Talk:-ae

"-ae

1. (botany) A taxonomic division or phylum of plants or algae. "

Please! Don't do this. This is an utter fabrication. Brya 22:01, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Usage disagrees with you. The terms Coniferae and Angiospermae exist, whether or not they are legitimate by current taxonomic codes. Wiktionary is descriptive, not prescriptive. --EncycloPetey 23:16, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, surely it cannot have escaped you that most botanical names above the level of genus end in -ae. Rank has nothing to do with it. Brya 18:09, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

BTW. The names Coniferae and Angiospermae are botanical names, and as such are both valid and legitimate. The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature explicitly mentions both these names in Art 16 Ex 2. They are not restricted to any particular rank. Brya 10:36, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Pronunciation

Is there no consensus on the pronunciation? I think I use all three of these variants myself, depending on what sounds best, but I was hoping there was an "official" pronunciation of some sort. 81.142.107.230 12:47, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

RFC discussion: March 2007–June 2009

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.

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-ae

-- Beobach972 21:47, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Deleted; not a suffix but an inflectional ending. --EncycloPetey 19:35, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

But what was the entry? It’s a plural suffix in English. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 11:15, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

The entry was only for the Latin language, and I had created the entry long ago. If you think an English entry under that name is desirable, then you can create the entry without worrying about edit history (since it was only as Latin). --EncycloPetey 13:59, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Aah, OK. Still, don’t you reckon it’d be useful to have the Latin entry, too? We needn’t call it a suffix, if you deem that inaccurate (though I’m at a loss to decide what we should call it instead); the English etymology for many of these suffixes will just be “From Latin (deprecated template usage) [inflexional ending].”, and the lack of a Latin-language referent would make that problematic. I’d quite like to have all these case and other endings treated on here in isolation from their usual paradigmata (like bellum for neuter nouns of the second declension, amō for much of the first conjugation, &c.); being a learner of Latin myself, I’d find that very useful — especially if our entries could elucidate the origins and historical development of the various endings. Since you “created the entry long ago”, you must have thought that to be appropriate at some point; what made you change your mind? † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 12:25, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, if neither of us has a proposal for how to label them, then that makes the issue of keeping the entry moot, doesn't it? It's really difficult to keep such an entry if it has no header name.

Which English suffixes are you talking about? I don't know of any English suffixes that derive from Latin inflectional endings. They all seem to come from Latin suffixes. In any event, the origins and historical development of most of those endings (and even Latin suffixes) is not known or very obscure.

What made me change my mind was a better understanding of the difference between a suffix and inflectional ending. A suffix (as we use the term here) is used to form a new word, while an inflectional ending is used within a word. A word that has an inflection table will already have all the necessary forms listed. Not so for various suffixes. --EncycloPetey 13:12, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

I think it's worthwhile to have entries for nonzero inflectional morphemes, where possible. (Sometimes it might not be — the inflectional morphemes in "mice" and "gave" are hard to pin down — but oftentimes it is.) —Ruakh_TALK 13:44, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

-e

Can't the plural be just -e, /-i/, while the pronunciation of final -a disappears dispite remaining orthographically? --Backinstadiums (talk) 10:41, 22 February 2020 (UTC)