Category talk:Finnish nouns ending in "-ismi"

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RFD discussion: July–October 2018[edit]

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.


I fail to see the point of this. We already have Category:Finnish words suffixed with -ismi, so this just feels redundant. SURJECTION ·talk·contr·log· 18:56, 3 July 2018 (UTC) (The entries will just have to be moved over...) SURJECTION ·talk·contr·log· 18:56, 3 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. @Surjection, you may want to start orphaning this one. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:06, 10 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I actually think I have, ironically enough, already finished doing that. SURJECTION ·talk·contr·log· 10:23, 10 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You haven't since the category isn't empty. DTLHS (talk) 16:26, 16 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
...shucks, I think I misinterpreted what was being said. Either way, I'll start blanking it now. SURJECTION ·talk·contr·log· 22:55, 18 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Better. SURJECTION ·talk·contr·log· 23:15, 18 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@SurjectionΜετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 22:47, 18 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Some of these kind of categories were started a while ago for the purpose of "pseudosuffixed" words that contain non-native morphology. Contra what Wiktionary states currently (after you guys here just now?), a word like militarismi or vitalismi cannot actually be decomposed in Finnish into militar+ismi or vital+ismi, since these Latinate roots do not exist separately in Finnish, not in this shape at least. I would say giving a derivation as an etymology is misleading when a word is a borrowing in its entirety; there are pretty much no cases of productive -ismi in Finnish. --Tropylium (talk) 23:28, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That is where the part of "reanalyzing" comes in. It is what I have used for the moved entries (ones where there was already a clear borrowing, I didn't add many of those to existing entries even when I probably should have) by claiming that the word can be analyzed as having the -ismi suffix, even if the word was not actually constructed in Finnish using that suffix. I believe a similar argument was used to justify the English version of this category into being deleted. SURJECTION ·talk·contr·log· 23:31, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't have strong opinions about the existence of the category, but I find it an abuse of the concept to claim that these words "can be analyzed as having a suffix". This is equivalent to claiming that e.g. English allocate can be analyzed as al- + locate, or suction as suck + -tion, or silly as sill- + -y. This kind of meta-analysis might be theoretically doable, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the etymology of the words, and should be IMO kept out of the etymology section. --Tropylium (talk) 13:25, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. What entries like pessimism seem to do is that they add the -ism suffix category manually without mentioning it in the etymology itself. I honestly don't feel like there would be much use in doing that either though, as I find the idea of having a list of "-ism" words to be a bit pointless either way. SURJECTION ·talk·contr·log· 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]