Talk:roast beef

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roast beef

Sum of parts? See also roast chicken, roast turkey, roast dinner, roast potato, roast pigeon, etc. ---> Tooironic 10:24, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Both roast beef and deep sleep (above) have Swedish (and probably also German) translations that are compounds and definitely distinct from the sum of parts, e.g. Swedish rostbiff is not the same as rostad biff (roasted beef), and djupsömn is not the same as djup sömn. I'm not aware of any similar compounds for the other dishes, e.g. roast turkey. I'm not an expert in either of these field (I eat and sleep, but not professionally). --LA2 12:40, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

French rosbif, directly from the English. Re: Tooironic I would definitely want to keep roast dinner as an idiom, as for this, well, I'm thinking. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:07, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

According to the definition though, it's simply beef which is roasted. And what do the translations have to do with the idiomaticity of the word? ---> Tooironic 01:52, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

It's not a proof, but it's an important clue: French people who have borrowed the word were considering it as a set phrase, as an element of the vocabulary of the English language. Lmaltier 06:59, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

• Keep, I think. Ƿidsiþ 13:19, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

• Apply the fried egg test. Is any roasted beef roast beef? According to this, roast beef is a specific cut, but that is weak evidence. - -sche 03:11, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

• I find a large number of hits for roastbeef — presumably, then, wt:COALMINE applies. — Pingku^dimmi 04:39, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

• I've fleshed out the entry a little. — Pingku^dimmi 02:11, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
• Keep it. --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:50, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Delete Only concept-oriented WordNet among OneLook dictionaries has this, if WordNet can truly be called a dictionary. (deprecated template usage) Roast and (deprecated template usage) beef can be freely replaces by other forms of preparation and types of food.

All common compounds are likely to have some minimal apparent usage of a closed form. It is not at all hard to consider it a misspelling. (Is "coalmine" a bad example of the valid principle underlying WT:COALMINE?) At COCA "roast beef" appears 385 times and "roastbeef" not at all.

The multiple senses are basically inherited metonymously from "beef" which can refer to a slice of meet, a serving of meat, a menu item or recipe, a cut of meat, etc. DCDuring TALK 20:01, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

If a compound has a closed form, that indicates that someone thinks of it as a word. The difference between misspelling and an alternate spelling can be complex, but I thought the vote behind WT:COALMINE was to add these phrases when we do have an entry for the closed form, and we do, for both coalmine and roastbeef.--Prosfilaes 21:48, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not arguing about the general principle, only about the interpretation that a very low frequency of closed compound spellings is sufficient support for the application of the principle. "Coalmine" appears 6 times in COCA vs 308 instances of "coal mine". "Roastbeef" appears 0 times in COCA vs 368 instances of "roast beef". What are numbers from other corpora that suggest that the spelling "roastbeef" is not vanishingly rare? Or is this really about translation targets? DCDuring TALK 00:09, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't think frequency matters; if we have roastbeef, we should have roast beef. It's not vanishingly rare enough not to be citable.--Prosfilaes 01:20, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Under the rule, one interpretation is that it doesn't matter. IMHO, it should. I don't know what frequency is sufficient to soften my heart. Anything greater than 2% seems included by the numbers in WT:COALMINE. The stated rationale for the COALMINE vote would have been satisfied by simply providing usage statistics for the closed and (nonidiomatic) open compounds, not that such user considerations necessarily bore on most people's actual motives. DCDuring TALK 01:47, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

As an example, I could attest homehealth (really). Does that mean that we should have home health? A low relative frequency criterion of, say, one percent would probably exclude this, but an interpretation of WT:COALMINE that said mere attestation of the closed compound was the criterion would not exclude this. I did not have to think very hard to find this. It was the third example I tried. DCDuring TALK 02:51, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Keep. An alternative form is roastbeef. It's a word, a name for a dish and has penetrated a few languages in this form, e.g. German, Russian, Japanese, Korean: - Roastbeef, ростбиф (róstbif), ローストビーフ (rōsutobīfu), 로스트비프 (roseuteubipeu). --Anatoli 22:28, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

It also seems strange that people want to delete something culturally important. Roast beef seems an important part of Anglophone countries, at least England. In Russia, when they talk about the English cuisine, roast beef and steak are first things that come to mind. I suggest we keep dishes, anyway but perhaps the CFI should have a clear definition of what we keep, not things like roast potatoes or pickled gherkins. --Anatoli 22:58, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

• Keep per WT:COALMINE. --Dan Polansky 15:54, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

kept -- Prince Kassad 19:14, 24 March 2011 (UTC)