Talk:waxing

Deletion discussion

The following information passed a request for deletion.

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.

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waxing

(uncountable) the action of the verb to wax. Can't decide whether to rfd or rfv, so will start with this one. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:21, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

What do you make of these: [1][2][3][4]? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 23:32, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

This seems to be what comes of our decision not to include {{gerund of}} alongside {{present participle of}} for English -ing forms. Any verb-ing form can mean "the action of the verb to verb", because -ing forms are gerunds as well as present participles. I've never understood why we try to hide that fact from our readers. —Angr 06:41, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV, those seem like the verb to me. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:45, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

@Angr: Why not just reform {{present participle of}} to {{en-ing form of}} and display Present participle and gerund of ...? Does that capture all the uses of the form or do we need more of a grammar lesson built into the display for "progressive"? DCDuring TALK 15:21, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

You can't change {{present participle of}} itself because it is used in languages (such as Italian) in which the present participle and gerund are of different forms and have different meanings and usage. SemperBlotto (talk) 15:26, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

But we could bot-replace all instances in English with an en-specific template that was specific to the grammar of English. DCDuring TALK 15:35, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I suppose we could have an English-specific template that says "both present participle and gerund", but I'd rather we just had two senses, one with {{present participle of}} and one with {{gerund of}}. It's really only coincidence that the two are homophonous in English; it's not like they form any sort of semantically natural pair. It would be like having a Latin-specific {{la-dative and ablative plural of}} just because the dative and ablative plural of (I believe) every single Latin noun are identical. But we don't do that; we list the dative plural and ablative plural separately. And the English pres.ptc. and gerund are even less closely related to each other than the Latin forms are. Can't we get a bot to add {{gerund of}} underneath every instance of {{present participle of}} in an English section? —Angr 17:38, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I’m not sure. If they were the verb, wouldn’t they be “waxing the floor” instead of “the waxing of the floor”? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 17:45, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Not necessarily. In "Waxing the floor is fun" it can't be anything but a gerund. —CodeCat 17:49, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

We must keep a sense of the noun because the plural is very much attestable. Whether it's this sense and/or the others, I don't know. Equinox ◑ 23:11, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

This sense is marked as uncountable. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:30, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

If the sense is marked uncountable, then the sense needs to be corrected; it is trivially easy to find instances of "waxings" referring to the action of the verb. See, e.g.:

• 1983, Youlan Feng, ‎Derk Bodde, A History of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. 2, p. 427:

  The wanings and waxings (of the sun and moon) occur according to the (twelve) pitch-pipes.

• 2009, Fritz Allhoff, Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking, p. 128:

  Are these metaphorical descriptions just the subjective waxings of the critic or are they aesthetic properties really (but metaphorically) true of the wine?

• 2006, Mary Lou Lyon, Early Cupertino, p. 81:

  The building interior was Gothic and finished by multiple waxings of the commercial coast woods, redwood, sugar pine, white pine, and Douglas fir.

Cheers! bd2412 T 16:31, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Now that we have the extended functionality of Lua modules. Could it detect "lang=en" and describe it as "present participle and gerund of..."? SemperBlotto (talk) 22:23, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

That can actually very easily be done even without Lua. The question is do we really want to? --WikiTiki89 22:26, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Weak keep because there are other noun senses (so it makes sense to have the most basic one), and waxings is attested. - -sche (discuss) 04:31, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I'm not sure it makes sense to keep such a vague sense. - -sche (discuss) 04:32, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

How is a vague gerund sense (applicable to noun forms of multiple verb actions) any less sensible than the lone "present participle of" sense for verbs with multiple meanings? bd2412 T 16:03, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Delete. But we should probably revisit how we present ing-forms. Perhaps the most economical thing would be to amend {{present participle of}} to refer to "gerund" and link to both participle and gerund pages ours or WP's or something new. DCDuring TALK 18:45, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

• Keep, on the assumption that we should not present -ing forms that act as nouns (e.g. by having a plural) as present participles (verb forms). See also Appendix:English -ing forms and Talk:fucking, Talk:perusing, Talk:ploughing, Talk:dating. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:04, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
• Keep per Dan Polansky. There is a different part of speech involved between "they are doing well waxing the ships" and "the waxings of the ships are going well". bd2412 T 16:03, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

  See {{en-ing form of}} and waxing#Verb sense 2 in this revision. DCDuring TALK 22:08, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

There is a related issue concerning Dutch and German verbs as well. Both languages have gerunds, like English, although the gerund is always identical to the infinitive, rather than like the present participle. These gerunds are nouns, and have neuter gender; a few have a plural form as well, but generally they're uncountable. German capitalises nouns, so the gerunds are spelled with a capital letter and so they get their own entry, as in Category:German gerunds. But for Dutch it's not so clear because the spelling is exactly identical with the infinitive. Only a few our current Dutch verb lemma entries also include a gerund sense, mainly because this is implicit in any verb. So the situation is really much like the English one being discussed above. Whatever we decide for English should presumably take the Dutch situation into account as well. —CodeCat 21:01, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

What about the -ung gerund (and its Dutch equivalent if there is one)? --WikiTiki89 21:29, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

(Dutch has -ing) That's not really a part of the verbal paradigm as such. It's more of a "companion". The relationship is derivational rather than inflectional, and many verbs don't even have such nouns. So their existence is lexically disconnected from the main verb and would need to be considered separately by CFI. Many of them also have idiomatic meanings, while the "plain" gerund always has the meaning of the verb. There are also other ways to form verbal nouns (like English -tion, -ance and so on), and often they have identical meanings and are in competition with the -ing suffix form, if it exists. —CodeCat 21:43, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

I see no consensus to delete and no likelihood of one developing. Can we close this now? bd2412 T 19:07, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Having heard nothing further on the subject, kept for lack of consensus to delete. bd2412 T 16:42, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

"Correcting Mandarin translation"

@Tooironic pls. use a different edit summary. It's not "correcting" but replacing with a more common, better, etc. term. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 00:58, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

OK, will do in the future. ---> Tooironic (talk) 01:19, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. :) --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:24, 24 July 2014 (UTC)