Talk:forlong
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The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification (permalink).
This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.
Rare/nonstandard/obsolete/weird at best, so needs glossing if kept. But let's see what we have here:
- A verb, "to be possessed with longing", with one citation: the cite's meaning is not clear to me, but it suggests that the narrator is "forelonged", in which case the def mixes up its object and should be "to possess with longing".
- A verb, "to keep or continue longer, prolong". Three cites, one from 1496 (should be Middle English instead?), one from James Joyce (famous inventor of nonce/nonsense words, and in this context it's clearly a noun, not a verb: "forlongs I have livramentoed"), and one with "forelonged memories" which is of unclear meaning but might fit this def. Equinox ◑ 19:09, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
- I have added what I could find to the citations page. I find a number of cases that look like an obsolete variant of furlong (I only added three of them). I also saw a number of quotes that look like an adverb meaning "for a long time", but it was usually hyphenated (for-long), with only one that I could find that clearly omitted the hyphen. Then there were a number of uses of "forlonged" or "forlonging" that seem to match the first definition, but might also indicate instead two adjectives (the originally supplied citation is similarly ambiguous). I suggest we convert Etymology 2 to Middle English, ignoring the Joyce quote as a nonce, and treating the 2005 quote as belonging to that group of "filled with longing" quotes, where it also works. We could then either clean up Etymology 1 as a verb, or convert it to a pair of adjectives. In either case, it should probably be considered poetic. I am inclined to ignore the furlongs, as part of the variation in spelling you find in very old texts. Kiwima (talk) 22:47, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
- This older(?) text has furlongs (“within two furlongs of a Bounſing Prieſt”). Can we be sure that forlongs is not a typo? --Lambiam 11:18, 6 January 2019 (UTC)
- Seems like a good plan, AFAICT. DCDuring (talk) 23:28, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
- I have added what I could find to the citations page. I find a number of cases that look like an obsolete variant of furlong (I only added three of them). I also saw a number of quotes that look like an adverb meaning "for a long time", but it was usually hyphenated (for-long), with only one that I could find that clearly omitted the hyphen. Then there were a number of uses of "forlonged" or "forlonging" that seem to match the first definition, but might also indicate instead two adjectives (the originally supplied citation is similarly ambiguous). I suggest we convert Etymology 2 to Middle English, ignoring the Joyce quote as a nonce, and treating the 2005 quote as belonging to that group of "filled with longing" quotes, where it also works. We could then either clean up Etymology 1 as a verb, or convert it to a pair of adjectives. In either case, it should probably be considered poetic. I am inclined to ignore the furlongs, as part of the variation in spelling you find in very old texts. Kiwima (talk) 22:47, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
RFV-resolved Kiwima (talk) 21:34, 18 January 2019 (UTC)