Talk:Atemweg

RFD discussion: June–July 2015

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Atemweg

According to the Duden [1], this is a plurale tantum (plural Atemwege = "respiratory system/tract"). Although there are several thousand Google hits for the singular, lots of them are misspellings, parts of compound words (in which case "Atemweg-" is indeed used, e.g. in Atemwegserkrankung = Erkrankung der Atemwege), or have a non-idiomatic sense other than respiratory tract. --Zeitlupe (talk) 12:28, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

These uses seem mostly legit, albeit certainly fewer in number than the plural. Usage note? -- Visviva (talk) 16:11, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

IMO they have no other meaning than "way of the breath", which is non-idiomatic and wouldn't qualify for an English entry. I am all for having less strict inclusion rules for German compound words (especially if they use an infix like -s- or -es-). But if we allow every German compound, then we have a combinatorial explosion of entries because in German, you can always build new words "foobar", which mean only "bar of foo". --Zeitlupe (talk) 16:39, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

@Zeitlupe:
1. duden isn't always correct. (Other sides/dictionaries like [www.dwds.de/?qu=Atemweg] sometimes say something different than duden and sometimes there are enough example like at [zeno.org/Zeno/0/Suche?q=Atemweg&k=Bibliothek] or google book search which show that duden is incomplete, incorrect or prescriptive).
2. German compounds aren't always "bar of foo", it can also be "bar for foo" etc. For example compare "Schweineschnitzel" (Schnitzel made out of a pig) and "Kinderschnitzel" (Schnitzel made for kids - not: Schnitzel made out of kids). So a non-native most likely could think that "Atemweg" might mean "a way to breath" (like fast or slow breathing) instead of "way of the breath" -91.63.247.5 13:35, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

• Keep: the components of "Atemweg" are not considered to be separate for the application of WT:CFI#Idiomaticity, so the term is not sum of parts for the purpose of CFI. Whether they are separate or not depends on whether they are separated by a space or a hyphen. See also a discussion at Talk:Zirkusschule. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:40, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

No consensus to delete. bd2412 T 17:29, 23 July 2015 (UTC)