Template talk:ru-noun

Bolding

The vote on nonbolding of non-Roman characters pertained to, IIRC, certain scripts that do not fare well under bolding, such as Chinese and Japanese, and other scripts that can only be reasonably bolded if you have the bold font installed, such as Thai and Ancient Greek. Both Russian and Modern Greek bold just as readily as Roman. While italicizing Cyrillic can be confusing, there is no reason not to bold Cyrillic in cases where the Roman would be bolded. —Stephen 11:39, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I missed the vote but I can't imagine why would anyone be against bolding Cyrillic characters, especially when so far Russian entries were boldened using {{infl}}. I am going to bolden {{ru-noun}} again, unless someone complains about this specifically. --Vahagn Petrosyan 18:06, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

g argument

This template does not seem to accept the argument g=p, nor does it accept g=m|g2=p. In дамы и господа, it needs g=p (without gender identifiers). —Stephen (Talk) 11:44, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

I can add g=p, but for g=m|g2=p, could you use g=mp? — [ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 16:23, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Well, that works, but sometimes some users are writing g=m|g2=p, then they don’t notice that it doesn’t work right. I just changed часы from g=m|g2=p to g=mp because it had been left that way. —Stephen (Talk) 21:00, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

That can be fixed pretty easily by bot, but I'm a bit retarded in that area so if someone like Conrad or Ullmann were asked to fix that... They'd probably do a better job of it. — [ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 00:07, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Stephen, thanks for fixing часы, my mistake. Will follow this discussion. If this is not changed, will try to be more careful and follow the parameters that work. --Anatoli 04:57, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

The reason I'd be hesitant to add g2 is that there are words with multiple genders, and I don't want to have to add up to g4=... So I advocate using mp, fn, mf and that kind of stuff, even though {{infl}} uses g= and g2=... — [ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 05:59, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Why don't these templates automagically add interwiki-links to the corresponding entries in the Russian Wikislowar?

Please explain that to: --IM Serious (talk) 10:18, 12 September 2012 (UTC) who is too dumb to master all this <noinclude> and #ifmacro magic!

Because not all Russian entries here have corresponding entries on Russian Wiktionary...for example, крем для бритья. We have a number of different bots that check whether an entry here has corresponding entries on other Wiktionaries and, if there are, they add the interwikis. —Stephen ^(Talk) 11:44, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Great, thank you Stephen for those satisfying answers! Bots can of course automatize this equally well to template code and thanks to whomever parents them: --IM Serious (talk) 14:51, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Singular-only forms

Why are the same abbreviations used for nouns that have both singular and plural, and those that only have singular forms? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:42, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Can you explain what you mean by "abbreviations", or give an example of them? —Stephen ^(Talk) 16:51, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

m-an and others. Anyway, I've discovered that I'm supposed to use "-" for such cases. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:55, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Error on missing gender

ложные срабатывание is currently showing an error because the gender wasn't specified. I think this is a mistake. Rather than showing an error, it should just show a question mark and gender request, which Module:headword supports. —CodeCat 14:06, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Gender in the plural

How do you know the gender of pluralia tantum like щи? Guldrelokk (talk) 23:05, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

@Guldrelokk: There are few ways - 1. etymology (derived from an obsolete singular form), 2. declension pattern or 3. by the use of a solid reference, usually describing why it's a certain gender. I'm not 100% sure why щи (šči) is a masculine and the declension doesn't change if it were feminine. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:59, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Masculine is probably the worst choice for щи, since its non-existent singular would then be **щ, which is too much even for a non-existent form. But the point is, all such words can indeed be taken as feminine, masculine or even neuter if you count former duals like плечи. The only thing you can be sure about is that those in -а́ are not feminine, but is it really worthy of noting? In all but a few cases the choice is completely arbitrary, so I do not see why should we have these. And choosing on etymological grounds is a straightforwardly wrong, as is any intermixing between synchrony and diachrony. For a synchronic description etymology is nothing. Guldrelokk (talk) 00:13, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

Anatoli about sums it up, although I'd also add that another possible way is to try to find adjectival agreement in old (pre-1918) sources, because plural adjectives in such sources still distinguished masculine from feminine/neuter in the nominative. I don't agree that the choice is completely arbitrary, and we do have reliable sources (e.g. Zaliznyak) that indicate gender of pluralia tantum; this is where the choice of masculine for щи comes from. Benwing2 (talk) 02:51, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, Benwing2. Yes, I forgot to mention the use of adjectives in the pre-reform spellings. That came very handy in deciding on the gender of ме́сячные (mésjačnyje), which was spelled мѣ́сячныя (mě́sjačnyja), which can't be masculine. Thanks to User:Wikitiki89 on this one. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 02:59, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Another method, not a very user-friendly one is to check what pronoun was used. онѣ́ (oně́) (modern spelling оне́ (oné)) was only used with plural feminine nouns only but it was getting dated even at Pushkin's time.

The gender of this particular term may not be easy to determine and the reasoning why it was marked as masculine originally. There is some evidence that "кислыя щи" was used in the pre-1918 literature. It may be a misspelling. Most Russians wouldn't know what grammatical gender some of pluralia tantum are. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:18, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, it looks like it was more commonly used with -ыя, but there are still plenty of pre-reform examples of it with -ые. I guess even at that time, the gender wasn't exactly certain. I think it makes sense to give both, and give feminine first (I don't think it's likely to be neuter). --WikiTiki89 18:05, 26 March 2018 (UTC)