Talk:one eighth

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RFD discussion: May–September 2019[edit]

The following information passed a request for deletion (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.

This is just a combination of one and eighth, and the meaning should be clear. "Eighth" is a noun, and "one" is an adjective quantifying it. This makes the whole thing a noun phrase. The phrase is not a numeral in the sense of a part-of-speech that acts as a quantifying determiner, like the cardinal numbers. For example, we say "two apples" but "one eighth apples" sounds incorrect compared to "one eighth of an apple" where it's a noun phrase modified by a prepositional phrase. Presumably this means that one-eighth is simply a combination of an adjective and a noun that are hyphenated according to normal hyphenation rules. For example "one eighth of an apple" but "a blue one-eighth length pipe". Related entries might also want to be deleted if this one is:

... but for some reason not two sevenths or one eleventh.

The general rules for making fractions could/should be have been added to Appendix:English numerals (which covers numbers, not just part-of-speech numerals). -- Beland (talk) 00:22, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Also
Delete. There are many more attestable spelled-out fractions, like “five twelfths”, but its meaning is a SoP, literally: 1/12+1/12+1/12+1/12+1/12  --Lambiam 08:43, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Lambiam, since these reflect the set of fractions for which we have Unicode characters, would it be sufficient to either make them "alternative spelling of" entries, or redirect them to the Unicode characters? Alternately, do you think we should delete the Unicode characters for these fractions? bd2412 T 22:30, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    The Unicode characters are translingual and I wouldn’t know what the argument for their deletion might be. If the existence of the entry ¾ somehow supports an argument for including English three quarters, it should also argue for including German drei Viertel, French trois quarts, Japanese 四分の三, Turkish dörde üç, and so on. But also there I don’t know what that argument would be.  --Lambiam 23:08, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    That raises an interesting question. Are there any languages in which any of these fractions are single word constructions, or constructions not made according to a standard formula? If so, this would invoke the concept of the translation hub. bd2412 T 23:41, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I do not understand the separateness of the meaning of one-tenth. How is that different from the meaning given for one-seventh, except for replacing “ten” by “seven”? (I also think that “the usual dimension” should not be used in their definitions; one can imagine a tree that is unusually large, so large that one couldn’t fathom even a one-tenth piece of it.)  --Lambiam 08:53, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all. Chignon – Пучок 18:00, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete or redirect to the Appendix on numerals (or to an appendix on fractions), I think, although some of these may be covered by WT:COALMINE. - -sche (discuss) 19:40, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all. DTLHS (talk) 16:15, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A redirect wouldn't hurt. Equinox ◑ 22:35, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: A quick and dirty Google translate search of a handful of languages suggests that a number of these have single-word translations:
Dutch for three quarters is driekwart
Basque for one third is herena; one seventh is zazpigarrena; and one tenth is hamarrena
Bosnian for one fourth is četvrtina
Bulgarian for one half is половина (which is different than the word for half).
Corsican for three fifths is triplici
Estonian for one quarter is veerand, and one tenth is kümnendik
Finnish for one half is puolikas; one third is kolmasosa; one fifth is viidesosa; one sixth is kuudesosa; one seventh is seitsemäs
German for three fourths is Dreiviertel
  • bd2412 T 00:29, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • For all of those that mean "one X": there's nothing special about them. Bosnian četvrtina is simply a noun meaning "a fourth", Bulgarian половина (and its Russian homonym) is a noun meaning "a half" (I don't understand your note about that word), etc. Canonicalization (talk) 16:29, 19 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • I mean that Google gave a different translation in Bulgarian for "half" than it did for "one half". The fact that these are single-word translations means that we would have unique entries for them, and that the English phrases could serve as translation hubs for these phrases. They might do that anyway. In English, at least, constructions like sixth and seventh mean something different than one sixth and one seventh, and "a sixth" or "a seventh" is formally improper, and can be ambiguous between the fractions and the ordinal meanings. bd2412 T 04:14, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • I tried that, and reversing the translation direction gave:
          • половина⇒half
          • наполовина⇒in half
        • Which just shows that Google Translate is not a substitute for knowing the language in question. As for a point you made earlier: Unicode characters are more like abbreviations than alternative spellings. The existence of ROTFLMAO doesn't mean we should have an entry for the spelled-out phrase. For that matter, there's also a Unicode character for a pile of poo: 💩- do we need to have an entry for the English phrase that represents? Chuck Entz (talk) 05:09, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
          • We have an entry for poo, which is basically what it represents. As it happens, we have entries for pile of shit and pile of crap, so an actual pile of poo entry does not seem at all far-fetched, if it can be cited. Spelled-out fractions, of course, can easily be cited, and many of the ones listed here also have additional idiomatic senses that can be found, as they quickly become shorthand for things like wrenches or pipes of particular sizes, animal breeds, sports positions, and the like. bd2412 T 13:02, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
            • If we have an entry for poo, it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that there is a Unicode symbol for it; same if we had an entry for pile of poo. I agree with Chuck Entz that "Unicode characters are more like abbreviations than alternative spellings". Their existence doesn't automatically warrant the "spelled-out" versions, in my view. Canonicalization (talk) 16:07, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
            • About your THUB argument, let's remember that "A translation does not qualify to support the English term if it is: a closed compound that is a word-for-word translation of the English term". Per that token, Dutch driekwart and German Dreiviertel don't warrant entries for three quarters and three fourths. Canonicalization (talk) 16:18, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
              • Note that three quarters was previously kept by consensus in a deletion discussion. Can you guarantee whether any of these fractions exist in other languages in forms that are not a a closed compound word-for-word translation of the English term? I can't speak for the Basque or the Estonian translations, but we seem to be missing those words. The Finnish translations that we have do not appear to be a word-for-word translations. bd2412 T 20:52, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
                • Yes, and this decision is being challenged right now.
                • I'm not sure I've understood your question. I can't guarantee that, and I've precisely never pretended too. We don't keep translation-target entries because there could be qualifying translations: we keep those entries because there positively are qualifying translations. As long as no such translation is provided, I don't see a THUB basis for keeping.
                • I have no knowledge of Basque whatsoever, but I can see there's a "(-)rena" element occurring in all the words you've brought up. Maybe that means something. Canonicalization (talk) 09:37, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
                  • Basque is an agglutinative language. That means that an amazing variety of things are indicated by prefixes, suffixes, interfixes and circumfixes that would normally be separate words. I don't know much about the language, but I would be very careful about reading too much into the presence of a single-word translation in Basque, unless you want to have entries for things like "for the benefit of those two people way over there". Chuck Entz (talk) 13:52, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
                    • To be clear, I included the Basque words listed above because other Basque translations for other fractions on the list were two words. This was the case for a number of languages for which I listed these terms - that some of these fractions were translated as two word phrases, and others in the same language were translated as single words. This actually raises another concern for me, in that it appears that some other languages have nonstandard constructions for specific fractions. It makes sense to provide entries sufficient to clarify this for the reader. bd2412 T 22:49, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would weakly keep the list per bd2412. These entries are useful in giving an idea of how fractions are formed and translated by way of example, and there is a guidance on where to put the limit: the existence of a Unicode character. That limit allows for a very small number of fractions to be included. Similarly, we keep some smaller cardinal numerals, which we would not have to do, like seventy-six. Admittedly, this is a WT:CFI override unless one makes use of "In rare cases, a phrase that is arguably unidiomatic may be included by the consensus of the community, based on the determination of editors that inclusion of the term is likely to be useful to readers". --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:22, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, personally. Ƿidsiþ 08:23, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • RFD kept: no consensus to delete. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:16, 6 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]


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