengave (talk) 14:58, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I relied only on 21st-century search results. I've removed the claim that it is uncommon, although I think a ratio of about 10 to 1 would justify such a label (but I now think any actual ratio isn't going to be that pronounced). The alternative-form entry does have a claim of "less common" now, though.
 * One advantage of Google Books over Google Search is that its contents mostly exclude machine-translated stuff. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk)  15:54, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Usage note
I don't think the usage note is correct, at least not for Belgium. There's plenty of usage with the article "een" and to me it sounds more normal. This may be a Belgian thing: e.g., there are 10x the results with site:.be for "is een haantje-de-voorste" than for "is haantje-de-voorste". (the hyphens don't influence the search results.) This still holds for the Netherlands (site:.nl), but only x2 Morgengave (talk) 14:08, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Hmm, again on Google Books with a different test ("haantje de voorste" vs. "een haantje de voorste") it seems to me that the latter only constitutes a small portion of the total hits of the former. The thing is that this is often used with adverbs like altijd or with auxiliary verbs like willen or moeten; those are omitted when you search for "is haantje-de-voorste". For instance "haantje de voorste zijn" is almost as common as "een haantje de voorste" while "een haantje de voorste zijn" does not have a lot of hits (so the overlap is small). But you may be on the money that there is a country-based difference in usage. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk)  14:30, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think you can make the claim hard that usage-with-article is uncommon, but the article does deserve a usage note that usage exists both with and without an article. Any objections if I make that change? Morgengave (talk) 14:58, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * There isn't/wasn't a claim that use without an article is uncommon, the usage note only claimed that that type of use was less common. I've edited the usage note a little so that claim is now absent. If you think you have found a country-specific tendency that should be added, be my guest. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk)  15:54, 30 January 2021 (UTC)