Wiktionary talk:About Lower Sorbian

{{dsb-noun}}

Discussion moved from Wiktionary:Grease pit/2013/January#Lower Sorbian noun template.

Could someone with mad template-writing skillz please edit {{dsb-noun}} so that:

1. the parameters for dual and plural are optional, named parameters (dual= and pl= or the like) rather than obligatory parameters 2 and 3
2. it includes optional named parameters for the genitive (gen=), diminutive (dim=), and feminine/masculine equivalent (f=, m=)
3. when all five parameters are specified, they occur in the order "genitive, dual, plural; diminutive; feminine/masculine"

Thanks! —Angr 13:34, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm on it. —Ruakh_TALK 19:59, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

 Done. And I've updated the existing entries using this template. (Note: I may continue to tweak the guts of the template, but its externally-visible behavior is done, unless you have any comments or I discover a bug.) —Ruakh_TALK 21:41, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, one bug is that nouns marked as feminine are displayed as masculine, see [1]. Also, could you make it possible for plurals to be marked as just plural without any other gender? Sorbian doesn't distinguish gender in the dual and plural, so pluralia tantum like wiki aren't identifiable as masculine, feminine or neuter. They're just plural. —Angr 21:54, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Re: "nouns marked as feminine are displayed as masculine": Sorry, typo, fixed now.   Re: "Sorbian doesn't distinguish gender in the dual and plural": In that respect, I was just preserving the existing behavior. Are you saying that the valid values of the gender are actually just m, f, n, d, and p? (And in the latter two cases, are there corresponding categories that should be added?) —Ruakh_TALK 23:13, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

As long as the template has the flexibility to allow something like |f|g2=p so that the plural forms of feminine countable nouns can be marked as such, then yes, m f n d p should be enough. Using {{plurale tantum}} already puts those into Category:Lower Sorbian pluralia tantum, so the template doesn't need to do that separately. And AFAIK Sorbian doesn't have any dualia tantum. Anyway, thanks for your help!!! —Angr 15:30, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Re: "As long as the template has the flexibility to allow something like |f|g2=p so that the plural forms of feminine countable nouns can be marked as such": Well, it doesn't, so I guess that invalidates the rest of your comment. But why would you want that, anyway? If it's the plural form of a regular countable noun, then doesn't {{dsb-noun}} belong at the lemma? —Ruakh_TALK 16:34, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, you're right, it does. Never mind. —Angr 17:24, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

So, what's the conclusion? Should the legal values really just be m, f, and n? —Ruakh_TALK 18:47, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

And p for pluralia tantum like wiki and knigły. — This unsigned comment was added by Angr (talk • contribs) at 18:55, 27 January 2013‎ (UTC).

 Done. —Ruakh_TALK 20:07, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Great! Thanks for all your help, Ruakh! —Angr 20:47, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome! —Ruakh_TALK 21:43, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Oh, one more thing just occurred to me. Maybe for masculine nouns it would be good to indicate whether they're animate or inanimate. Do we do that for other Slavic languages? —Angr 15:34, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

No idea. —Ruakh_TALK 16:34, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I recently added it for Slovene, by allowing "ma" for masculine animate, "mi" for masculine inanimate, and "m" for unknown animacy (adds the entry to a cleanup category). Compare človek and glas. Slovene only distinguishes animacy in masculine singular though, it may be different for Lower Sorbian. And I think Polish distinguishes two kinds of animacy, so that may also apply here. —CodeCat 17:43, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Lower Sorbian (don't know about Upper) distinguishes animacy in all three numbers of the masculine, though in the plural it seems to be optional in some way I don't quite understand. —Angr 18:21, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I've looked at some random samples of Russian and Polish masculine nouns, and neither of them mentions animacy in the headword line, so I guess Lower Sorbian doesn't need to either. —Angr 18:55, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Animacy is part of the gender, though. It affects more than just the declension of a noun, it also affects adjectives that are used with it. So you need to know whether something is animate if you want to use it within a sentence. —CodeCat 21:47, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Animacy is reflected in the declension tables, though. If you want to know if a given noun is animate, just look in the declension table and see if the accusative singular has the same form as the nominative or as the genitive. Anyway, animacy in Lower Sorbian is pretty straightforward: nouns referring to human beings and animals are animate, everything else is inanimate. —Angr 22:47, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

FWIW, I tend to agree with CodeCat — since animacy affects not just declension but also agreement, it seems unhelpful to require readers to piece it together the definitions and/or the declension table — but I don't feel strongly about it. (How do other dictionaries do it?) —Ruakh_TALK 04:01, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Neither my Lower Sorbian–German dictionary nor my German–Lower Sorbian dictionary (Starosta 1999 and Jannasch 1990 from the Sources section of this page, respectively) indicates which nouns are animate and which aren't. All I have to go on is the statement in the grammar books that masculine nouns referring to humans and animals are animate and everything else isn't. I'm not even sure how far down the Animalia family tree "animals" is understood to go. Are things like barnacles, coral, and sponges animate? Biologically they're animals but to the average observer they don't seem very animated. And of course the Sorbs are a landlocked people, so it's not like they're going to be talking about these sea critters much anyway. And I recently added a declension table to policaj, which apparently means not "a policeman" but rather "the police" – is that animate or not? I don't know, and the dictionaries don't say. In such cases, I feel bad enough about committing myself to an animacy status when adding the declension table; I'd feel worse if the headword line actually said "m animate" in black and white on the basis of a mere guess on my part. —Angr 14:24, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

And a second thing just occurred to me: it needs a sort= parameter since Lower Sorbian treats ó and o as the same letter for sorting purposes. Thanks! —Angr 16:00, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

 Done. Though really I've only done half of it: I've modified the template to support sort=. The other half is to devise a sort-key system: a mapping from pagenames to sort-keys that results in the necessary order. Unfortunately, this will be a pain; as far as I can tell, Lower Sorbian puts <ć> after <č>, which is the opposite of Unicode order, so there's probably no sort-key mapping that will both (1) work properly and (2) be non-confusing to humans. (Scribunto will solve this problem by letting us compute the sort-key programmatically, but in the meantime, we'll need humans to do it.) —Ruakh_TALK 16:47, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, at this point I'm content to manually tell it to treat ó as o and leave the rest of the diacritics alone. In addition to putting ć ś ź after č š ž respectively, the really perverse thing Lower Sorbian does is put regular l after ł, which I'm always forgetting when I want to look a word up in the dictionary. The whole sorting order is at w:Sorbian alphabet, including Upper Sorbian (which puts ch after h!). —Angr 17:32, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Speaking of mad skillz, who wants to take a look at #Template:ti-noun for me? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:08, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Lower Sorbian pluralia tantum

I think there should be a template or at least a parameter for Lower Sorbian pluralia tantum. Any suggestions? --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 06:25, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Do you mean an inflection template or a headword-line template? An inflection template or parameter would definitely be good; also one for uncountable nouns / singularia tantum. —Angr 10:03, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Both, I think. For {{dsb-noun}}, how about m-p or f-p? Any options for the declension templates? --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 10:21, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

knigły? --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 10:26, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Done, please check knigły and źurja. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 10:53, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

As I mentioned at Template talk:dsb-noun, plural nouns don't have any sort of explicit gender marking (for example in agreement with adjectives or pronouns, all of which are gender-neutral in the plural), so there's no need for marking pluralia tantum m-p, f-p, or n-p. They're just plural. —Angr 11:18, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

You said this before. knigły and źurja have no marking other than "p". --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 11:34, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes; this time I was saying it for Lo Ximiendo's benefit, in case she didn't see it at Template talk:dsb-noun. I don't know if that's on her watchlist. —Angr 11:49, 1 June 2013 (UTC)