Category talk:Telugu feminine nouns

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We don't categorize by gender -- Liliana 12:16, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Erm we certainly do in some languages. What confuses me, is I didn't realize that Telugu had gender; {{te-noun}} doesn't have a parameter for it. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:57, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Which ones? I haven't seen such categories before. -- Liliana 16:15, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Mglovesfun, Telugu has gender according to w:Telugu grammar#Gender. —Angr 16:35, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Category:Masculine nouns by language has 18 members. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:42, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
And Category:Telugu masculine nouns isn't even one of them. —Angr 17:00, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Category:Masculine nouns by language is not clear on which kinds of masculine gender it encompasses. Telugu has grammatical gender, but it's based on objects being neuter, women being feminine, and men being masculine. Look at Category:Telugu masculine nouns‎ and you'll see that it's all nouns that are inherently for males only: words for sons, fathers, certain types of men, or male-only names. Category:Hebrew masculine nouns‎ is completely different; דג (fish) is masculine, even though fish are not inherently male in any way. (And as a side note, דג isn't even in Category:Hebrew masculine nouns‎...) --Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 14:19, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
So it's the same gender system that English has, more or less? I'm not sure if that really matters a lot, if it has strict grammatical consequences. The Bantu languages have an elaborate system of classifying words based on meaning (although it's not as neat as it was historically), and the Slavic languages distinguish between animacy in masculine nouns, which also has a semantic connotation in addition to a grammatical one. —CodeCat 18:53, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete with whole Category:Masculine nouns by language and subcategories. These categories are useless and I see no reason to keep them. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Maro 22:58, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
No more useless than Category:Telugu nouns, right? I mean nobody would learn a language by navigating such a category; such categories are for Wiktionary statisticians only; they're not intended to be useful for language learners. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:53, 20 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I use categories like Category:Telugu nouns. I frequently use Category:Old Church Slavonic nouns or Category:Old Church Slavonic nouns because some sounds can be spelled in different ways and its a good way to find words when you’re not sure of the spelling. But I don’t see any value in having gender categories. It’s no different than having categories for words that end in consonants, and another for words that end in vowels. Who cares? In fact, Slavic masculine nouns are generally those that end in a consonant, and Slavic feminines are mainly those that end in -a. Neuters end in -o or -e. I don’t think these categories are useful, but our standard noun and verb categories certainly are useful. —Stephen (Talk) 06:27, 21 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Some languages do have categories to sort words by declension or conjugation. I imagine sorting them by gender is similar in that respect because it may affect the grammar, especially if the language has no other grammatical categories. In that sense, 'feminine nouns' may be interpreted as 'nouns of the feminine declension'. —CodeCat 12:00, 21 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
But why would you want to know whether a word had a masculine or feminine declension when you can just look at the declension table as see for yourself what the declension is? And besides using gender categories for this would not work very well, because nouns such as папа are classified as masculine but have feminine declensions...or кофе, which looks like a neuter, is classified as masculine and is undeclinable. If you need a number of examples of a certain kind of declension, you should go to a template like {{ru-noun-inan-1}} and click on "What links here." —Stephen (Talk) 12:47, 21 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't trying to apply what I said to Slavic languages because I know they don't work that way. But in Telugu maybe the gender is the only factor in deciding declension, I don't know. —CodeCat 12:41, 21 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t think that would be of any help in Telugu either. Eventually we need to add declension tables for the Telugu nouns, but gender categories won’t be useful in that endeavor. —Stephen (Talk) 12:47, 21 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]