Talk:great-great-grandfather

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Latest comment: 2 years ago by Backinstadiums in topic Pronunciation
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great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather

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Seriously? Does anyone really use such a term in speech? Greats after a certain number start to get difficult to count. 2602:306:3653:8920:C531:D028:8E0:2504 00:54, 23 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

Speedied. I redirected it to great-grandfather. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 00:59, 23 April 2016 (UTC)Reply
Does anyone? Yes, they do:
  • 2012, Matt Chandler, The Explicit Gospel, page 119:
    Do you know your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfatherʼs name? It wasn't that long ago.
We established a rule specific to constructions like these by a vote some years ago, at Wiktionary:Votes/2014-01/Treatment of repeating letters and syllables. The rule is, if it is attested (which this one is), it is hard-redirected to the entry having three repetitions, in this case great-great-great-grandfather. bd2412 T 02:47, 23 April 2016 (UTC)Reply
Five greats is the most I hear outside of genealogical circles (which can go on indefinitely, but these days are typically abbreviated to the jargony "4th Great, 6 Great, 8G"). That's probably because few people other than genealogists know their genealogy back more than seven generations in any line, and also likely because it's increasingly easy to lose track of how many times you say "great" with each repetition. But I agree: as long as it's noted that one can keep adding more, there's no good reason for each repetition to have a separate entry. Even those famous genealogists and coiners of words, the Romans, stopped at three greats (avus=grandfather, proavus=great-grandfather, abavus=great-great-grandfather, adavus or atavus=great-great-great-grandfather), and thereafter resorted to other means of counting generations. P Aculeius (talk) 03:09, 23 April 2016 (UTC)Reply
If it's attestable in Serbo-Croatian, then there should be a Serbo-Croatian entry. But there doesn't have to be a corresponding English entry in order to translate it into English; if vasoflorbella means "beautiful flowers in a vase" in Broglish, that doesn't mean that beautiful flowers in a vase should have its own entry in English. P Aculeius (talk) 04:36, 24 April 2016 (UTC)Reply
Sure, the issues being that (1) beautiful flowers in a vase isn’t itself a word in English, in contrast to great-great-..., (2) probably few or no other languages have a word meaning beautiful flowers in a vase, so that having translations for it isn’t particularly useful, but a larger number of languages have extensive systems of kinship terms, and (3) we do already have entries that exist only for translation purposes, such as day after tomorrow, so current consensus seems to be that such an argument doesn’t necessarily hold. Vorziblix (talk) 09:31, 24 April 2016 (UTC)Reply
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that few or no other languages have a word meaning "beautiful flowers in a vase". There is a language with a single word for "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant". —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:24, 24 April 2016 (UTC)Reply
You’re right, polysynthetic languages entirely slipped my mind. At any rate, however the community chooses to deal or not deal with this is all right with me. Vorziblix (talk) 20:04, 24 April 2016 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I think that would make sense, especially given that previous consensus seems to allow for entries such as dark red, in the future, day after tomorrow, &c. for translation purposes. Vorziblix (talk) 09:31, 24 April 2016 (UTC)Reply


Pronunciation

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Where do the stresses go here? --Backinstadiums (talk) 06:45, 8 April 2022 (UTC)Reply