Template talk:en-proper noun

Uncountable?

Hmm. How can a proper noun be uncountable? If it's a proper noun, isn't it basically the name of something? There's either one or more than one of those things, and in both cases that's countable. Uncountable nouns are things like cash (as in money). It doesn't make sense to talk about "two cashes" or "a cash". But one could talk about "two Americas" (as Kerry and Edwards did, for example) or "an America" (e.g., "That's not an America I'd like to live in."). I bring this up not just to point out that the example on this page is bad; I don't think an uncountable proper noun is even possible. Am I wrong? (Plus, this is the second time in a few days that I've come across an English noun described in Wiktionary as having an uncountable sense when it really doesn't. Thought I would give a heads-up here so people could help to look for them.) - dcljr 17:19, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Others - kept

Kept. See archived discussion of 11 2006. 12:47, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Response

There are uncountable proper nouns. "English" can be a noun meaning "English language." In this case, one could say, "I have poor English," and one would be using it as an uncountable noun.

That's not a proper noun. You are not saying "I have poor English language", you are saying "I have poor English grammar." or "I have poor knowledge of English.". When you are using English to mean the "English language" it is countable. That count is "one". --EncycloPetey 00:24, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Parameters

A couple parameter questions:

• Why does this template allow plurals? Plurals created from proper nouns are common nouns so they would use {{en-noun}} instead of this template (that way they get categorized correctly). (deprecated template usage) America and (deprecated template usage) Americas are the only minor exception I know of to this (and they aren't one-to-one singular/plural).
  • And if there's no plural, we shouldn't really take uncountable either.
• Some proper nouns generally take the definite article (e.g. the U.S.). Is there someway we could fit that into this template so it appears on the inflection line?

Cheers. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 10:18, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

plural classes

This template doesn't add the various plural classes to the plural link the way template:en-noun does. Could someone make a change to make it more in line with en-noun? CyberSkull 02:03, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I'll add pl= to be the same as {{{1}}}. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:39, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, that never happened. See wiktionary entry for Unix. pl=Unices doesn't show on the page. 206.205.20.130 20:29, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Request edit (space formatting)

A space is in the wrong place. The template renders as:

Obama ( plural Obamas)

A space should be removed before "plural" from --> ''plural'' <!-- and added after [[uncountable]];

Examples:

Obama (plural Obamas)

Superman (plural Supermen)

—Pengo (talk) 21:35, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Done. Keφr 21:44, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, but looks like there's a stray ' now before plural now. I can't spot where it's coming from. Contrived example:

Hemmingway (plural en-proper nouns or -)

renders like:

Hemmingway (countable and uncountable;'plural Hemmingways)

—Pengo (talk) 23:06, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks. —Pengo (talk) 05:23, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

"pos=" parameter

According to TemplateTiger, this was the only instance of the "pos=" parameter, and it was supposed to be "head=". The name "pos=" implies that the parameter should be used to specify the word's part of speech, like in the linking templates (foobar (noun)), but that's obviously not a sensible thing to do in a part-of-speech headword-line template. Can the parameter be removed? I don't see a comparable parameter in {{en-noun}}. - -sche (discuss) 19:23, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Before we standardised on head=, many templates had different names for the parameter that specifies the headword display. For {{en-noun}}, it was originally sg= to stand for singular, while for {{en-adj}} it was pos= to stand for positive degree. At some point someone must have gotten the interpretation of those names wrong and started using pos= for other things as well... —CodeCat 19:26, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Plural noun

@Benwing2: can this template be updated to include the functionality of {{en-plural noun}}? See Magi which is both a proper noun and a plurale tantum. — SGconlaw (talk) 15:32, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

Or Dioscuri. – Jberkel 10:19, 21 August 2021 (UTC)