Talk:great-great-great-grandmother

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great-great-great-grandmother

You can put as many iterations of great- in front as you want, and create words like great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother - where are we going to stop? Note that great-great-great-grandfather failed RFD in 2007. -- Liliana • 16:17, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I am inclined to agree with you: delete; it would create a disaster. On the other hand, however, I have used great-great-great-grandmother myself many times, which leads me to believe that this (3 great-'s) might just be the point at which we would want to stop it. I cannot recall ever (seriously) going beyond 3. Leasnam (talk) 16:22, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Surpirsingly, I am finding cites for both (3- and 4-). Well, perhaps we should allow as many as can be verified by 3 cites? They *are* being used apparently Leasnam (talk) 16:38, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Merge into great-grandmother with a usage note indicating that basically an unlimited number of instances of "great" can be prepended to the term, each indicating one further generation of ancestry. Add a sense to great for "indicating an additional generation of ancestry beyond two generations", as this is also used for relations like great-great-granduncles and great-great-grandchildren. As to Leasnam's proposition, consider:

• 2007, Fritz Allhoff, Nanoethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Nanotechnology, page 105:

  Maybe one afternoon a thousand years ago in some Swiss village, a young woman decided to go for a stroll to the lake. There she met a lad, and later they married and had children. Thus she became the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great -great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of Adolf Hitler.

That's 38 greats, which I suppose was the author's estimate of a thousand years of generations. It is trivially easy to find CFI-worthy examples of seven, eight, nine, or ten "greats", but after the first one they seem to me to become sum-of-parts. bd2412 T 18:54, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

I note that we have a separate entry for great- for this sense; however, I also note plenty of sources using an unhyphenated series of the word, with and without commas in between. bd2412 T 19:11, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Merge/redirect per bd. - -sche (discuss) 19:00, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Merge / redirect per bd. I have a famous ancestor from about 500 years ago, and I normally describe him as my "ten greats grandfather". Not really an official title, but it does illustrate that after about 4 greats it becomes rather pointless. No-one is actually counting them.--Dmol (talk) 22:15, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Just for fun I did a little research and found that urururururururgroßmutter is attested. Obviously the same stricture should apply to German as to English in this regard, and to any other language which repeats a prefix to indicate generationality. bd2412 T 23:52, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I was reading something about someone finding letters from their Ururururururopa to their Ururururururoma the other day (give or take a few "ur"s; I didn't commit the number to memory)... - -sche (discuss) 03:54, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

There being no objection to the proposed merge and redirect, I plan to proceed by:

1. Redirecting this title to great-grandmother.
2. Placing a usage note at great-grandmother to indicate that any additional instances of "great-" can be prepended to the term, each indicating one further generation of ancestry; and that for large numbers of generations a number can be substituted, for example, "four greats grandmother" or "four-times-great-grandmother".
3. Also redirecting variations including larger common numbers of "greats" ("my great great great great great great great great grandmother", which is eight "greats", gets five Google Books hits, which is probably the limit of reason), with or without hyphens, to great-grandmother.
4. Doing the same for other relationships for which this pattern applies (great-great-grandfathers, great-great-grandsons, great-great-grandchildren, etc.).
5. Eventually getting around to doing this for other languages, where applicable (for example, with ur- in German, ta- in Portuguese, and пра- in Russian).

If any person here can show cause why this plan should not be implemented, speak now or forever hold your peace. bd2412 T 22:39, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

• I see, by the way, that we already have great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. bd2412 T 23:14, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Striking as merged, since that is now done, per this discussion. I am assembling citations pages for each of the great-grandsomethings with collections of cites showing use with up to ten "greats" (if citations can be found for that many), and making redirects accordingly. bd2412 T 14:19, 30 June 2013 (UTC)