Template talk:de-ndecl

Proper nouns

@Benwing2 would it be possible to suppress the indefinite and definite articles for proper nouns that don't take them? While it is possible to say things like "aus dem mittelalterlichen China" and "wir hoffen auf ein wiedervereinigtes China", it's pretty rare without an intervening adjective. Such cases should be distinguished from things like "die Schweiz", "der Iran", "die Niederlande", where the definite article is normal in all instances. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:12, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Mahagaja, Fytcha That is definitely possible, although it will require adding an indicator (similar to a parameter) on a case-by-case basis. Which is more common, having the article or not having it? And I imagine the indefinite article should be suppressed for all proper nouns? Benwing2 (talk) 08:34, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Proper nouns almost always have no accompanying article but it is almost always possible to use one with the right context. I think Mahagaja's concern is to distinguish the proper nouns that necessitate an article (such as Schweiz, Iran) from those that only rarely have one. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 08:38, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: I think you can pretty much always say "das X von heute" and the likes without intervening adjective. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 08:36, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha So if most proper nouns don't have an article (right?) then they should be suppressed by default and the indicator should bring the definite article back. Which proper nouns require an article? Is there a list somewhere? Benwing2 (talk) 08:41, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I don't think of it as though some proper nouns either "have an article" or not. In my opinion, the correct way to think about it is that only a select few proper nouns necessitate the article regardless of the context (list of such countries, there might be other place names though, I don't know...) whereas almost all proper nouns could have an article in the right context. Every proper noun designating a place must have an article in a construction as the one given above: "das X von heute" = "today's X" — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 08:48, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Actually, come to think of it, there are a lot more proper nouns than just those countries that necessitate an article, e.g. de:w:Margelchopf. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 08:53, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I think mountain names usually take the article: "der Mount Everest", "die Zugspitze", "das Matterhorn"). Apart from the countries in the list linked above, there are a few others, such as "der Wedding" (a neighborhood and former borough of Berlin). Maybe we should only suppress the indefinite article for proper nouns, since that's much rarer (though still possible in the right context). —Mahāgaja · talk 09:26, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Mahagaja, Fytcha Yeah, I can do that. I'll add a .prop indicator that specifies that the noun is a proper noun; this will make the declension module default to singular-only (just like {{de-proper noun}}, but this can be overridden), and it will suppress the indefinite article. This indicator can be added automatically using a bot script. Benwing2 (talk) 03:18, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Looks like this isn't in the module yet? It would be good to update the documentation page with information specifically for proper nouns. – Jberkel 09:44, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2, @Mahagaja Wouldn't this be more appropriately handled by usage notes, since the articles (plural too, c.f. 'die beiden Chinas' as noted on the discussion page at {{de-proper noun}}) are theoretically possible and regularly occur in certain circumstances? Gallmann2018 actually deals with this topic in in detail. I'll excerpt the most salient points for this discussion:

• The rules:

a. definit → definiter Artikel (je nachdem im Singular oder Plural)

b. indefinit & zählbar & Singular → indefiniter Artikel (im Singular)

• Implying:

a. indefinit & zählbar & Plural → Ø

b. indefinit & nichtzählbar → Ø

• The exception which is relevant to us:

a. bestimmte Eigennamen (aber in Verbindung mit bestimmten Attributen → sekundärer Artikelgebrauch) [my emphasis]

On another note, there are actually some words where an article could said to be genuinely impossible, i.e. Jura 'law', but it's not even a proper noun (the only hits on google were relative clauses e.g. "Leute, die Jura studieren" or references to a brand name). And looking at its entry, a usage note is exactly how it's been handled. Although you'll notice the genitive form is specifically excluded over at the German wiktionary. Helrasincke (talk) 23:18, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Adjectival nouns

@Benwing2 This doesn't yet work for adjectival nouns like Obdachloser, does it? I assume that's still in planning. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:37, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Mahagaja Yes, that's right. I am working on a German adjective module now; it's maybe 60% done. With this module, it will be pretty easy to get adjectival nouns as well as adjective-noun combinatinons (e.g. schwarzes Loch) working. Benwing2 (talk) 03:16, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

@Mahagaja, Fytcha I have implemented support for declining adjectives and adjectival nouns. See User:Benwing2/test-de-adecl for adjective declensions, User:Benwing2/test-de-noun for headword nouns (look for Erwachsener, Erwachsene, Adlerjunges, schwarzes Loch, Kanarische Inseln and Olympische Winterspiele), and User:Benwing2/test-de-ndecl for noun declensions (look for the same nouns as above). Note that I added weak forms of adjectival nouns and adjective-noun expressions into the headword as I find these terms very confusing to decline, esp. adjectival nouns. Still to be done: a few edge cases for adjective declensions, new-style adjective headword support, push the changes live, write and run a bot script to convert adjective headwords/declensions to the new format, write and run a bot script to convert adjectival nouns and adjective-noun expressions to the new format. Benwing2 (talk) 04:49, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Also, I need to implement the prop indicator I mentioned above. Something like "(keine) Kanarische Inseln" doesn't really make sense. Benwing2 (talk) 04:50, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Thank you a lot for your great work again. I tried them out here and here and they seem to work just perfectly.

On the point above: Something like "keine Kanarischen Inseln" does make sense in the right context. There's a hit on Google Books (", dieser kennt noch keine Kanarischen Inseln.") and a couple on the web ("Ohne Vulkanismus gäbe es keine Kanarischen Inseln.", "kann es sein, dass euer spanien keine kanarischen inseln beinhaltet?", ...). Personally, I would have put these rather as "die Kanarischen Inseln nicht" but the version with keine seems fine too. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 09:02, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, it's hard to know what to do with marginal cases like this. Kanarische Inseln is also marked as "plural only", but Google Books shows several examples of "eine kanarische Insel" ("Ein junges Berliner Paar plant Mitte der 80 er Jahre auf eine kanarische Insel auszuwandern", "War Atlantis eine kanarische Insel?", "…unwahrscheinlich für eine kanarische Insel hält…" in a text from 1845, so it's not just a modern phenomenon). I don't know whether it's significant that kanarische is lowercase in all these instances. —Mahāgaja · talk 09:09, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha, Mahagaja I have converted all adjectival nouns and adjective-noun combinations, and deleted the old adj+noun templates. Unfortunately there are a lot of non-lemma forms that people have created over the years using headword accelerators that are all messed up, e.g. blinde Passagiere which claims to just be the "plural" of blinder Passagier. I am thinking of enumerating them, deleting all the ones without audio, and recreating some of them using declension-table accelerators, which create the right {{inflection of}} invocations automatically. However, that will take time. Benwing2 (talk) 05:22, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2 Hi, I found a problem at Leibhaftige. The new template includes the indefinite article, but only the weak endings, so it implies that "ein Leibhaftige" is acceptable, which of course it isn't. Can we suppress the indefinite article in the table? Thanks —Mahāgaja · talk 08:29, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Mahagaja Yes, there are a lot of expressions that seem to take the definite article, always or usually. Some examples: Paläozoikum, Kiez (“Reeperbahn”), Republik China, Eiserner Vorhang, Goldener Schnitt, Karpaten, Dritter Golfkrieg, etc. Almost all are proper nouns, but there are a few common nouns: Letzter (“the last one”), starke Deklination, Landesinneres, alte Leier (“same old story”). All of these are currently marked with the .article indicator, which causes the definite article to appear in the headword. I'm thinking of suppressing the indefinite article for all of them; sound good? I am already suppressing the indefinite article for toponyms marked with the .toponym indicator (which currently specifically indicates neuter toponyms for cities and towns like New York, Salerno, Grinzens, Sofia and countries like Burkina Faso, El Salvador, Slowenien, etc.). All of these toponyms have two genitives (one normally used with the article and one without), and I suppress the indefinite article for them because it doesn't seem to make sense. Benwing2 (talk) 08:55, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2, Mahagaja: Isn't the issue rather that this isn't lemmatized correctly? Masculine adjectival nouns are lemmatized in their article-less form, which would be Leibhaftiger. FWIW, Duden also lemmatizes this one as Leibhaftiger, even though it is questionable whether it can be attested in it's lemmatized form, then again it might occur in the lemmatized form in a vocative context. Pretty sure moving to Leibhaftiger would have solved Mahagaja's concern with the ungrammatical form *“ein Leibhaftige”. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 09:06, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha, Mahagaja Agreed here, I will move the article. I did BTW add support for suppressing the indefinite article when .article is used, but so far only for nouns without modifying adjectives. I'm not sure what to do for those, because sometimes they do occur without the article, e.g. strong Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika is definitely attestable. Maybe in these cases the "mixed" (indefinite) forms should be suppressed; but I bet they are attestable as well, e.g. for Dritter Golfkrieg I bet you can find instances of sein Dritter Golfkrieg, etc. Benwing2 (talk) 09:12, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2, Mahagaja: On the topic of adjectival nouns, when can the strong dative singular of a masculine noun, e.g. Rothaarigem as an inflected form of Rothaariger, ever be used? The phrase "mit Rothaarigem" sounds like the neuter nominalization to me, not the masculine, and another context where Rothaarigem is grammatical doesn't come to mind right now. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 22:40, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

I've wondered about this too, and I think the chief place would be in headlinese, e.g. "Schwarzhaariger hilft Rothaarigem". Here, for example, is an example of "mit Obdachlosem" in a headline, here is an example of "hilft Arbeitslosem", and here is an example of "zu Jugendlichem". Couldn't find any with "Rothaarigem", but the examples show that it is possible for adjectival nouns to appear without any article at all. —Mahāgaja · talk 23:00, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Ah yes, forgot about this one. Thanks! — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 23:05, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Surnames

@Fytcha, Mahagaja I added support for surnames. See the last entry in User:Benwing2/test-de-ndecl. I'm not sure if I'm 100% liking the table format, though. Contrast the German Wiktionary entry on de:Schulz. Suggestions for different formatting are welcome. Benwing2 (talk) 06:11, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: It looks good in my opinion; having three columns is a bit unusual if you're used to the two columns typically present in German noun declension tables but I don't mind. However, I don't quite see why we're suppressing the indefinite article; it gives off the false impression that surnames cannot be used with an indefinite article, which they can. I think they should be added in parentheses, possibly with some usage notes below the table (but within the template) as we do for dative singular forms. de:Schulz actually comes with pretty nice boilerplate usage notes that we could copy: "Für den Fall des Artikelgebrauches gilt: der „Schulz“ – für männliche Einzelpersonen, die „Schulz“ im Singular – für weibliche Einzelpersonen; ein und/oder eine „Schulz“ für einen und/oder eine Angehörige aus der Familie „Schulz“ und/oder der Gruppe der Namenträger. Die im Plural gilt für die Familie und/oder alle Namenträger gleichen Namens. Der schriftliche, standardsprachliche Gebrauch bei Nachnamen ist prinzipiell ohne Artikel." — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 08:55, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha Thanks, I can add the indefinite articles back. Should we have them in the plural or only the singular? Benwing2 (talk) 09:01, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I think what you're referring to with indefinite plural article is keine? If so, I guess something like "keine Müllers" or "keine Meiers" is grammatically possible and even attestable but very rare. I don't have any strong opinions on it. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 09:07, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha I added the indefinite articles to surnames, see User:Benwing2/test-de-ndecl. I will add the above text (translated) next. Benwing2 (talk) 05:25, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Whole-table qualifiers?

@Benwing2 In Nerv somebody added a declension table using {{de-ndecl|m[very rare].weak}}. The issue is, the "very rare" hint is not being displayed anywhere from what I can tell. Ideally, it would be displayed in the title, I think, as support for displaying these two declensions in one table is not really necessary. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 09:27, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha Agreed, I will implement that. Benwing2 (talk) 09:29, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Thanks a lot! Another case: Fatwa — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 09:56, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha This is implemented. In the process I felt I needed to change the format of the title annotations a bit to fit with the new gender qualifiers; please let me know what you think. Benwing2 (talk) 23:27, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Looks great in my opinion! Thanks for taking care of this so quickly. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 23:30, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Declension/gender of abbreviations

@Fytcha, Mahagaja What is the gender of abbreviations like IL, StuK, A, WKÖ, AGB, etc.? Does the gender match that of the full phrase? Do the abbreviations take endings like s and en as appropriate in the genitive/plural/etc., or do they remain undeclined? What about the dative plural in -n? Benwing2 (talk) 23:50, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Yes, generally the gender matches that of the full phrase. They do tend to take inflectional endings but they don't always agree with the one of the full phrase: IQs but Intelligenzquotienten. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 00:17, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Abbreviations tend to have two options for plural: zero ending, or adding -s. My impression (which could be mistaken) is that zero ending is more formal, -s more colloquial, at least for things like LKW, PKW and KFZ. I see die LKW haben in newspapers and hear it from newsreaders, but I hear die LKWs haben from ordinary people in everyday life. At least, that's my impression in Berlin; maybe things are different in other parts of the German Sprachraum. —Mahāgaja · talk 09:09, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

genders of pluralia tantum

@Fytcha, Mahagaja I am going through the existing entries that use {{de-decl-noun-pl}}. Many of them have a gender assigned, either based on the corresponding singular or etymologically or who knows how. Should we support this? It has no practical import in terms of declension, and in some cases it seems hard to assign any gender (e.g. die Malediven, unless we assume it's feminine by the -en ending or by analogy with Insel). But maybe it's useful. Benwing2 (talk) 00:32, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: In Standard German, pluralia tantum don't have a (surfacing) gender to the best of my knowledge, though I've heard @Fay Freak point out that, dialectally, a gender can be inferred using the fact that zwei, again dialectally, inflects for gender. What's more, Malediven sounds pretty feminine to my ears. I guess that has to be because *Maledive is the obvious backformation for the singular which in turn has to be feminine. I would actually guess that most of these can be assigned a gender that most natives would agree on, but the usefulness of this information is very questionable. I would not oppose getting rid of all German plurale tantum genders, though I feel that this needs to be discussed first. Pinging also @Jberkel. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 00:43, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Even as a nonnative speaker I agree that Malediven "feels" feminine somehow, although there's nothing in principle preventing it from being a weak masculine like Löwe or even a weak or mixed neuter like Herz or Auge. After all, the -diven part comes from Sanskrit द्वीप (dvīpa), which is masculine or neuter, not feminine. —Mahāgaja · talk 09:21, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha, Mahagaja, Jberkel, Fay Freak I have added support for specifying genders on pluralia tantum in case people want to do that. It's not required. To do it, specify mp, fp or np as the gender in place of just p. If you do this, the headword and the declension title page show the gender (e.g. as m pl in the headword) but the declension isn't affected. There are now some examples in User:Benwing2/test-de-noun and User:Benwing2/test-de-ndecl (see in particular the examples for Eltern, which claims on its page to be m-p or rarely n-p). Benwing2 (talk) 23:55, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

mixed vs. strong

@Fytcha, Mahagaja @Fytcha, you requested that Nachbar show up in the title with "mixed" in place of "strong". Does this apply to all nouns that are otherwise strong but have -en or -n in the plural? Benwing2 (talk) 02:49, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

What about nouns like Museum, pl. Museen, and Kaktus, pl. Kakteen? If no, should I be specifically excluding nouns in -um and -us? Benwing2 (talk) 06:19, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Or should it only be nouns whose plural is composed of the singular + -n or -en? E.g. Kapital, pl. Kapitalien. Benwing2 (talk) 06:20, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Sorry, I'm out of my depth here, I don't think we had terms like gemischte Deklination at school; I guess that's rather on the grammar curriculum for non-native speakers. Going by de.wiki, it seems the criteria for what (masculine/neuter) mixedly declined nouns are are rather strict: -s/-es/-(e)s (there's also s:es/es:s in the templates sometimes, to document frequency) in the sg.gen., and -n/-en in the plural. Then again, that table is not exhaustive (failing to categorize your examples, even though they have a nicht klassifiziert row). — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 08:20, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm out of my depth too. I don't know whether things like Museum and Kaktus are considered mixed declension, and my German grammar books don't really clarify, though I can't think of a reason why they wouldn't. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:18, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha, Mahagaja The way I implemented it, it requires that the plural is formed from the lemma + -n or -en, so it excludes Kaktus, Museum and Kapital. Benwing2 (talk) 19:09, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

Plural-only adjectival nouns

The documentation mentions Erwachsene as a plural-only adjectival noun, which it isn't. Can we find a different example? Searching only yields Feinste which of course can also be used in the singular. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 15:08, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha Feinste is the only example that uses this. I assume there must be plural-only adjectival nouns in German, but I don't personally know of any. Benwing2 (talk) 19:07, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I didn't think they exist but I found one: Miese. While it is morphologically the plural of Mieses (obviously attested: [1]), that specific sense (that is not just the nominalization of the adjective) is a plurale tantum. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 10:52, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

dat_with_e

@Benwing2 Can we find a different example for this parameter? I've removed it from Symbol (diff) which is the current example. Attestation here: [2] — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 15:12, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha The only other word where I found it necessary to use this is Flottillenadmiral. Not sure if Flottillenadmirales is attested. Benwing2 (talk) 19:05, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, also the base form Admiral. Benwing2 (talk) 19:08, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Yeah, I think that's right. Admirales can be attested a small handful of times (though only very rarely, Google Books inflates the number by showing endless copies of the same few works) but I don't think it's worth documenting. I'll change the example. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 12:21, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

order of cases

@Fytcha, Mahagaja I notice that Duden uses the order "nom, acc, dat, gen" instead of the traditional (Latin-based) "nom, gen, dat, acc". To me, Duden's order is better because of the frequent syncretism in nom/acc and nom/acc/dat. What do you think of switching the order like this? Benwing2 (talk) 22:21, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: See Template_talk:de-decl-noun-m#Case_order. I personally like NADG best for German in accordance with the Case hierarchy (I know it says G<D but this order seems to be universally reversed for German lects). However, thinking back, we too had the accusative as the last case back in school. Pinging also @Fay Freak. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 22:29, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha Thanks. I don't have my German textbooks at hand (they're in storage) but I'm 90% sure the order was NADG and 99% sure the order was not NGDA. Since the English Wiktionary is intended for English speakers I think we should use what makes the most sense for foreign-language learners rather than what is traditional in German pedagogy. AFAIK the only reason for the NGDA order is because it mimics the order traditionally used in teaching Latin (which is Nom, Gen, Dat, Acc, Abl, Voc). German is not Latin so no reason we need to follow that order. Benwing2 (talk) 22:41, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: The reason in sense of causality is the traditional order, as you already know from Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2019/December § Order of cases is not consistent across Latin templates. From there is no conclusion that there are better rational reasons for another order. I doubt it “makes sense” sense to group the cases in a certain order because of one being more “useful” than the other. Don’t gild the lily? Fay Freak (talk) 22:52, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha I'm not sure why you think all case orders are equally helpful. The traditional Sanskrit grammarians, for example, who were far more advanced in their time than any other native grammar traditions, purposely chose an order that allowed for the most syncretism of adjacent cases (Nom Voc Acc Ins Dat Abl Gen Loc). By presenting cases in an order that reflects natural syncretisms, we help learners identify these syncretisms, which makes it easier to learn the declensions. I suspect this is why Duden uses NADG. I should add that the orders NADG or NAGD are fairly universal in modern English grammars of Germanic languages, cf. Campbell's "Old English grammar" which uses NAGD. Benwing2 (talk) 23:02, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fay Freak Oops that was intended as a response to Fay Freak. Benwing2 (talk) 23:02, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: They aren’t inherently equally helpful, but tradition has bearing in how information is parsed, and as this is an universal dictionary, it would be concerning to special-case Germanic languages by reason that Germanic-language grammars have a trend that grammars of other language groups have not partaken in, not to speak of grammars written in other languages: “English grammars” surely aren’t equally convincing to all parties present; I wouldn’t know that Italian grammars or Croatian grammars of German wouldn’t have equal weight: particularly since non-native speakers come here for our coverage—like me, not really because I have a predilection for English but because the previous content attracted me as well as the technical infrastructure for which we have to thank Benwing, not having learnt every language via English grammars but rather presuming international grammar conventions. With this argument I feel quite like when they persist to use lbs instead of kilograms etc., blackballing international audience, this time by novelty rather than tradition. Fay Freak (talk) 23:46, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

As long as nominative comes first and dative doesn't come second, I really don't care what order the cases come in. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:40, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

'(e)s'

@Fytcha Currently (e)s always puts -es before -s. This is actually wrong most of the time, because most words are multisyllable words. We could reverse the order, but I'm thinking instead of reimplementing it so that it counts the number of syllables and puts -es first if there is one syllable, otherwise it puts -s first. What do you think? Ideally I think we should not be using (e)s at all and I'm kind of sorry I implemented it; es:s and s:es are the same number of keystrokes and make the order clear. But I think going by the number of syllables gets it right most of the time. To count syllables, I will look for the following sequences of vowels, which are by default considered to be diphthongs or long vowels, and count them as part of a single syllable: au, äu, eu, ai, ei, ie, aa, ee, oo, also u+vowel when followed by q. Did I miss any? Benwing2 (talk) 06:45, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I think having (e)s available is actually really important: It signals that the person who created the entry doesn't know and didn't research the frequencies of the genitives, which can later be tracked and fixed. What would be far worse is if everybody just used s:es or es:s haphazardly without proper care; that way we would have no way of telling properly researched es:s/s:es apart from randomly used ones. Per Wiktionary:Tea_room/2022/February#New_German_noun_template, I think we should fix your bot's substitutions in cases where the genitive section of the headword was previously edited (à la git blame) by an editor who is known to order the genitives by frequency (namely Special:Contributions/84.57.154.13 which is probably the same editor as most / all prolific German/Maltese IP editors that geolocate in Germany).

As for the second part of the message: I hope what you're referring to is which order it should be displayed in when using (e)s, as opposed to whether (e)s should be replaced by es:s or s:es by bot, right? In that (the former) case, I think your criterion captures it pretty well, though I would not be confident enough in such an orthographic heuristic to then categorize these words in Category:German 1-syllable words (that should still only be done by {{IPA}}). But for merely the ordering of the genitives it's good enough. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 10:52, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha Yes, not to make bot substitutions by this criterion but to display -s or -es first, instead of unilaterally displaying -es first. I was actually thinking of doing a bot run to fix all occurrences of (e)s that came from previously ordered headwords to reflect that order, but you are right that it's probably safer to do that only for this anon IP; once the module code is changed as described above, having the wikicode use -(e)s is probably fine in most cases. Benwing2 (talk) 07:35, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Different behavior for same parameters

@Benwing2: I've noticed that {{de-proper noun|f.article}} produces no plural whereas {{de-ndecl|f.article}} does. Is this intentional? See diff, diff. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 20:46, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

A bizarre request

@Benwing2 If both .weak as well as a custom genitive is specified, I think the singular dative/accusative forms should be copied from the genitive, not just be -en. See Id**t for a concrete example where the current approach fails. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 16:58, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

langname acceleration

@Benwing2 The plural forms of langnames don't seem to support acceleration: Thrakisch — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 12:28, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha I'll take a look at the three issues you've called out here. Benwing2 (talk) 17:13, 25 June 2022 (UTC)