Talk:wer

Bad example

"Kannst du mir mal den Dings rübergeben? – Wen? "

For one thing, this is certainly not colloquial German as the article claims. It may be regional dialect (Ruhrpott/ western region most likely) to call something "den Dings" (masculin!), but certainly not general colloquial language.

Much worse, however, is the "Wen?". I cannot imagine anyone in any region replying to such a question by asking "Wen". It would always be "Was". "Wen" is for persons only. This is not "colloquial", it's just plain wrong and absolutely unidiomatic. --217.239.14.250 21:12, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

antonym

if "wer" is male, what is the female version? Would like to see listed. Olivia comet (talk) 02:09, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

RFM discussion: February 2021

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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wer, were

J3133 (talk) 04:46, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

The verb were makes it difficult to ascertain the commonness of the two forms, but Ngram Viewer has "wers" being more common than "weres". Merriam-Webster and Century make "wer" the canonical form (as do other dictionaries' etymologies for "werewolf" when they say it's equivalent to "wer man + wolf"), and MW also says "were" is less common, so I considered making "wer" the main entry. However, while "wer" may have been most common historically, it seems "were" is the main spelling which still exists, in two ways: it is the main spelling found in spaced compounds like were wolf and were gild where it looks like or functions as a separate word, and it is the spelling used for the modern sense "any shiftshifter". In the Tea Room we recently discussed what to do when some senses are (present tense!) more common in one spelling while others are more common in another, and apparently we're going to keep splitting them between entries, as at egoism vs egotism and blacksnake vs black snake; however, in this case, the senses that were historically more commonly spelled "wer" are obsolete, so I tentatively think it may be better to drag them over to what is now the main spelling so they're all in one place. This assumes the senses are attested in both spellings; if they are not, then the unattested spelling wouldn't even merit an {{alt form of}} entry for the unattested sense and we have to crosslink in a more creative way (compare besague / besagew). - -sche (discuss) 20:26, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

But then again, more likely "were" = "any shapeshifter" should be considered a back-formation from werewolf, werecat, etc — and so a separate etymology and word — and the obsolete senses should be on wer... hmm... - -sche (discuss) 21:23, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I've reversed course and gone with my initial instinct to make wer the lemma for the "man" and "fine" senses, since "shapeshifter" has a different etymology. - -sche (discuss) 23:19, 13 February 2021 (UTC)