Talk:castanha do Pará

Not a word

According to Portuguese grammar, "castanha do Pará" is not a valid word. Botany-related words are always hyphenated, thus "castanha-do-pará" is the only valid word. CaiusSPQR (talk) 00:09, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

@CaiusSPQR, here at English Wiktionary we do not blindly follow prescriptive claims. Even if some authority claims that only castanha-do-pará is correct, what matters is the evidence from actual usage. If you think the evidence from actual usage is not enough to justify its inclusion, you can make a WT:Request for deletion, but you should know that the spelling castanha do Pará is found in many, many books and scientific articles; these were proofread and the specialist decided that there was no error. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 18:10, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

RFD discussion: August 2018–February 2019

The following information passed a request for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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castanha do Pará

According to Portuguese orthography (and upheld by the Orthographic Agreement of 1992), "castanha do Pará" is not a valid word. Botany-related words are always hyphenated, thus "castanha-do-pará" is the only valid word. CaiusSPQR (talk) 17:27, 19 August 2018 (UTC)

For the purposes of English Wiktionary, prescribed orthographies are only relevant to the extent that speakers take them seriously. While the current standard Portuguese orthography (described by the Orthographic Agreement of 1990) is taken much more seriously than that of German or Dutch, there are some regulations that are usually ignored. One of them is the requirement that compound names of species (not all botany-related words) be hyphenated. You can easily find hundreds of books and scientific articles that were written, proofread and published with this spelling.

In fact, if we were to follow this regulation to the letter, we would have to remove scores of terms which are only attested without the hyphen (although this is not the case with castanha-do-pará). There is no reason to delete castanha do Pará or to consider it a misspelling, since only a minority of educated Portuguese speakers de facto consider it a misspelling. The only change I’d consider tolerable (but not ideal) is to include a label of proscribed or similar, but even that should be done on a case by case basis, since like I said there are many compound vernacular names that are only attested without hyphens. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 19:35, 19 August 2018 (UTC)

I see your point, and by the way, sorry for making the mistake of getting the year wrong. I agree with labelling the entry as proscribed in this case, because most of the people don't get the word wrong (at least according to Corpus do Português, where the frequency of "castanha-do-pará" is higher than that of "castanha do Pará"). So taking those points into consideration (the OA and the frequency on Corpus do Português), I think the discussed entry should either be deleted or at least labeled as proscribed. CaiusSPQR (talk) 20:11, 19 August 2018 (UTC)

• Keep per above-above. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:42, 31 December 2018 (UTC)
• RFD passed and a proscribed context label added. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:11, 6 February 2019 (UTC)