Module talk:la-noun/table

Width issues

@This, that and the other: I think the new title format isn't ideal in cases like December#Proper_noun_2 or nihil#Pronoun_3 where the title is longer than the cells beneath it, and now gets forced to wrap. It looks OK on mobile view, but weird on desktop where there's room to have the title on just one line. Is the extra bounding box around the title & cells necessary? It looks a bit more cluttered to me than the old style that didn't have it. For la-adecl, the width seems off now for nemo and quisquam for some reason. Urszag (talk) 16:27, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

@Urszag I thought I would give this a try, as the title really belongs to the table itself. Yes, it does lead to poor results on a handful of entries with complex declensional dispositions and hence long titles. Clearly December is one of these; it could be improved slightly by making the hyphen in "i-stem" a non-breaking hyphen, but that doesn't really address the underlying issue. As I said, only a small handful of entries are affected, but there is another problem. I fixed the width issue on quisquam, but now we have the same problem where the text is too bunched up.

I just made this particular change as an experiment and don't feel strongly about it. If the title is not present, the additional box will disappear too. There was nothing particularly wrong with the way it was before, so I will see about reverting it. I should have time for this later today. This, that and the other (talk) 22:27, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Actually I reverted the "fix" to the width issue at quisquam. This needs more thought. As noted, I will see about reverting the title/notes changes to Latin entries when I have a moment. This, that and the other (talk) 22:31, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Removing locative plural forms for non-plurale tantum nouns

@Theknightwho, @This, that and the other, (Notifying Fay Freak, Brutal Russian, JohnC5, Benwing2, Lambiam, Mnemosientje, Nicodene, Sartma, Al-Muqanna, SinaSabet28): : Currently, whenever a Latin declension table displays a locative form, it gets put in the table in both numbers. While there's a simple rule for the theoretical formation of the locative plural (it's identical to the dative and ablative plural) I don't think these forms are actually in general use as locatives except for in the case of plurale tantum proper nouns/city names. Sanford and Scott's reader (1922) explicitly leaves the locative plural empty when giving the paradigm of domus; this is given as a general rule by a handout someone uploaded to coursehero. Other resources are not so explicit, but generally only mention the locative as a singular form when presenting the declension of nouns like this (e.g. Allen and Greenough, Walters and Conway. I think it's of dubious accuracy, and at any rate more misleading than helpful, to list forms such as domibus, diebus, bellīs as plural locative forms. You can find constructions with a preposition such as "in domibus nostris" or "in domibus vestris" (though these also exist to some extent in the singular, and so are not conclusive proof of the nonexistence of a locative form).

Given that locative forms of common nouns are rare, and to a certain extent may be frozen/adverbialized (compare English "home" and "yesterday") I think it might be better to just present them all in notes beneath the table, rather than as part of the table. Any thoughts? Urszag (talk) 05:25, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

@Urszag Remove the plurals, but keep the singular forms in the table (with notes as appropriate). There's no need to remove the singular forns from the table entirely - it's just awkward, as it obscures what they are. That being said, we should also consider Old Latin with the intact locative, which is sorely neglected at the moment. Theknightwho (talk) 06:15, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I think I remember reading about locative forms being used to a greater extent in other Italic languages, but what is the basis for describing the locative as intact in Old Latin? Heckmann 1905 ("Über präpositionslose Ortsbezeichnung im Altlateinischen"), who uses a cutoff date for Old Latin of 75 BC., discusses examples mostly of the same nouns that recur later as examples: rūrī, viciniae, domī, humī, bellī, militiae, and then goes on to eventually say "Abgesehen von den Adverbien, den bereits angeführten Substantiven und den Ortsnamen sind Lokative mit Sicherheit nicht nachzuweisen" (p. 326). If you are talking about an even earlier stage, isn't the Old Latin corpus very small?--Urszag (talk) 07:06, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

@Lambiam I suspect "intact locative" was probably overstating things, but we definitely do know that the vestigial locative was more prevalent in Old Latin, as was recognised by speakers of Classical Latin at the time.

You're right that the Old Latin corpus is very small (at least by comparison to Classical Latin), but the way I see it is that if we're going to fold Old Latin into the "Latin" L2, then we need to do it credit by acknowledging it in entries, and if we don't want to do that (e.g. because of clutter), then we should split it out as its own L2. Theknightwho (talk) 21:00, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

@Urszag Pinging the correct user this time. Theknightwho (talk) 21:01, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Would that involve anything beyond just mentioning locative forms for all nouns where they are attested? I don't have an issue with doing that (regardless of whether the attestation is in Classical Latin or Old Latin), but I don't think it would change things too much, since I haven't seen any Old Latin locative attestations so far.--Urszag (talk) 21:08, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

We list the ablative used as an adverbial of time (e.g. diē) as a locative. Then we find, e.g., cunctis diebus nostris in the Vulgate (Jeremiah 35:8). However we analyze this, I don’t see the point in giving locatives separately when predictably identical to the ablatives, as they are for plurals, including pluralia tantum.  --Lambiam 08:00, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I agree with @Theknightwho about not displaying locative plurals but keeping locative singulars in the table for nouns that have them. I think this is similar to what we do with Russian (which has occasional examples of vocative, locative and partitive singulars, but no plurals of any of these cases). Benwing2 (talk) 01:09, 8 December 2024 (UTC)