Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2013 January 31

Category:Greek loanwords (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (XfD|restore)

The deleted category was one of a series of many categories by language and a sub-category of Category:Indo-European_loanwords (it also includes Celtic, Germanic, Hindi, Iranian, Latin, Romance, Romani, Slavic and Urdu loanwords) which is a sub-category of the parent Category:Loanwords. The category was wrongly nominated for deletion, considering that it had valid categorization and was a significant part of a large series. (note: I took this to requests for undeletion but they redirect me here.Wikipedia:Requests_for_undeletion#Category:Greek_loanwords) Macedonian (talk) 10:25, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• I've edited the nomination statement because the links weren't working for me. I have not changed any of the wording.—S Marshall T/C 12:11, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• DRV participants should probably read the 2012 CfD for Category:Loanwords as background to this.—S Marshall T/C 12:15, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Okay, this is a complete and utter mess. We are said to have a consensus to delete
  WP:CLN, which essentially says that if you can have a category then you can have a list and vice versa. And as well as being contrary to the guideline, I put it to you all that even though that CfD was well-attended, the conclusion was just plain wrong. Loan-words is a perfectly encyclopaedic topic. I have a bookshelf full of excellent sources concerning the evolution of the English language and I can point to detailed examples of loan-words.

  Anyway, because this is such a mess, the way I suggest that we proceed is to suspend this DRV for the moment. DRV can then, on its own motion, open a discussion about the 2012 deletion of Category:Loanwords and discuss that. (I'm willing to be the nominator.) When and if we overturn the deletion of Category:Loanwords then we can proceed to consider Category:Greek loanwords; is anyone unhappy with this suggestion?—S Marshall T/C 12:29, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply

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WP is an encyclopedia (not a dictionary) so we categorise articles by subject (science, art etc) not by the form of the article title. WP has many articles whose title is (or includes) a loanword, but very few articles actually about loanwords. The whole of Category:Loanwords should be deleted or replaced by a redirect to Wiktionary which (1) is the correct place for such categorization and (2) already has a much more comprehensive loanwords category structure (see for example Wiktionary:Category:English terms derived from other languages). DexDor (talk) 20:01, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We don't have an article about people born in 1971, but we have Category:1971 births. We don't have an article about guitar-players from France, but we have Category:French guitarists. The fact that we don't have many articles about loanwords doesn't mean we can't have categories for loanwords—that simply does not follow.—S Marshall T/C 20:34, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Being a French guitarist or being born in 1971 are both characteristics of the person (the subject of the article), not of their name (the title of the article). We don't categorize people based on their name (e.g. there's no "Category:People with a double-barrelled name"). Most (if not all) of the articles in loanwords categories have been placed there (incorrectly) by categorizing based on the characteristics of the title, not on the characteristics of the subject. DexDor (talk) 00:28, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So if I understand you correctly, you feel that because (for example) déjà vu is a property of the mind, but its Frenchness is merely a property of its name and origin as a concept, there is no benefit in having a category:French loanwords for déjà vu to be in. Is that right? To take what seems like a parallel case to me, would you also advocate deleting category:French mathematicians? Or is someone's Frenchness a property of them rather than merely a property of their name and birth?—S Marshall T/C 08:01, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Category:French mathematicians is for articles _about_ French mathematicians (however that's defined) which is fine. Are you really unable to see the difference between categorizing based on an article's subject (art, science etc) and categorizing based on an article's title (loanword, abbreviation etc) ? DexDor (talk) 20:25, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're seeing a simple dichotomy where I see shades of grey.

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and ISBN 978-0748638420.—S Marshall T/C 22:05, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply

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The subject of cats is within the subjects of mammals, carnivores etc. The subject of cat (the word) is within the subjects of English language, 3-letter words etc. Where's the grey area ? DexDor (talk) 19:51, 2 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

With that particular example, I don't see any grey area. As far as I'm aware "cat" is standard Indo-European, hence le chat, die Katze etc., and I would not see it as useful to characterise it as a loanword. We can have articles about cats and felidae but there's nothing useful to say about the word "cat". That far, I'm with you.

However, you (and Johnpacklambert and others below) generalise from examples like "cat" and "plunder" to say that loanword categories can never be useful, and that's a clear fallacy. Well aware though we all are of

WP:NOTDIC, Wikipedia can and does have encyclopaedic articles about words in cases where the word is linguistically interesting enough to have scope for them (e.g. thou, generic you, singular they, yes and no, y'all). These articles about words have frequently been taken to AfD and tested against NOTDIC. They survive. And given that we do have articles about words as opposed to about concepts, it's right that we have categories to deal with them properly.

Now, this is where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes in. In English, we distinguish between house and home. To an English speaker, they're separate concepts. But it's linguistically interesting because few other languages make that distinction. Its came about probably in the ninth century when "house" (or hús) was the Norse word and "home" was the Saxon. Likewise we have for example a distinction between "skill" (a Norse word) and "craft" (a Saxon one); the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that these words for similar but related concepts are linked into their root language. Under the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis Weltschmerz isn't just a German loanword, it's also a product of German thought that has its own particular quality because of its source language. Déjà vu isn't just a French loanword, it's a product of French thought in a French language. The evolution of language becomes a way to trace the evolution of thought. And what that means is that classifying, say, kitsch as a German loanword is as fundamental and relevant to its meaning as classifying seven as a prime number. Make sense?—S Marshall T/C 01:20, 3 February 2013 (UTC)[reply

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If it's clear that a concept (deja vu, kitsch etc) originated in a particular country then that's a defining characteristic of the subject and could be used for categorization - maybe in the existing "Inventions of" categories. The article about

deja vu would be eligible for such categorization whatever title was chosen for the WP article (see Tip of the tongue for a similar concept that has different names in different languages). There are some words whose use is sufficiently notable / interesting to have their own WP article (personally, I'd like all such articles to have a title containing "(word)") and some such articles could be categorized as loanwords, but approx 95-99% of the articles in the existing loanwords categories aren't articles about words and (as others have pointed out) "loanwords" is so ambiguous that it's not a good basis for categorization (cf Wiktionary). DexDor (talk) 08:25, 3 February 2013 (UTC)[reply

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I'm with Mangoe about taking the whole category tree to RFC.—S Marshall T/C 13:10, 3 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If the

Deja vu article in the loanwords category, then you're being inconsistent. Living people categories generally contain a significant number of articles appropriate to the category, unlike loanwords categories. DexDor (talk) 18:32, 4 February 2013 (UTC)[reply

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• submit whole category tree to RFC As the nominator of the parent, deleted category, I've reviewed the various loanword CFDs. All nominations for specific language categories except this one ended with no consensus. My sense is that we need to address the subject again, on a comprehensive basis, in a more widely advertised forum. It's clear that there is a fairly strong core of people who object to all of these categories on general principles, and I must admit to belonging to this group. On the other hand the fact that the parent category more or less sailed through deletion, while specific languages mostly did not, suggests that a lot of the support for this class of category comes from people with connections to particular languages, and that they weren't paying attention to the parent category deletion discussion as a result. The consensus thus seems imperfectly formed. I think we need to repeat the 2012 discussion and make it more widely advertized. Mangoe (talk) 15:19, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • That makes things easier. I feel that the deletion of the category in question was well within policy but that it might be the "wrong" result (IMO). That's not generally a good reason for DRV to overturn. But as the inconsistency of results exists and the original nom is okay with revisiting this via RfC, seems like a good way forward. Hobit (talk) 20:10, 1 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse we categorize things by what they are, not what they are named. Ther whole category tree is a mess, but there is no reaon to overturn the decision here. The articles are on things, not words. This is an encyclopedia not a dictionary. Categorizes like this encorage people to write dictionary articles.John Pack Lambert (talk) 00:06, 2 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I have come up with the best description of why this category is a downright horrible idea. We have an article
  plundering, whicb is a redirect to this article, we could not put it in Category:Hindi loanwords because plundering comes from German. However since plundering and looing are the same thing, they should be in the same categories.John Pack Lambert (talk) 00:19, 2 February 2013 (UTC)[reply
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• Endorse – the argument of John Pack Lambert is entirely sound: this is categorisation by a property of the name of an article, not by the topic of the article. And
  Oculi (talk) 02:10, 2 February 2013 (UTC)[reply
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• Endorse the decision to delete the category - per arguments above by JPL, Oculi and myself. DexDor (talk) 18:32, 4 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse The logic for retention was offered at CfD and consensus was strong that this was an inappropriate topic for a category. I don't see any issue with the close or any new evidence that would justify overturning the consensus in the original CfD. Alansohn (talk) 04:45, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]