Talk:lesbiske

RFV discussion: March 2021–June 2022

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lesbiske

Swedish. Created by a bot. Logically impossible, because males can't be lesbian. Glades12 (talk) 09:04, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

One can jocularly/hypothetically refer to male lesbians (just as well as to invisible pink unicorns or other things that need not actually exist), so it's at least conceivable that it might be used. When I google Swedish websites I get some hits, but many look like Norwegian and others look like gibberish, or intentional (or unintentional) misspellings like den lesbiske gudden; in general the fact that it's also a Norwegian word, and that likely collocands are also homographic to Norwegian words, makes searching tedious, so I don't know if it's actually used anywhere or not. - -sche (discuss) 10:58, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

It's a form in Danish too, which makes searching even more tedious. Glades12 (talk) 12:02, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Are there any words in Swedish that are grammatically masculine but can refer to females? By way of parallel, the German word for 'guest' is grammatically masculine regardless of the gender of the referent, so one could certainly refer to ein lesbischer Gast with the masculine form of the adjective. (Gast is one of the very few German words that refers to a person that doesn't have a separate feminine form; a German friend of mine once laughed out loud when I referred to someone as a Gästin because I didn't know any better.) —Mahāgaja · talk 17:02, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

That's not how the Swedish gender system works. The only grammatical genders in the vast majority of dialects are common (a merger of the masculine and feminine genders that did exist in older Swedish) and neuter. Adjective forms ending with -e (like this one) are optionally used when referring to something naturally masculine, like a man, in the definite form. Far from everything considered "masculine" in German would be considered "masculine" here. Glades12 (talk) 08:07, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

I can find a non-durable web hit for "Ah du menar som karaktären Lisa i L-word, den lesbiske mannen. Som figurerar kort i första säsongen av serien." Everything else is Norwegian. - -sche (discuss) 05:53, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

So, this form isn't attested in durable media. On one hand, it's theoretically valid i.e. it is what would be used if someone were referring (in a hypothetical, joke, etc) to a lesbian man, which people sometimes do on the non-durable web, in Swedish just as in English (e.g. if talking about how this guy joined a lesbian dating app), and we don't require every cell in an inflection table to be attested: if there are only two or zero citations of the neuter mixed declension dative form of a German adjective, we don't remove it from the table. On the other hand, we don't list forms if they categorically don't exist, like we don't list plural forms if a word is singular only. So what do people want to do here? Leave this form, or modify the template to allow the masculine to be suppressed? (Delete the entry but leave the table as-is?) It's tempting to think there must be other adjectives which couldn't be used in the masculine form, but I'm not sure it's true, e.g. "den kvinnlige mannen" and "den feminine mannen" are attested (perhaps because they also mean "feminine" and not just "female"), as is "den gravide mannen" (unsurprising, given the existence of seahorses and trans men as well as the boundless possibilities of fiction). - -sche (discuss) 01:57, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't speak Swedish, but in this situation I'm inclined to support keeping the entry. A comparison might be Spanish nievo ("I snow", logically impossible and probably unattested, but there is no doubt that this is the 1st-sg present form of the verb). It would be different if there were some grammatical reason to doubt that the form is valid (a possible singulare tantum or defective verb, for instance). —Granger (talk · contribs) 19:05, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

a) "I snow" could be possible, like if a personified cloud speaks.

b) nievo could be an impersonal (3rd person only) verb like schneien, so the form could theoretically be RFVed as well.

c) At least older grammars and also SAOB know a masculine gender, e.g. in SAOB it's "GAST gas⁴t, sbst.¹, m." and not gast c (“ghost”), "DIALEKT di¹aläk⁴t [...] r. l. m." However, "Lesbian Greek(s)" might be more likely to be attested than "lesbian ghost".

-Myrelia (talk) 18:20, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

In the absence of further input after eight months, and there being no great solution here, I'm going to close this as a 'technical keep', in the way that an inflected form of a verb (if known to be the only possible form) would be kept, but if anyone feels that this should be deleted and is up to changing the template to allow suppressing or asterisking this form, have at it. I would also revisit this if there prove to be many adjectives that don't inflect in the masculine, if that's a category like singularia tantum. - -sche (discuss) 21:56, 12 June 2022 (UTC)