User talk:Msh210/Archive/descendants of inflections

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Latest comment: 14 years ago by Msh210 in topic parentis
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This page is an archive of old discussion. Please don't edit this page. If you wish to communicate with me (msh210), you can do so at User talk:Msh210. Thanks!

parentis

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The descendants should be listed on the lemma page. there are many, many good reasons to prefer the lemma for descendants rather than distributing them to form pages. For example, Latin-derived proverbs and expressions should key from the lemma, and not from whatever form happened to be used. Likewise, many Romance language nouns actually derive from the ablative form rather than the nominative, but hiding them on the ablative form page would not serve our users. --EncycloPetey 22:53, 22 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

I agree with you that it should be listed at the main entry, but think it should be listed at the form also. My reasoning is twofold: (a) someone coming across the English phrase may want to know what it means and look up its parts instead of the whole, and (b) well, it is a descendant of parentis isn't it?​—msh210 22:57, 22 December 2009 (UTC)Reply
That leads to much needless duplication of content in little-traversed pages. Do we then list facilis descensus Averno as a derived term from Averno as well as Avernus? Is keep up with the Joneses to be listed as derived from Joneses? The page for parentis is merely a placeholder for a form; it is not a word in its own right but a form of a word. It is the lemma page that we use to stand in for the whole word (in all its forms), and many people have repeatedly pointed out that it is links between lemmata that are desirabel and informative, not links to/from non-lemmata. --EncycloPetey 23:24, 22 December 2009 (UTC)Reply
In answer to your two questions, yes and yes, IMO. Obviously you differ; and you say many others do, too. WF seems to agree with me (he added the phrase to [[Joneses]]), but I'm not sure if I should cite that as support  :-) .​—msh210 23:29, 22 December 2009 (UTC)Reply