Talk:fasque

RFV

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification.

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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Rfv of the adjective section; one of the senses was tagged years ago but not listed. The noun is only fas + -que, which means it should be deleted, according to the usage note in [[-que]]. - -sche (discuss) 04:39, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

• Not in my dictionary, nor in Lewis & Short. Noun sense should be deleted according to our norms. SemperBlotto 07:14, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
  • FWIW I oppose deleting such compounds. Has there been some consensus on this?​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:17, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
    • They aren't really compounds, they are words with a clitic particle attached to them. The Romans themselves considered -que to be a separate word, because they abbreviated Senatus Populusque Romanus as SPQR. —CodeCat 20:50, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
      • As with German "Nouncompounds" and Hebrew words with clitics, I think we should have these because an English speaker (English Wiktionary's audience) will not know where to break up the word so will look up the whole thing. (I know that view's unpopular here, but I thought I'd state it again in the context of these Latin words, since they've come up and I haven't mentioned it in their context before.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:23, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
        • I understand that point of view, but suffixes like this could be added to almost any word, which means there is an almost infinite amount of possibilities. Latin is not the only language with sentence clitics, they also exist in Finnish, Gothic and many other languages. And what about words in scripts that don't use spaces, like Chinese? If the combination fas+que is idiomatic in Latin then it should of course be kept. But we have a policy of judging the idiomaticity of a phrase in its own language rather than in English, and unfortunately it is the case that in some languages, some compound words may not be idiomatic. Many polysynthetic languages can form compounds almost without restriction, but I doubt we can have an entry for every single combination of verb, subject and object in those languages, even if they would all be single words. —CodeCat 21:50, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
          • Re "which means there is an almost infinite amount of possibilities" and "an entry for every single combination": Well, we'd only include attested ones. Re Chinese: No, my view as stated above applies only to languages which have spaces between words (for some value of "words").​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:03, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
          • Prefixes like un- can be added to almost any English word. Were Latin a polysynthetic language, I might be more sympathetic to your argument, but it's not.--Prosfilaes 00:49, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

The adjective (the section which was RFVed) has now been deleted, RFV-failed as uncited. The noun is a separate matter. - -sche (discuss) 05:52, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Deletion debate

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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We do not include Latin entries suffixed with (deprecated template usage) -que by consensus of Latin editors and longstanding practice. I believe that this is the only outstanding offender. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:03, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

See the RFV discussion on Talk:fasque, and especially the discussion at WT:T:ALA#Latin_-que_compound_words. There is not consensus that -que words should be deleted, it is merely the practice of some editors — a practice which several others oppose. We should try to establish a consensus one way or the other now, though. - -sche (discuss) 21:11, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

I'd support deleting, since -que, as far as I know, can be attached to any word at all. --WikiTiki89 21:17, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

On the other hand, so can un-#English. (You might give examples of words that un- isn't attested as being attached to, but then I'd give examples of words that -que isn't attested as being attached to.)

Romans did not put spaces between their words, but when modern compositions and modern editions of old texts do use spaces, they (and even we, e.g. in quotations) leave -que attached to the preceding bit, as if it formed a single word. I quote msh210's comment on WT:T:ALA that "As with German "Nouncompounds" and Hebrew words with clitics, I think we should have these because an English speaker (English Wiktionary's audience) will not know where to break up the word so will look up the whole thing." I even designed an {{&lit}}-like template, {{&lat}}, to format the definitions. (Although we give un- words full definitions... hmm...)

Back on the first hand, though, we do (as EP pointed out) exclude words suffixed unidiomatically with -'s (cat's, etc). - -sche (discuss) 21:34, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

I think un- is more limited than -que: You can't generally attach the former to prepositions (unabout, unbecause, ununder), for example. Furius (talk) 21:52, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

un- (“Un-”) can have meaning of negation, reversal, or removal, but in different combinations with different words, not following any rule AFAIK. This each English word using un- needs to have an explicit definition, thought not necessarily a separate entry as the definition(s) of, say, undo could appear at [[do#Verb]]. DCDuring TALK 23:58, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Delete. If this is kept then there will have to be a separate entry with -que appended for every single Latin word (and every conjugated form). In every singe case it will mean "and (definition of the word in question)." Instead, however, this seems to be the only case on wiktionary where a non-idiomatic compound of -que is given an entry. This isn't really analogous to un- which changes the meaning of the word in question (usually, but not always predictably).

There are some few cases of words with -que on the end which have a unique meaning, and they should of course be kept (quisque: anyone/everyone comes to mind). Otherwise, though, it is just a conjunctive clitic (exactly analogous to τε, for example, which (note) has only been written with a space between it and the preceeding word since Medieval times). Furius (talk) 21:42, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

You dismiss the comparison to un- because it's "usually, but not always" predictable, then say -que is usually, but not always predictable? lol. But I admit there are better examples than un-. What about he English plural suffix -s? Words formed with it are included, although they mean "plural of (word in question)". - -sche (discuss) 21:52, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

There is really no analogous example in English. We do have languages that have better analogous examples: Hebrew (וְ־ (v'-, “and”), שֶׁ־ (she-, “that”), בְּ־ (b'-, “in”)), Arabic (وَ (wa-, “and”), بِ (bi-, “in”)). And the consensus by far in those languages is not to keep words with these clitics. --WikiTiki89 22:07, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that didn't come out logically on my part. My point was more that un- changes the meaning of the word, whereas -que (with a few exceptions which I said should be included) doesn't change the meaning - it helps to co-ordinate its relation to other parts of the sentence. Furius (talk) 23:34, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Delete SOP. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 21:49, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

More SOP than acessórios, less SOP than acessórios, or approximately as SOP as acessórios? - -sche (discuss) 21:58, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

More. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 22:03, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Because you can more easily tell that fasque is fas+-que than that acessórios is acessório+-s, or what? - -sche (discuss) 22:15, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Because acessórios is an inflected form of acessório formed by the addition of the suffix -s to the noun acessório (actually a loanword from Latin accusative masculine plural accessorios, but it can be analysed as such anyway), while fasque is a (non-idiomatic) sum of noun fas with conjunction que, which happens to be written without a space. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 22:25, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

• Delete for the same reason we don't have father's, aunt's, cat's, etc. —Angr 21:53, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

  We do have fathers, aunts and cats, though. - -sche (discuss) 21:58, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

  Which have inflectional morphology that is unique to countable nouns on them, not a clitic that can be added to absolutely anything. (And 's can be added to other things than just nouns: consider "the boy I was talking to's mother" or "the dog I bought's fur".) —Angr 22:10, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

  Good point! - -sche (discuss) 22:36, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Presuming we delete -que words generally, should we make exceptions and have soft redirects/{{&lat}} entries when a sequence of letters is a word in an unrelated language, e.g. masque and bisque? Does any language like Guarani, Hawaiian, etc have word that just happens to end in -'s, which we can look to for precedent? (I'm guessing the answer to both is "no". I'm not going to lose sleep if we decide to exclude all the -que words, and I'll bin {{&lat}} if we do, but I want to see what our parameters are.) - -sche (discuss) 22:36, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

My understanding, albeit only based on others' comments, is that this is not a word so not protected by 'all words in all languages', it just superficially appears to be one because there's no space between fas and que. It's somewhat similar to hablarnos in Spanish which is also not a word, but hablar and nos not separated by anything. Mglovesfun (talk) 00:00, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

@-sche: Luckily, there is precedent. The structure of Hawaiian (and I believe Guaraní as well) precludes such a possibility, but certain plurals are formed with -'s in Dutch. I would bin {{&lat}} straightaway because the entry taxi's does not have an English section. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:57, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Delete. -que is not really a suffix in the sense that it forms words. It is rather an unstressed particle that attaches to the preceding word, but it has a syntactic function rather than a morphological function. It doesn't modify the meaning of the preceding word, instead it provides a syntactic "glue" like any other conjunction would. It differs from normal conjunctions in that it is not a separate word, but there is an analogue of that in many Slavic languages, which have prepositions like v, s and z that form part of the following word but are not written together with it. Also consider the case of Finnish, which has possessive suffixes -ni, -nsa which attach to the preceding word. We don't include word forms with those suffixes currently, because they would multiply the amount of attestable forms of every noun sixfold at least; and there are are already 34 (!) case forms without it. —CodeCat 04:07, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Although I do not want to include fasque, there ARE Latin words in which -que is a suffix, and those words should be kept. Examples include namque, atque, neque, ubique, quoque, etc. Just to make this clear. —Angr 15:50, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

• Keep in the absence of a plausible reason for deletion. The analogy to English un-, non-, -ness and the like has not been refuted. The assertion that "-que" can be attached to any word at all has no bearing to CFI, and I wonder whether it is strictly correct anyway: is there really not a single Latin word to which "-que" cannot be attached? The assertion that the term is a semantic sum-of-parts is wrong as long as "headache" is not a semantic sum of part for its being written solid, without a space or a hyphen. Predictable morphology is not a reason for excluding word forms, whether it is derivational morphology ("whiteness") or inflectional morphology ("marked"). --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:26, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  Technically it doesn't attach to any word at all. Rather, it is placed after the first word of a clause, whatever word that is. This is an inherited Indo-European behaviour that applies to all sentence clitics. As has been pointed out already, the difference between un- and -que is that un- forms new lexical items with distinct meaning, whereas -que does not add any new lexical information. A word like unmovable has a part of speech, but fasque has no part of speech as it is not a lexical unit anymore than and religion is a lexical unit. Prefixes and suffixes like un- and -ness operate at the lexical or word-level, while clitics like -que or English -'s operate at the syntactic or phrase/sentence level. —CodeCat 18:34, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  The fact that -que is like a conjunction attached to a word that results in a thing that has no part of speech makes an interesting difference to un- and -ness. However, proverbs such as a picture is worth a thousand words also do not have a part of speech. Per what regulation of CFI do you want to delete fasque? --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:43, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  Per the same regulation that forbids and religion, whichever it is. Probably the idiomaticity requirement. Proverbs are generally idiomatic by nature, as they carry an implication that is not obvious from the literal meaning. I've changed fasque from "noun" to "phrase". —CodeCat 18:48, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  Gee! and religion is not written together. "headache" is written together; if it were always written as "head ache", it would be excluded as a semantic sum of parts. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:24, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  I know next to nothing about Czech, but skimming through the articles at Wikipedia turned up what looks to me like an analogous construction:

  Budeš-li se pilně učit … - If you learn (study) hard …

  Now, I realize that this has a hyphen, but what if it just happened that it was all written together- do you think we should have entries for "words" like "budešli"? Chuck Entz (talk) 08:38, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

  I have no problem including "budeš-li", although hyphen does make a difference. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:37, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  Your comment about proverbs has no bearing to my comment about them: via proverbs, I pointed out that a thing does not need to have a part of speech in order to be included in Wiktionary, whereas you implied that not having a part of speech was a bad thing for inclusion. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:28, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  No, but we generally require phrases to be idiomatic if we want to include them. fasque is not idiomatic. —CodeCat 20:11, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  (after edit conflict) About attachment to any word at all: I looked at Category:Latin adjectives and checked. I cannot find google books:"aconitifoliusque", google books:"acceleratrixque", and google books:"acridentatusque", for starters. You will easily find others by combining the members of the category with "que". --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:36, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  That really doesn't prove anything. Language is flexible and productive and there are many possible combinations of words, many more than anyone has ever uttered. It's not hard at all for any speaker to produce a phrase that nobody has ever said before. So a gap in the attestation of combinations like "aconitifoliusque" doesn't imply that "fasque" is idiomatic. —CodeCat 18:44, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  That merely refutes the claim--made by one of the supporters of deletion--that "... -que, as far as I know, can be attached to any word at all". --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:24, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

By “others” I assume you mean the ones which are vastly more common than acceleratrix, acridentatis and aconitifolius. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 18:59, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

See my post above: the claim that -que can be attached to any word at all has thereby been refuted. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:24, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

All you refuted was that -que has been attached to every word, not that it can be attached to any word. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 19:39, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

What sort of observable occurence or occurrences would refute that "-que can be attached to any word"? --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:41, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Analysis by Latin grammarians. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 19:55, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

It seems you have misunderstood my question. What sort of observable occurence or occurrences could correctly convince Latin grammarians that it is not true that "-que can be attached to any word"? What are the observations that endanger your hypothesis? --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:00, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Dunno. What would convince you that English -'s cannot be attached to any word? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 20:08, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

First, I will tell you what would convince me that someone is an extremely sloppy thinker: it would suffice that he repeatedly makes utterly implausible claims and invents implausible excuses when presented with a refutation.

Second, English -'s cannot be attached to any word, as *"does's", *"blue's", *"called's", and "before's" are not attested word forms. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:13, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

"I don't know who will come to my home, but the person who does's dog will get a nice treat." —CodeCat 20:19, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

You know what convinces me of someone being a sloppy thinker? Excessive use of strawman arguments. By the way: “... become the year before’s sneakers”, The guy who called’s name is Brian. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 20:42, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I admit I was not very careful with my choice of counterexamples to the 's hypothesis. But you get the idea: I do not hold the hypothesis that -'s can be attached to any word irrefutable; I consider the following to be a refutation: "monitored's", "outperforming's", "underwhelming's", "tripled's", "quadrupled's", "reverberate's", "bluest's", and "greenest's". However, my attempt at refutation yields a confirmation of the statement that "'s" is readily attached to a large variety of word forms, whether as a possessive thing or as an ellipsis of "is". --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:32, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

What's your point? Who cares about the difference between "any word at all" and "an unmanageably large number of words." You seem to be spending a lot of time trying to refute side points that aren't necessary for the main arguments to be true. I guess if you can't refute the main points, you're stuck with indiscriminately refuting anything else that moves. I would suggest you stay away from mirrors- you might end up refuting yourself by accident. Chuck Entz (talk) 08:00, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

“... in the queue of the printer being monitored's properties being changed ” ([1]). — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 21:41, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Just because lithium apple is unattestable doesn't make tasty apple or lithium cell SOP. --WikiTiki89 19:35, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I think you mean it doesn't make them idiomatic. But even if -que isn't attachable to absolutely anything in Latin, it's attachable to anything whose semantics allow it to be preceded by the concept 'and'; and if 's is not attachable to as many things as -que is, that's all the more reason not to include words with the -que clitic. We have already decided that 's is far too productive in English for us to want to list every attestable word that takes it. A fortiori, therefore, we should not include every Latin word that takes -que, which is even more productive in Latin than 's is in English. —Angr 22:00, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

• Delete, because it's not considered as a word in Latin, unlike birdlike in English. Unless we add a criterion When words are separated by spaces in the language, anything which is attested and might be mistaken for a word because it's written without spaces may be included, because some readers are likely to look for the meaning. If this criterion is added, a new POS should be chosen. Note that I think that this case does not happen in English, except maybe the case of -'s and other such cases using '. Lmaltier (talk) 21:44, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Dan Polansky, I think you haven't refuted what you think you've refuted. You've refuted that -que is added to any Latin word, not that it can be. For example, you can't prove that I can't poke myself in the eye with a toothpick just because I never have done it. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:08, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

• Delete I'm not particularly a fan of excluding words matched by the regex [a-zA-Z]*, but I think it's pretty clear -que is unbounded in the set of words it can be added to. I'm concerned about the number of times Latin shows up outside Latin, but Latin readers even at the weakest level should not be confused by -que, no?--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:35, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

  It's at the level of Latin 101. English speakers will likely only regularly see it in (deprecated template usage) SENATVS•POPVLVSQUE•ROMANVS. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:32, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

  My main concern is that this deletion is not driven by CFI, and the supporters of the deletion do not acknowledge that. There is no way in which "fasque" is a sum of parts while "redness" is not. Yes, "que" can be attachated to word forms regardless of their part of speech, unlike "ness", but I do not see how that has any bearing to sum-of-partness, nor do I see any other way in which it relates to CFI. This deletion seems to be driven by a wish to exclude a huge number of attested forms for their perfect predictability, and for their having no part of speech. That may be okay, but, again, is not driven by CFI or a tentative universal principle of deletion. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:37, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  One more note. CFI says this about idiomaticify AKA non-sum-of-parts-hood: 'An expression is “idiomatic” if its full meaning cannot be easily derived from the meaning of its separate components.'. The key word is separate. I do not see that "fas" and "que" are more separate in "fasque" than "red" and "ness" are in "redness". --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:42, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  I tried to demonstrate this "separateness" in my post on BP. The two parts of "redness" are more closely bound together as they form a single lexical unit (a single thing with "meaning") while "fasque" is not a single unit and can't be understood as having one meaning, but rather the syntactic composition of two meanings: "religion" and the conjunction "and". I'm not sure how to make this clearer to you but the way I see it, "fasque" is very different from "redness". So I don't see a problem at all in treating it with different rules. —CodeCat 17:48, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  I do not think I understand what you are saying. You seem to be saying that "fasque" is not a "single lexical unit" (whatever that is intended to mean), and therefore "fas" and "que" are separate components despite appearances. As regards my understanding of separateness, "black hole" is a term composed of two separate components, whose meaning cannot be derived from the meanings of the components. I estimate that "black hole" has to be a single lexical unit; does the being lexical unit make "black" and "hole" less separate? By contrast, "headache" is a term consisting of two components that are not separate. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:10, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  Yes, exactly. However, I don't see it as sharply as that. "black hole" is more separate than "headache", but they aren't absolutes. I suppose I could describe it as an "idea", but that is also quite vague. Still you would probably agree that in "and religion" there is not a single "idea". Rather there is the idea "religion" and another (grammatical) meaning that connects "religion" to the rest of the phrase. Think of it this way: You can easily ask "what is a black hole?" or "what is redness?" or "what is religion?" or "what is quickly?" or even "what is to walk?" or "what is and?" but I can't think of any way to answer "what is and religion?"... Not without making reference to its parts individually, anyway. Can you? —CodeCat 18:15, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  Is a proverb a "single lexical item"? Furthermore, is "I'm" a "single lexical item"? --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:25, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  Is they're composed of separate components? --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:27, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  I wouldn't consider a proverb a single lexical item, really, but it does have a meaning that isn't derivable from its parts. Proverbs are normally more idiomatic than something like "fasque". I think a better analogy would be a catchphrase or meme... its meaning is obvious and there is no extra "hidden" meaning like there might be in a proverb. We don't include catchphrases or memes for that reason, as far as I know. I'm not sure why you are asking these questions though. Does my argument no longer hold any value to you if I don't have answers to every problem? —CodeCat 18:33, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ About a proverb, I wanted to know whether you deem it as "single lexical unit", and now I know it.

  But let me ask again about the other guys: Q1: is "they're" a "single lexical unit"? Q2: Is they're composed of separate components? --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:41, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  To me, the only "single" aspect of they're is the pronunciation. Lexically and semantically, it's just they + 're. Same goes for most other English contractions. --WikiTiki89 18:52, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  Yes, I would agree. But as I said there is not just two extremes, separate and not separate. Some combinations may be more separate than one combination, but less separate than another. I think they're is not so different from fasque in that respect, since both are bound at the syntactic or phrase-level rather than the lexical or constituent word/unit level. Think of it this way then... the clitic forms 're and 's (the singular form of 're) can be attached to any noun or nominal phrase, especiall if it ends in a vowel: "the window's open", "the tea's ready" but also "the houses're being built". Is this a reason for including window's as a separate term? I think window's is no different from fasque in this respect, the only difference is in the spelling. Perhaps if the Romans had written fas'que..? —CodeCat 18:59, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  Even more poignant: Q3: does German fürs (für + das) consist of separate components? Q4: does German sowas (so etwas, such a thing) consist of separate components? For more, see Category:German contractions or Category:Dutch contractions. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:04, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  We seem to include contractions involving articles, pronouns, and other particle-like things, but not nouns. I believe this is because the former are small, closed sets with restricted semantic content, but nouns make up a significant proportion of the vocabulary of those languages. Practical considerations do have their place. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:50, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

  I don't think so. I think that the criterion is: is it considered as a word by the language? Contractions such as du or au are considered as words in French, compound nouns are considered as words in German, but fasque is not considered as a word in Latin. If there is a page (or red links) in the wiktionary of the language, it's very probably considered as a word by the language. But I agree with you nonetheless: in some languages, it's possible that they are considered as words or not considered as words for the reasons you mention. Or for the reason that they have no meaning, the meaning being in each part. We should not decide, the tradition of each language must decide. Lmaltier (talk) 09:30, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Similar or related discussions

Talk:satisne (no consensus and hence retention of a term with -ne), Talk:antse (deletion of words with a phrase-final clitic -e that attaches to anything). - -sche (discuss) 15:11, 24 May 2018 (UTC)