Talk:Verbrauchen

Deletion discussion

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion.

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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Verbrauchen

The dative plural of Verbrauch is Verbräuchen. - Master of Contributions (talk) 03:53, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

It's a noun - "(das) Verbrauchen" means "use", "usage", formed from the infinitive [[verbrauchen]]. Restore and reformat. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 02:20, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

As a rule, we don't include substantivized German infinitives here, unless they happen to be the usual noun form. But that's not the case here; the usual noun for "use, usage" is Verbrauch itself. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:56, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Why don't we include them if they're includable? —CodeCat 17:32, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Because they'd be redundant to the lower-case version. Capitalizing a noun in German is as automatic as capitalizing a word at the beginning of the sentence, so it makes no more sense to have separate entries for stehen and Stehen (which has all the same meanings stehen does, just used substantivally) than it does to have separate entries for horses and Horses. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:27, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Adjectives can also be used substantivally, and when they are, they're capitalized (e.g. alles Gute, du bist kein Guter, mit etwas Gutem, etc.) but it would be redundant to have separate entries for capitalized Gute, Guter, Gutem etc. The exception is substantivized adjectives with truly nominal meanings, like Obdachloser and Abgeordneter. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:30, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

I don't see any rule about excluding nominalised verbs or adjectives. They are, admittedly, predictable and any verb can be nominalised the same way - rauchen - "to smoke", Rauchen - "smoking", etc. but we don't exclude words or forms that are predictable in other languages. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 21:30, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

We try to. We actually exclude English words capitalized only in sentence-initial position. We exclude taxonomic species name abbreviations except in special circumstances in which the meaning is not obvious. We exclude English phrases that are hyphenated only for style reasons. We should exclude having entries for many more. Whether such variants are even worthwhile content as alternative forms, with or without hard redirects, is an open question to me. If our search engine can present the main form flawlessly at or near the top of a search list, why bother adding the entry. If they aren't worth systematically adding, then to maintain consistency of our user interface (thereby educating our users) we should eliminate such variations systematically. DCDuring TALK 14:25, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

I understand what you mean but this is not the same thing. Nouns and verbs in German behave differently (as expected). Capitalised "Verbrauchen" is not just an alternative form "verbrauchen", it's a neuter noun and "verbrauchen" is a verb. The nominalised verbs are predictable but they have different grammar and usage, not just capitalisation. Compare [[Denken]] and [[denken]]. I don't see it different from English -ing forms, which are predictable but we keep them. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 21:27, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

@Atitarev I was using as a rule to mean "in general"; I didn't mean we had an actual rule. The difference between German capitalized infinitives and English -ing forms is that -ing forms have an actual suffix on them, while capitalized infinitives are no different form lower-case infinitives except in their capitalization. The thing is, virtually any part of speech can be treated as a noun in German, and is capitalized when it is so treated. If we start adding separate entries for all these capitalized forms, we will double the number of German entries while not actually adding any value, because the new capitalized entries won't tell us anything the old lower-case entries didn't. IMO we shouldn't have Denken, which doesn't mean "thought(s)" as the entry says (that's Gedanke(n)), but merely "the act of thinking". —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:52, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

While I agree that there will be duplication and (possibly) little value for people who are comfortable with basics of the German grammar but I still don't think it's fair to delete such entries or not allowing others to create them. The efforts of making such entries could be a job for a bot, not for a human editor. Nominalised adjectives still behave like adjectives (so "Gutes" may not need an entry, if we have gut) but nominalised verbs behave like nouns, e.g. "des Denkens" is the genitive definite form of "das Denken" and nouns should have declension table, verbs - conjugation tables. I don't see any problem with increasing the number of German noun by simply adding capitalised verbs with a declension table. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:04, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

But nominalized adjectives don't behave like adjectives; if they did, they wouldn't be capitalized. The same goes for nominalized prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and so on. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 22:24, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

Nominalized adjectives behave like adjectives in most cases as per declension.

Pls compare with the Dutch denken, which has both verb and noun sections, which don't even differ in capitalisation. We need a clearer policy on German (and Dutch, etc.) nominalised entries. I favour wider inclusion of nouns, whether they are predictable or not, derived from verbs, etc. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:35, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

I feel certain we had a discussion about this somewhere before; can anyone find it? One point I recall being made is that nominalized verbs inflect as nouns — one speaks of something happening während des Schwimmens, während des Denkens, etc. - -sche (discuss) 22:48, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

That's my point too. We can't assume users will know the grammar of the noun Schwimmen if they know the verb schwimmen. Sorry, I don't know where that discussion is. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:52, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

Maybe this one, Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2012/July#German nominalized infinitives? -- Curious (talk) 21:16, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

That's the one; thanks for finding it! :) - -sche (discuss) 21:59, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

So, please restore as per Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2012/July#German nominalized infinitives (thanks Curious for finding it). --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:18, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

The original request (pertaining to the dative) seems to have been resolved, and there's no consensus to delete (and there seems to be a consensus, especially considering the previous discussion, to keep) the entry as it stands now. - -sche (discuss) 05:14, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Just wondering, but would the hypothetical English cognate to this be "forbrook" if it actually had a cognate in English? Tharthan (talk) 18:05, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

• Presumably. German ver- is cognate with English for-, and German brauchen is cognate with English brook. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:34, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

• Striking the heading; RFD deleted on dative plural while RFD kept on nominalized verb infinitive. --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:36, 1 February 2015 (UTC)