Talk:waaater

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search

RFD discussion: July 2018[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.

Useless. DTLHS (talk) 22:03, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I think this should be snow deleted. PseudoSkull (talk) 22:05, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know what snow deleted means. DTLHS (talk) 22:07, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@DTLHS Sorry, it's a wiki-slang term. It basically means deleting more quickly without any further discussion, either because the consensus is overwhelming or because the consensus has been overwhelming for very similar discussions. I mean, if we kept this, we could have waater, waaaater, waaaaaaaaater, and the possibilities are just endless. I could also do this with any word: "I want it NOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!" PseudoSkull (talk) 22:12, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:SNOW. (Interesting: I think I had misunderstood "snow keep/snow delete" as "keep/delete by obvious overwhelming majority, and stop the vote early".
@PseudoSkull, we actually have an established rule for this, from Wiktionary:Votes/2014-01/Treatment of repeating letters and syllables. Anything attestable variation with more than three repetitions should be redirected to the shorter elongated form. bd2412 T 04:08, 7 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete almost everything in Category:English elongated forms (except a few common interjections, the "arghs" and "oohs" perhaps). Equinox ◑ 22:13, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Are these attested terms? If so, there is always the possibility that a non-native speaker or a young reader will come across this term in writing and not immediately know that it is an elongated form, rather than a different word (particularly since English is rife with words that differ by the duplication of a vowel, such as "stop" and "stoop", "bet" and "beet", etc. bd2412 T 04:01, 7 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, it's equally possible (in fact even more likely) that a (dyslexic?) child or learner confuses the letters b and d, but that is a poor argument for us having an entry for unberbog. If anything we should improve the search engine. Equinox ◑ 17:23, 7 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    The issue is not that people might misspell words out of inability or error, but that authors might intentionally use these spellings as words to convey meaning. Such a device is basically the equivalent of an onomatopoeia, which we would include. bd2412 T 03:34, 8 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you have a statement like "the dog is loose" and you write "THE DOOOOG IS LOOOOOSE!" then clearly that's intentional, yes, and we might even be able to find evidence for DOOOOG and LOOOOOSE if enough writers have (basically coincidentally!) used the same number of vowels in their extension. We could redirect those things to dog and loose (I think that is stupid) or we could have separate entries for them as "extended form of" (I think that is doubly stupid). What are you actually suggesting? It is obvious that these are not words per se because they are formed as nonce-words on the spot by extending existing words (usually by repeating a vowel). Indeed if they were accepted as "regular words" then the pattern of extending the vowel would no longer have its emphatic effect. Equinox ◑ 03:38, 8 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • And by the way, your argument about conveying meaning is a sudden goalpost-move from "children might misunderstand it". So you need to be clear about your position, and how it will benefit speakers/users in general and not a theoretical non-existent minority. Equinox ◑ 03:40, 8 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    You are missing the point. When you talk about how dyslexic children might read (or write, in some transient format) a word, distinct from attestable usage, then you are talking about a hypothetical word for which we can necessarily find no proof of use. The entire basis of the attestation requirement is to provide a baseline for coverage of what appears in print. There are languages where double "a" strings are used in conventional spelling, so it is not at all a conjecture that people might thing "waater" (and by extension, "waaater") is something different from "water", and for that matter that a "doog" is a thing as different from a "dog" as a "boot" is from a "bot", and that "doooog" is an extension of an unfamiliar word "doog". Readers might also be inclined to think that a variation with any additional number of o's was pronounced differently, likely with a long "o" sound, when we could be informing them that no matter how many instances of "o" there are, the pronunciation remains the same as if there were only one. bd2412 T 04:38, 8 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    I have a lot of respect for BD2412 but apparently I'm stupid and I can't see how this remark contradicts what I said above. This truly isn't a sarcastic remark and I have spent some time with it and discussed it with somebody else. Can anyone explain? What am I missing and how does it help the project and its users? Equinox ◑ 06:26, 8 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    The baseline that we are aiming towards hear is "all words in all languages". If the spelling of a word is changed for a particular purpose, then it effectively becomes a different word. Why do we have both center and centre, and both neighbor and the neighbour? We could have decided that inclusion of one of these alternatives was good enough, but we keep both because even though they are in one sense the same word, the different spelling makes them different words. We have eye dialect spellings like zee for the and somepin for something, dated or archaic forms like gerbille for gerbil, floo for flu, and civill for civil, and common misspellings like accross for across and freeest for freest. The constant is that these are arrangements of letters attested in print and conveying meaning. Many of these entries are of no immediate use to competent speakers of the English language, who know that "the" is not "zee", and know how to spell words generally. Why do we have an entry for "the" at all, when everyone knows what it means? Why do we have entries for highly technical terms, which only people working in rarefied fields are likely to ever read in texts? Because "all words in all languages" means that we cover everything that someone might come across, irrespective of their capacity to understand the language being read. bd2412 T 16:45, 8 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
For the same reasons as for maaan, striking my previous vote, and voting keep. PseudoSkull (talk) 04:41, 7 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I see that this RFD has caused even more of these garbage entries to be created. What a joke. I'm never nominating anything for deletion again. DTLHS (talk) 17:36, 8 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That's what you get for missing staff meetings. bd2412 T 17:47, 8 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]


Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:waaater&oldid=50060863"