Talk:-oth
Add topicLatest comment: 11 years ago by BD2412 in topic -oth
Deletion discussion
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I'll just repeat my statement from the tea room: "-os, -oth et alia aren't actually suffixes in English. They're suffixes in Hebrew (and arguably Yiddish), but they're never appended (except humorously, but not in a CFI-attestability sort of way) to nouns that didn't already have that pluralization back in Hebrew. Put another way, halachoth is not halachah + -oth but taken wholesale from Hebrew halakhót." —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 17:16, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
- Delete. As Μετάknowledge says, these don't seem to be applied to non-Hebraic words; they don't even seem to be applied to that many Hebraic words. It is somewhat useful to know that foo+־ות usually becomes "foo-os" or "foo-oth" in English, but a usage note at ־ות may be a better place to house that information, because I'm not convinced that anyone would look at "halachot", know what "halacha" meant but not know what "halachot" meant, and think "-ot must be an English suffix, I should look it up" as opposed to "I should look up halachot". PS, note that I am the creator of "-oth"—I think it is as deserving or undeserving as "-os". - -sche (discuss) 17:55, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
- Keep -os, and keep -oth if "halachoth" is really an English word. As -sche says, no one would ever look this up; however, they might well follow a link to it. It's (presumably) true that this suffix is not productive in English, but it is retained in English, which can't be said for all languages' plural endings. (There are plenty of English nouns from Amerindian languages, but I challenge you to find even one singular–plural pair where English retained the source language's number marking. Go ahead, try.) —RuakhTALK 05:40, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
- @Ruakh: They wouldn't follow a link to it if we would just remove the links. The links should be removed in turn because it's not an English suffix. Moreover, even with your unfair Amerindian challenge (many such languages don't follow the Indo-European concept of countability), I easily found the example of pochtecatl (plural pochteca), which can be attested in English (both forms) via BGC. I don't really see your argument to keep. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 21:44, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
- Why isn't this analogous with -i, which forms the plural of some Latin-derived words? Furius (talk) 01:43, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Kept for lack of consensus to delete. bd2412 T 14:35, 27 November 2013 (UTC)