Talk:vorkantscher

Lemma form

Vorkantscher is not the way a German-speaker would cite the word. The basic form of this is vorkantsch. Now, I did read the word-of-the-day nominations page[[1]]. See, it is indeed true that the form vorkantsch probably rarely ever occurs in actual usage. But (1.) it might occur: Sein Denken ist noch vorkantsch. ("His thinking is pre-Kantian.") This would be a sentence that is not contrary to my personal feel for language. And even if we assume vorkantsch doesn't exist in practice, (2.) it still remains the basic form, i.e. the form in which it would be cited. One would never say das Adjektiv "vorkantscher" but only das Adjektiv "vorkantsch".

• I searched for uninflected vorkantsch but could not find any evidence that it is ever used predicatively. That's why I recommended using vorkantscher as the lemma form. If you can show evidence of predicative or even adverbial vorkantsch in use in a durably archived source, I'll be happy to move this to that lemma. But we shouldn't use hypothetical forms as our lemmas. That's what we do with ordinal numbers and superlatives, which also don't have predicative forms: we don't have entries for *neunt or *größt but for neunte and größten. (I don't agree with those particular lemmas—they ought to be neunter and größter—but the point is we don't list the nonexistent predicative forms.) —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:40, 20 January 2014 (UTC)