Talk:pohjois-
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Finnish is an agglutinative language and often forms compounds by putting words together. Some words are changed during this process by converting them from the nominative singular form into their inflectional stem. This includes words ending with -nen, which becomes -s- when an ending is attached (see the declension of pohjoinen) or when the word is used in a compound. This process is completely regular and predictable, so every Finnish word ending in -nen automatically has this stem form with -s-. For that reason, it seems wrong to treat this as a prefix (since there is Category:Finnish words prefixed with pohjois-), this is just the combining form of a word. It's the same as how Russian сам (sam) becomes само- (samo-) in a compound, like in само-вар (samo-var), and Greek and Latin also have such combining forms of most words. —CodeCat 14:57, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
- Well, the Institute for the Languages of Finland, also known as KOTUS, lists pohjois- in their wordlist, which we have copied in Wiktionary as Finnish index. They list it as prefix. They don't list every word formed this way, e.g. varsinais- (from varsinainen) is not included, although it is used in some place names, see Varsinais-Suomi. I also think the commonness of this form speaks for keeping it. A simple Google search for "pohjois-" gets 27.6 M results, which - to be honest - includes millions of inflected forms of pohjoinen (“northern”). Further, the process of forming these prefixes/attributive modifiers is regular but not perfectly predictable. Notable exceptions include the colours sininen (“blue”) and punainen (“red”) which become sini- and puna-. I would say majority of adjectives cannot be transformed this way. I have never heard common adjectives such as tavallinen (“common, ordinary”) modified to tavallis- whereas erikoinen (“special”) becomes erikois- which, by the way, is included in KOTUS wordlist. --Hekaheka (talk) 07:50, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
- sini and puna are distinct words, so you can't really treat them as combining forms of sininen and punainen. The argument that "you've never heard some adjectives modified this way" seems a bit moot. Of course not every word actually does appear in compounds, but that doesn't automatically make the remainder into prefixes. What I would find more convincing is if the prefixed/combining form had a different meaning from the base word, but as far as I can see pohjois- means the same as pohjoinen, so I don't see any way it could be distinguished from the compounding form of pohjoinen. I would agree with keeping it, though, if we changed the definition into something like "combining form of" and allowed such entries for all other -nen words. But that would be so that people don't get stuck when they see a term like Pohjois-Irlanti and can't find "pohjois" anywhere. Then again, would they know whether to look for pohjois- or pohjois? —CodeCat 12:59, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Kept, no consensus to delete. bd2412 T 13:46, 28 April 2014 (UTC)