Template talk:es-verbform

Usage

This template is designed to be used in definition lines of Spanish verb-forms.

It takes a number of arguments:

• one unnamed argument — a link to the verb's infinitive, such as [[hablar#Spanish|hablar]].
• ending — the ending on the infinitive, either ar, er, or ir. (Currently this isn't actually used for anything, but once the template supports categories there might be separate categories depending on this.)
• mood — the verb-form's mood, either ind(icative), cond(itional), subj(unctive), imp(erative), ger(undio), or part(iciple).
• tense — only if mood is ind or subj — the verb-form's tense, either pres(ent), imp(erfect), pret(erite), or fut(ure).
• pers — omitted if mood is part or ger — the verb-form's person, either 1(st person), 2(nd person), or 3(rd person). Note that usted and ustedes are considered third-person.
• gen — only if mood is part — the gender of the participle, either m(asculine) or f(eminine).
• num — omitted if mood is ger — the verb-form's number, either s(ingular) or p(lural).
• aff — only it's an affirmative-specific imperative — any non-empty value, such as 1.
• neg — only it's a negative-specific imperative — any non-empty value, such as 1.
• nocap — only if the template-text shouldn't start with a capital letter (i.e., this template is only part of the definition, and not the first part) — any non-empty value, such as 1.
• nodot — only if the template-text shouldn't end with a period/full stop (i.e., this template is only part of the definition, and not the last part) — any non-empty value, such as 1.

So for example, this:

# {{es-verbform|[[hablar#Spanish|hablar]]|mood=ind|tense=pres|pers=3|num=s}}

# {{es-verbform|[[hablar#Spanish|hablar]]|mood=imp|pers=2|num=s|aff=1}}

would be placed at habla to produce output like this:

1. Third-person singular (“él”/“ella”/“usted”/impersonal) present indicative of hablar.
2. Second-person singular (“tú”) affirmative imperative of hablar.

and add the page to Category:Spanish verb forms.

Possible changes

So thinking about it, a few changes might be in order:

1. Categorizing more specifically.
2. "Second-person informal" and "Second-person formal", at least for the second- and third-person imperatives. (Complication: ustedes is not formal in most of Latin American, vosotros having fallen out of use. Perhaps vosotros forms should automatically be tagged {{context|Spain}}?) Handled in a way that I think works (explicitly including the pronoun).
3. Removing support for negative imperatives, as they're not in our conjugation tables. (Spanish uses the present subjunctive for its negative imperatives.)
4. Explicitly mentioning the pronoun in the finite forms, at least in the second person, since as applied to Latin America "second person plural" might sound like the ustedes form, and "second person singular" is potentially ambiguous between the tú form and the vos form. (I'm not sure if we actually include vos forms at the moment, but in theory we need to be able to, no?) Done.
5. Adding support for participles and gerundios. Done.
6. Distinguishing between -ra and -se forms somehow. (I don't consider this essential, but if we don't, then the corresponding categories will contain two of each verb.)
7. Some forms are always identical; for example, the first- and third-person singular present subjunctives are always identical. Should these then appear on just one sense line? In cases where two forms are almost always identical, like the first-person plural imperative and present subjunctive (identical for all verbs except ir), should it be possible to combine these on one sense line, but also to separate them (like with {{past of}} vs. {{simple past of}} and {{past participle of}} for English)?
8. Maybe {{{num}}} is better than {{{numb}}}? Done.

—Ruakh_TALK 23:53, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

• In general, options for abbreviations are good, but you should be able to write out the words (like "person" or "present") as well and not have it break the template. I'm not sure if I know template coding well enough to fix that for all the parameter entries in it now, but otherwise it becomes hard for newcomers to approach.
• Also, I am confused by your use of "gerundio," which 1) is a Spanish word, and 2) usually refers to what we call a present participle in English, or 3) when not, isn't a verb form in any case, but a noun or adverb derived from the verb.
• Also I'd like an ending parameter (ar, er, or ir) for future categories, perhaps the same for the two past subjunctive endings, though that's not as urgent.
• Another parameter for formal/informal would be nice. So far (which bothers me) I think the only reason this hasn't happened in the current articles is that the bot creations never created a second-person (in the indicative) definition for the articles like escribe, escribirá, tose, toserá. etc.
• As for your suggestion in #3, I strongly prefer two lines with two template calls, for clarity's sake, and since they are different meanings. Dmcdevit·t 02:49, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
  • In addition, no verbs have genders, unless I totally missed what you were trying to do. Participles are sometimes adopted as adjectives and then take genders (aburrido#Adjective/aburrida), but these are not the verb forms themselves (aburrido#Verb). Dmcdevit·t 03:23, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

• First of all, let me preface this by saying that if there's anything you feel strongly about, I'm willing to cede the point. Apparently (?) I tend to come off as feeling more strongly than I really do, so don't be deceived. :-)
• I'm not sure I completely agree that support for full-out words is good: there are just so many parameters, and they'll be used multiple times, and the template code is going to end up very complex and unwieldy as it is. (I guess you can say that the template code can be as unwieldy as it wants, since the whole point is that people won't have to deal with it, but it still bothers me a bit. For one thing, it's already going to be a bit of a pain to test out all the template's edge cases.) I'd be quite fine with completely doing away with abbreviations, though; they're also more ambiguous (with "imp" meaning both "imperfect" and "imperative").
• Gerundio is indeed a Spanish word, with no good English counterpart; I've seen "gerund", "gerundive", and "present participle", with about equal frequency. I don't like any of these, though, because "gerund" usually refers to a verbal noun and the other two to verbal adjectives (whereas the gerundio is a verbal adverb). Also, "present participle" is sometimes used to refer to the derived forms in -nte (which descend from Latin present participles). At Wiktionary:About French we've decided to sidestep the issue by never mentioning the gérondif, but that's not an option here because the gerundio is its own form in Spanish. (In French it's the preposition en plus the present participle, so not really a separate form.)
• To be clear: you're not saying the endings would be mentioned in the sense line, right? In that case, they're already supported, in that you can pass them in with no effect: the template doesn't yet really support categories. (Or are you saying the documentation should mention them, in anticipation of when the template might use them for categorization?)
• I'm not sure quite what you have in mind for a formal/informal parameter. It seems like the template can output intelligently, throwing in "formal" and "informal" and whatnot, without any such parameter? (How about "informal second-person" for pers=2, "formal second-person" for pers=3 with mood=imp, and "third-person and formal second-person" for pers=3 otherwise? This isn't perfect — in Latin America ustedes isn't specifically formal — but I really can't think of a better way. Also, we can have a special pers=vos for vos forms, which would also require a {{{region}}} parameter.)
• O.K., great; that's simpler to code. :-)   But when affirmative and negative imperatives are the same, those can share a line, right?
• It seems like participles can have gender even when they're verb forms: Las lechugas fueron comidas "The lettuce was eaten". No? (Your Spanish is probably better than mine — much of my approach to Spanish is to take French and pronounce more of the letters, which works better than you'd think, but isn't perfect — so let me know if I'm off-base here.)
• —Ruakh_TALK 03:45, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

• • Oh, I was adding the support for full-word parameters (and other reasonable abbreviations) before I saw this, hm. I don't think it's too big of a deal, as log as I didn't break anything else, I hope.
  • As for Las lechugas fueron comidas, (NOTE: In Spanish, this sounds unnatural; if ou wanted to say "is eaten," i.e. passive voice, you'd likely just use "se come") if anyone were to really say that, I'd still say that they were using "comidas" as an adjective (as in, they have the state eaten), and that "comido" could be substituted to make the verb phrase "fueron comido," "were eaten". To catch the difference, try looking at a word where the translated participle and adjective words (identical in Spanish) have different English words. If I want to say the pencils were sharpened, I might say "Los lápices fueron aflilado" whereas if I want to say that they were sharp I'd say "Los lápices fueron aflilados," since afilado is an adjective, it becomes plural (Again, "se afilaron" is better, anyway). So, I'd say that verb forms can't take a gender, no. This is why I'd say that I'd scrap gerundio altogether, and use either present or past participle, leaving the gendered gerundios to go in other POS headers.
  • I just added "past" to the tense options, too, intended for "past participle" only.
  • Affirmative versus negative imperatives... frankly, I have not figured out how we should put those. But it's easy to leave that until later, anyway. :-)
  • You're right that adding "ending=ar" won't break the template, so I can do that already, and work on the categories later.
  • I don't quite understand how the template could output the formality intelligently. At escribe, we have two senses, in different persons (same number). So the template call will be the same except for the "person=2/3" right now, and the "person=2" will also be identical to what the template will look like at escribes. Perhaps a formality parameter where you tell it "tú" or "usted" and "vosotros" or "ustedes" will be the simplest way, rather than saying "formal" or "informal," and then have it intelligently spit out the regional meanings for plurals. Or something. Probably not a priority right now, anyway.
  • I'm working on categories right now. Dmcdevit·t 05:07, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

• Well, whatever you decide on the parameter-​names front is O.K. by me. My preference is either all-​abbreviations or all-​full-​words, no template-​supports-​multiple-​formats (except perhaps for preterit(e)), but all I care strongly about is that it be documented so future tinkerers with the template can be sure what's going on.
• You're right that the reflexive is more idiomatic when there's no agent specified, but I was just trying to give an example. :-)   I disagree with your analysis; if it were "the lettuce had the state 'eaten'", it would be "las lechugas estaban comidas" (using estar in the imperfect, not ser in the preterite). This might seem like nitpicking, but it's an important point for my evidence, which is that google:"edificios fueron construidos" gets 502 hits, while google:"edificios fueron construido" gets only 5 (of which one is clearly a typo'd version of the former). I contend that all of these are in the passive voice (as I don't see another idiomatic interpretation), and the latter group are erroneous (seeing as they're outnumbered by more than 100:1). Unfortunately all my Spanish grammars got lost in the mail (though I submitted the form, and am still hopeful the mail will find them eventually) so I can't cite an authoritative source, but both my memory and Google seem pretty sure that participles in the passive-voice construct do inflect for gender and number.
• I'm not sure what you mean by "gendered gerundio" — I'm using gerundio to refer to the -(a|e)ndo form, and that's the way I've always seen the term used. Are we talking at cross purposes? For me the -(a|e)do form is the "participle" or "past participle". (In Spanish it's usually just called the participio since they only have the one, but the term participio pasado is definitely in use as well.)
• Well, I'm thinking escribe would have two senses, if this works for you? :
  1. Third-person and formal second-person singular (“él”/“ella”/“usted”/impersonal) present indicative of escribir.
  2. Informal second-person singular (“tú”) affirmative imperative of escribir.
• Great. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 05:43, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

• Oh, hey, authoritative source on the passive-voice-agreement front:
  • C. C. Smith et al. Langenscheidt's Compact Spanish Dictionary: Spanish-English, English-Spanish. Langenscheidt: New York, 1989. →ISBN. Page 515.

    The passive is formed with tenses of ser and the past participle es recibido, será vencido, fue construido. In passive uses the past participle agree in number and gender with the subject: las casas fueron derribadas.

• —Ruakh_TALK 05:54, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

• • I'm not talking about the reflexive as a special set of verbs (as in lavarse), but the use that can be applied to any verb to express what is translated into English as passive. This reference above is not wrong, but misleading, in my opinion. "ser" + participle is a direct translation from English, and likely to be uncommon in many situations. "Se recibe," I think they'd say, isn't a passive construction in Spanish (?). In Spanish I could rewrite "las casas fueron derribadas" as "las casas se derribaron" and it would, I think, not be passive voice, since the object isn't receiving the action according to the verb conjugation, it's just translated that way (there is an indirect object pronoun "se" receiving the object, I'd say). My point was that "edificios fueron construidos" makes sense as the participle is used descriptively as an adjective, not as a verb with gender.
  • Er, Spanish has a present participle, e.g. saltando, not just the past. This is all my point about gerundios is (I think I just had a think-o using gerundio instead of participle up there); I suggest we label -ando/-iendo as present participles and the -ado/-ido as past participles in the verb section, and restrict the participles with gender and plural to the adjective senses, with no gender options in the verb templates.
  • I'm not in love with "Third-person and formal second-person singular" for escribe, as it seems like separate meanings on the same line, but I know most conjugation tables (not sure if there is another major dictionary with separate entries for all verb inflections to compare with...) list them on the same line, so it's not terrible if people like that better. Dmcdevit·t 08:12, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

It's true that when no agent is explicitly mentioned, English's passive voice is usually translated to Spanish's reflexive voice; however, Spanish does have its own passive voice, and as it happens (I'm not sure if this is due to coincidence, or what), it's formed the same way as English's passive voice: form of "be"/ser in the relevant tense and mood, plus the past participle. In Spanish, the passive-voice past participle does agree with the subject in gender and number: my memory, Google counts, and the little conjugation guide in my dictionary all agree with me on this point. Your interpretation of "edificios fueron construidos" as meaning "building are in the state 'constructed'" does not work, as that would use neither ser nor the preterite.

The Spanish gerundio (the form in -ando or -endo) is used in ways similar to English's present participle, but (1) Spanish speakers don't consider it a present participle (see w:es:Participio), (2) it's a verbal adverb, unlike English's present participle, which is a verbal adjective, (3) there's no consistent English name for it — "gerund", "gerundive", and "present participle" all see use, and (4) the term "present participle" is often applied to something very different in Spanish (the derived forms in -nte). If you strongly insist, I'm O.K. with also including the term "present participle", but I do not think that "present participle" alone is an acceptable label.

Hmm. How would you feel about something like "Third-person singular (and hence also formal second-person singular: “él”, “ella”, “usted”, impersonal) present indicative"? (I'm not all-out opposed to having separate lines for the two: from a Spanish-internal standpoint, it seems like they're really just one sense, but we're writing for English readers, who might be excused for thinking of these as two totally separate senses.)

—Ruakh_TALK 14:48, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

P.S. So should I take it that we do indeed plan to support both full words and abbreviated names? —Ruakh_TALK 14:48, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

If we're going to do one line, I think I like "Third-person singular (“él”/“ella”/impersonal) and formal second-person singular (“usted”) present indicative of escribir." Not a huge deal though.

I thought I had made it clear that I understand what you are stating about the passive voice, just that what's passive in English isn't necessarily a translation of a passive voice construction in Spanish. In any case, I think that's beside the point, and we're getting a bit sidetracked from the issue. I am curious though, when you mention your conjugation guide: does it give the plurals and genders for the participles, in the conjugation table? This is what I have never seen. Conjugation tables list all inflections, but "construido" is usually the only participle listed.

I admit I have never learned or studies Spanish in any linguistics context, but in English, my impression is that the -ando/-iendo forms are frequently described as present participles, and certainly when talking about the progressive tenses I think that's what I typically see ("estar + present participle"). However, you can have a past progressive, making the term "present participle" seem counterintuitive, and this is why I have seen it described properly as an "active participle" instead. -nte is only formed by a small number of verbs, and I think is basically a regular adjective in almost all cases. "Verbal adverb" is not wrong, that's not what I am saying. Maybe my main concern is that if we totally omit the terms present participle and gerund from Spanish, we are giving the false impression that there are no such forms, when the -ando/-endo can be described as a present participle, even if it's not in all cases.

And yes, I didn't change the inclusion of both full words and abbreviated ones, because I prefer it, but that's not a big deal. Dmcdevit·t 20:31, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

With 3rd-vs.-formal-2nd: O.K., sounds good. How do you feel about "regional informal second-person plural" for vosotros and "formal or regional second-person plural" for ustedes? (This seems suitably NPOV, describing both ways as "regional", right?)

With participles: So, we agree that the true Spanish passive voice (which is much more restricted in use than the English passive voice) is formed with ser and a form of the past participle; the disagreement is over whether said past-participle forms are "verb forms" per se, or simply adjectives? Well, one approach would be to give the masculine-singular participle both an inflection line, that gives its other forms (in the same way we do with adjectives), and a sense line that says something like "Past participle of construir"; and the other forms of the participle can have sense lines that say something like "Masculine plural of construido, the past participle of construir." This would still treat these other forms as "verb forms" to some extent, but would make them clearly secondary. Would you be O.K. with that?

With gerundios: I'd be fine with just about anything that has either "verbal adverb", "adverbial", or "'gerundio'" in it; how about "Adverbial present participle of construir"? Or "Present participle or 'gerundio' of construir"? Or "Verbal adverb (present participle or 'gerundio') of construir"?

The more I think about it, the more I think this is going to be kind of unwieldy anyway. If we're going to need copy-and-paste in order to slog through it anyway, we might as well make it as user-friendly as possible.

—Ruakh_TALK 21:43, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Regionalisms: We need to specify which is which, not just say "regional." Why not use "{{Spain}} Informal second-person plural..." for vosotros? As for ustedes, one region does not specify the formality, while another considers it formal. I think we could do this with a context tag like "(Spain: formal) Second-person plural..." (or maybe "Formal in Spain," or whatever).

The past participles: I suppose this works; we don't give gender in any definition lines anyway. They are always in inflection lines.

Gerundios: "Adverbial present participle," or anything without the word "gerundio" is best. The problem is that, while I know in spanish what gerundio indicates, and I understand what a participle is in English, explaining the Spanish concept in English terminology is what is difficult. "Gerundio" is more precise, but throwing the term at the general reader is even less helpful than even an English approximation of the word. Dmcdevit·t 22:21, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Categories

Okay, I think I've got these working pretty well, though it's more and more complicated code. :-( Mock-ups at User:Dmcdevit/Test. The cool thing is that it will let us categorize every precise kind of inflection, and their parent categories should then let you navigate up to different tenses/moods/persons/etc. Also, it categorizes based on the ending. I wanted also to include a way to put all the forms of a single verb in one category, like [[Category:Spanish verb forms of {{{verb|{{{1}}}}}}]], but that doesn't work if brackets are in verb parameter, and it seems impossible to fix that without 1) taking out the brackets or 2) entering the verb twice, once without the brackets and once with. Neither of these are desirable, I bet, although it's possible we could have people only enter the verb once, and then let AutoFormat add the other if they don't. Anyway, there it is. I think the only form it doesn't do yet is gerundio, since I'm not satisfied with that, but please test it out and see if there are cases it doesn't understand. Dmcdevit·t 10:40, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I was hoping that the template could be smart enough to put what-the-heck? forms in a Category:Requests for cleanup (Spanish verb form) or something. Do you mind if I implement that idea? —Ruakh_TALK 14:48, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Sounds cool. Dmcdevit·t 20:31, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Will do, then. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 21:43, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Formal/informal

Actually, having looked at how this will appear, I think that all this stuff about one or two lines and informal or formal is too complicated. This is how I'd like it to work, and I hope we can make the template do it: I should be able on any 2nd person form (four for each tense: tú, usted, vosotros, ustedes) to say if it is formal or not, and then, (depending on the plurality) it knows which of the four you mean. And always put those on their own line, since they are a different person from the other form them might share the same conjugation with, and since otherwise it will be hard to figure out how you are supposed to enter the template. Basically, I'm proposing that these four create:

• {{es-verbform|pers=2|num=s|form=no|tense=pres|mood=ind|ending=ar|verb=[[estornudar]]}}

1. Informal second-person singular (“tú”) present indicative of estornudar.

• {{es-verbform|pers=2|num=s|form=yes|tense=pres|mood=ind|ending=ar|verb=[[estornudar]]}}

1. Formal second-person singular (“usted”) present indicative of estornudar.

• {{es-verbform|pers=2|num=p|form=no|tense=pres|mood=ind|ending=ar|verb=[[estornudar]]}}

1. (Spain) Informal second-person plural (“vosotros”) present indicative of estornudar.

• {{es-verbform|pers=2|num=p|form=yes|tense=pres|mood=ind|ending=ar|verb=[[estornudar]]}}

1. (Spain: formal) Second-person plural (“ustedes”) present indicative of estornudar.

If we have anything output both a second and third person form on the same template call, it will ambiguous to the user whether they should be telling the template 2 or 3 for "person," and I think it also becomes harder for the reader to identify, since it looks like a single form.
— This unsigned comment was added by Dmcdevit (talk • contribs) at 04:53, 2 September 2007 (UTC).

Well, but it is a single form: usted and ustedes are semantically second-person, but are third person both in terms of verb agreement, and in terms of the corresponding direct and indirect object pronouns (l@(s)/se and le(s)/se, respectively, not some sort of special formal second-person pronoun). I've never seen a conjugation table that provided the two separately. As for someone looking at the text and not knowing how to use the template that generates it — well, it seems like no one can ever look at template output and know how to use the template; you need to either look at the wiki-markup source, or at the template documentation. I don't see that adding a {{{form}}} will make it more intuitive for people.

Also, the (Spain) and (Spain: formal) thing won't really work, unless you want to do away with the ability to have something else earlier on the line. (I guess I'm not married to that ability, but I think it would be nice to have the flexibility.)

So, all told, I think my preference is for something like:

• {{es-verbform|[[estornudar]]|ending=ar|mood=ind|tense=pres|num=s|pers=2}}
  1. Informal second-person singular (“tú”) present indicative form of estornudar.
• {{es-verbform|[[estornudar]]|ending=ar|mood=ind|tense=pres|num=s|pers=3}}
  1. Third-person singular (“él”/“ella”), impersonal, and formal second-person singular (“usted”) present indicative form of estornudar.
• {{es-verbform|[[estornudar]]|ending=ar|mood=ind|tense=pres|num=p|pers=2}}
  1. Castilian informal second-person plural (“vosotros”) present indicative form of estornudar.
• {{es-verbform|[[estornudar]]|ending=ar|mood=ind|tense=pres|num=p|pers=2|castonly=1}}
  1. Informal second-person plural (“vosotros”) present indicative form of estornudar.
• {{es-verbform|[[estornudar]]|ending=ar|mood=ind|tense=pres|num=p|pers=3}}
  1. Third-person plural (“ellos”/“ellas”) and formal or Latin American second-person plural (“ustedes”) present indicative form of estornudar.
• {{es-verbform|[[estornudar]]|ending=ar|mood=ind|tense=pres|num=p|pers=3|castonly=1}}
  1. Third-person plural (“ellos”/“ellas”) and formal second-person plural (“ustedes”) present indicative form of estornudar.
• {{es-verbform|[[estornudar]]|ending=ar|mood=ind|tense=pres|num=p|pers=3|nocast=1}}
  1. Third-person plural (“ellos”/“ellas”) and second-person plural (“ustedes”) present indicative form of estornudar.

(Except possibly "Iberian" and iber instead of "Castilian" and cast, depending on how the discussion at Wiktionary talk:About Spanish turns out.)

I guess there should also be support for impersonal verbs; I'm thinking something like:

• {{es-verbform|[[llover]]|ending=er|mood=ind|tense=pres|pers=-}}
  1. Present indicative form of llover.

If you feel strongly that ustedes should get a separate line from ell@s, and so on, then I guess I'm O.K. with that — it seems non-ideal, since it's asking editors to put in more work, and also to remember that we have special lines for usted and its ilk, but since I'm hoping most of these entries will be filled in by bots, that's not a huge deal — but I don't think "form(al)" is the perfect name, because in the plural that represents a Castilian/Iberian POV. (Again, I guess it's not a huge deal if we have an underlying Castilian/Iberian POV that's usually only bots know about, but it's not ideal, at least if we can think of a better name to replace it with.)

—Ruakh_TALK 17:03, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Just look at your first two to see why this is too opaque. Let's say I'm at an usted/3rd-person singular. I know usted is a second-person singular, but if I tell the template that, it would give me a tú form. This is why putting them on the same line doesn't make sense. It gives completely unpredictable forms, unless you just memorize how it works instead of filling in the parameters accurately. Telling it "formal=yes" is actually comprehensible. "castonly" and "nocast" seems completely strange to me. I still like {{Spain}}, and even if it means you can't put anything before it (though that could be a template parameter, I suppose), I think being able to add a second sentence after is sufficient. As you say, this will almost all be bot work that I will get started on once the template is reasonably stable, so that means that I'm not very worried about the extra work of entering a second line, but I am worried that when someone does have occasion to use the template, it will inevitably be unfamiliar to even the regulars here, since humans weren't usung it most of the time, so we want to make it intuitive—or at least understandable from the wikitext. Dmcdevit·t 20:12, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Re: separate lines: Well, I'm still not convinced that separate-​sense-​lines-​for-​usted(es) is the way to go, but I'm willing to compromise on this. I'd be O.K. with the separate-line thing if, when the bot added these, it (1) put the "third-person" line immediately before the "formal second-person" line, (2) started the "formal second-person" line with "Hence,", and (3) used nocap=1 in calling the template for the "formal second-person" line.

Re: formal=yes: O.K., I really can't think of any other sensible name, so I guess I'm forced to agree. :-)

Re: castonly=1 and nocast=1: That's reasonable; so, what would you suggest instead? Even if we're using "(Spain)" and "(Spain: formal)" — which I'm still not at all keen on — we need to be able to convey to the template when the verb is specific to Spain, or not found in Spain, so it can adjust its tags accordingly. (If the verb is specific to Spain, then "(Spain)" should be dropped and "(Spain: formal)" should become simply "formal"; if the verb is not used in Spain, then "(Spain: formal)" should be dropped.)

Re: putting something else earlier in the line: Adding more afterward will certainly work in some cases, but what if, say, a context label needs to be added? If we're going to use "(Spain)" and "(Spain: formal)", I think the only way to do that is to have it outside the {{es-verbform}} template. (I'll grant that this would have the nice side effect of obviating the previous point.)

—Ruakh_TALK 22:38, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Separate lines: sounds fine, if you think that helps.

"castonly"/"nocast": I may be confused here, but I was suggesting "formal" instead. If you put an informal second-person plural, then the template should be able to output whatever indicates it's Spanish Spanish. Since these will mostly be made with bots, I suppose that we can just move the region tags outside of the template for ease. I don't think there's really a better option there, for consistency and simplicity. Dmcdevit·t 23:32, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

"castonly"/"nocast": The intent was to say "the verb of which this is a vosotr@s form is only used in Spain anyway, so it's redundant to mention that this form is specific to Spain"/"this verb of which this is an ustedes form is not used in Spain anyway, so it's pointless to mention that in Spain this form would be formal". But if we're moving the region tags outside the template, then that's not an issue; the only issue is to make sure your bot is aware of these quirks and doesn't add needless forms and tags. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 00:25, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

If we can get these ideas into the template now, we can see how it actually looks in practice, and then I can work with the bot. Dmcdevit·t 00:34, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Also, I just noticed that the third-person/second-person plural articles already have two lines. escriben has one sense line for the third-person plural and another for the second-person plural (and, I always stink at Spanish Spanish, but aren't all these wrong? The Spanish use this form for the second-person plural, they just use it only formally, I thought). Dmcdevit·t 02:45, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Right, they're wrong. —Ruakh_TALK 02:56, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Still left to do:

• Change "gerundio" to "Adverbial present participle." May also want to change or add alternative parameter names to match this.
• Add "gerundio" forms to the category (wasn't done earlier).
• Take out gender (it will go in an inflection template to be created just for Spanish past participles).
• Regional tags will go outside of the template. We still need a Spain template and category. Perhaps make one especially for verb forms, so the regular categories aren't clogged up.
• Add the formal/informal parameter. Ideally, this should only work for 2nd-person singular (formal and informal) and the informal 2nd-person plural. The ustedes 2nd-person should be the same no matter what formality you put in, either always say that it's formal only in Spain, or, I think we decided, leave that to the context tag outside the template.
• Anything else? Dmcdevit·t 18:47, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm working on all those. I should have a decent version sometime tonight or tomorrow. Though — is there any reason we need a separate template for past participles? We already have various parameters that are only relevant some of the time; it seems like {{{gen|{{{gender}}}} and {{{ms}}} can do likewise.

And one other thing: I know I'm the one who started this template here, but I'm starting to think this is a bad name, because it kind of sounds like it fills in the inflection line for a verb form (like {{es-noun-m}} and so on do). Maybe we should move it to {{es-def-verbform}} or something?

—Ruakh_TALK 19:23, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

The separate template for participles I mentioned was just for the inflection line, I mean. At the main (masculine) entry, we were just going to put "past participle of X" in the definition line, and then have the gender and plural forms in the inflection line. If an existing inflection template can be modified for that, that's fine, but it's a different job than this template.

Feel free to move it to whatever seems best. Maybe "es-form of" would work, but I'm not picky. Dmcdevit·t 20:47, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

FYI, I've been making Template:es-form of (verb). —Ruakh_TALK 02:34, 8 September 2007 (UTC)