Wiktionary talk:Languages with more than one grammatical gender

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This is the discussion page for the terms of this policy regarding how to include gender with the translations of English words on Wiktionary. The following is the argument that brought attention to the need to establish such a policy:

Hello, all. I have been working on Wiktionary's translations to be checked and have noticed great inconsistency regarding the inclusion of gender and plural variants with the dictionary entry. There was some discussion about creating a guideline/policy for this, but it has been inactive since 2004 with no resolution. Many word translation sections are cluttered with regular gender and plural variants. In addition, some translations give the regular gender variants while other translations give only what is considered the basic form. For example, see the synonymous Spanish translations for the words mad and angry. All the gender variants are listed under mad: enfadado m, enfadada f, enojado m, enojada f. However, under angry, only enojado and enfadado are listed, not the feminine forms. Many other listings are inconsist in this way. Would someone be willing to open up a discussion page so that a possible policy can be talked over?--El aprendelenguas 22:18, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Over time, this policy may develop into a standard for how to list the lemmata of all parts of speech. For now, however, let us debate the current terms of the policy for nouns and adjectives.--El aprendelenguas 20:04, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Simplification[edit]

This is too simple. The Dutch language for instance have nouns where the same word can be used with either the male or the female form. There is no link to the sex of a person. There are also other genders than male and female.. So I do not think this is a great proposal. GerardM 14:16, 11 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Irregulars[edit]

It makes sense to me to list any irregular genders as well. Could you imagine on another language dictionary translating a gender-neutral posessive as his but not her? DAVilla 21:01, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why pre-define lemmata?[edit]

Why does the proposal define a noun or adjectives "second-language lemma" as "the masculine singular form"?

There are three problems with this, though one might be strictly hypothetical:

  1. A language can have more than one grammatical gender without having a masculine one; for example, Finno-Ugric languages have two genders, animate and inanimate.
  2. Broadly speaking, there is no such thing as the masculine "form" of a noun; in many languages there are masculine nouns with feminine counterparts, but these are distinct (albeit usually closely related) nouns, much as in English actor and actress are closely related nouns. (That said, I do think it's reasonable to list only the masculine noun in cases where the feminine counterpart is predictable.)
  3. Even if a noun or adjective has a masculine singular form, that doesn't mean it's necessarily its second-language lemma. (I don't know if there are languages where it isn't, but it's quite an assumption to assume that in all languages it is. Certainly with verbs not all languages use the same forms for their second-language lemmata; I don't think it's wise to assume that with nouns and adjectives they do.)

—RuakhTALK 08:28, 26 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

RFC discussion: April 2011[edit]

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (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.

Tagged but not listed. An old one, it seems. I'll add my two cents and say the name is very misleading. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:11, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's not very clear when exactly a word is considered a lemma. With cases this is usually clear (me is the object form of I). But how does it work with gender? Is German sie a form of the lemma er? And does that mean the former shouldn't get its own entry? What about English she and he? —CodeCat 14:22, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Do we want to keep this at all? I mean, it should say in the title with respect to translations or something: from the title I would assume it's simply about languages with one than one grammatical gender, which is a lot of them. But it's not. If anything it reads like a Beer Parlour subpage. --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:58, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]


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