Talk:ops

RFV discussion: June 2019–April 2021

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

---

ops

An IP editor insists on removing it as "unattestable". — surjection ⟨?⟩ 13:32, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

According to L&S the nominative singular is unattested. It's not in my Later Latin (to AD600) glossary either. DCDuring (talk) 14:51, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

The IP may know Latin (just FYI the IP address belongs is a US school district), but they don't know how Wiktionary Latin entries are organized: the lemma is supposed to be at the nominative singular, and the other forms are soft redirects to the lemma. If we delete the lemma, the definitions, etymology and inflection tables go with it, just leaving redlinks to a non-existent lemma in the form-of entries. IIRC, we deal with this by saying somewhere in the lemma entry that the nominative singular itself isn't attested. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:48, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Curiously enough, the term is also the name of the earth goddess Ops, and also when used as her name it is unattested in the nominative or vocative; even where you would expect this according to the standard grammatical rules, the oblique case “Opis” is substituted. This is rather peculiar. Was there a tabu on the term “ops”? And how can we be sure that the nominative is not actually “opis” (cf. “apis” – “apis” – “apī” – ...)?  --Lambiam 20:16, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

There's inops, possibly virops, Ops (besides Opis). But correctly it would still be *ops or opis (genitive, nominative not attested) with a "--" for the nominative in the inflection table. --Pitza Guy (talk) 16:17, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Should terms like these be moved to the Reconstruction namespace? That way we could keep the information, and still link to it from other entries, but we avoid potential errors of speculation about lemmata. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 15:10, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

Is the entire term unattested, or just the nominative singular? What form(s) are attested? —Mahāgaja · talk 16:44, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

From what I gathered, some non-lemma forms are attested. I meant that the lemma should be moved to a Reconstruction namespace, not the attested forms. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 22:06, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

The lexeme is attested (the usage note mentions where). If it's clear what the lemma form would be, we typically put content there even if the cites are for inflected forms. If the nominative can only be ops, the entry is fine, with its note that the nominative is not attested. But if the nominative could be opis, that complicates things. Are the attestations of Opis where a nominative would be expected, which Lambiam mentions, unambiguously in an oblique case (with adjectives also inflected in that case)? A cursory search finds at least one work, in a Festschrift for Henry Hoenigswald, which says ops is merely "implied by the nom. sing. Opis", which seems to accept that Opis is the nominative of the uppercase word. Why do some scholars take the nominative of lowercase opi to be ops? Have any taken it to be opis? Since opis is an inflected form, anyone who searches for it will reach the content (on ops), so we could just add a usage note that it's unclear whether the nominative is ops or opis... - -sche (discuss) 00:24, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• The proper name is attested here and there as ops, though also as opis and opes. There's no possibility of a personal name's nominative/vocative not being in use. It's really a mute point whether the ops in the grammarians' glosses stands for a proper name or a common noun - it was a common noun used as a name (cf. Terra in the linked passage that the editors didn't even bother capitalising). Unlike vēnus, this one passes RFD. Brutal Russian (talk) 03:28, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

  OK, I'll strike this as resolved, and see you already removed the RFV tag. I think the usage notes (and context label) now adequately explain which forms are attested and why this is taken to be the nominative even if it wasn't in use for the common noun (namely, that it was in use for the proper noun). It is curious that multiply-weird forms like opid exist and that the nominative was so often avoided (or, for the name, variable), it does make me wonder—like Lambiam said—whether there was some kind of superstition against saying the word "normally" or uncertainty over what the forms of the word were. - -sche (discuss) 17:46, 6 April 2021 (UTC)