Talk:ромски

RFC discussion: July 2013–August 2017

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ромски

romski

The second definition in each of these entries has a confusing context tag. I tried to clean it up, but must have misunderstood what it was saying, because Ivan reverted my edits. Is it saying that the term is used as a masculine substantive? In that case, why is it in an adjective POS? Is it saying that it has the specified meaning only when used with masculine substantives? What? - -sche (discuss) 18:43, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't know but I think most language adjectives in Serbo-Croatian have this definition. I picked one at random, katalonski, and it has it. We should ask Ivan. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:08, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

It is indeed an adjective, but specifically it can refer to a language when acting as a part of the prahse ...ski jezik "the X language", with jezik part (meaning "language") usually dropped in speech/writing. Before treating language names that way, we had all of them listed as nouns, which was grammatically and semantically wrong, not to mention that it would require special adjectival inflection templates that would only inflect for masculine gender. Color names will be subject to the same treatment, e.g. cr̀ven, which in feminine gender act as a shorthand for the phrase -a boja "the X color", and which will be lemmatized at the original adjective with the context label in femininee . This I announced on WT:ASH talkpage. So far only one color ("the red") has been processed that way, but the rest will be as well. This is the way it is done in all of the Serbo-Croatian dictionaries I checked.

Now that you mention that it is confusing I was wondering whether context labels can generate links to language-specific appendices where things like this will be explained. It would be much more useful than cluttering the general-purpuse glossary, not to mention that we could have space for language-specific examples. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 14:23, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

In some Slavic languages (including Serbo-Croatian and Russian) adjectives denoting ethnicities may also be nouns/substantives, e.g. англи́йский (anglíjskij), ру́сский (rússkij), which mean the language of that ethnicity (a shortened colloquial form of adjective + "язык" (language). In case of русский, it's also an ethnic Russian (noun). They are declined as adjectives, used as nouns. I will also wait for Ivan for further explanations about the Serbo-Croatian setup of this kind of adjectives. Russian adjectives are set up a bit differently but it doesn't have to be that way in Serbo-Croatian. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 14:23, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I notice that for Russian you have full entries such as английский язык (anglijskij jazyk), and the standalone adjective treated as a shortened synonym. One can argue that the full phrase is then non-idiomatic sum of parts though. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 14:37, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

One may think so, yes and some do but it's important to know that "английский язык" is not only "the English language" but also "English" (noun, "language"), its usage is much broader and is more common in formal settings. The official, formal and most common translation of "English" (language, noun) into Russian is англи́йский язы́к (anglíjskij jazýk), though. The (university) subject, title of textbooks is never simply "английский" but "английский язык". Anyway, having the template as in Serbo-Croatian nominalised adjectives is not such a bad idea, the Russian equivalents have both noun and adjective sections with only one inflection table (someone may wonder why there is no inflection table for the noun sections). --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 14:58, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

• Looks good now --New WT User Girl (talk) 10:32, 27 August 2017 (UTC)