Talk:Weak position (poetry)

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 12 October 2006. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

[edit] AfD and rename

I think there was actually consensus for keeping the page after it was significantly expanded during the course of the AfD discussion. But now my proposal is to give the page a more appropriate name, say Weak position (poetry), because I am still planning to delete the "Words and phrases in weak position" section, for the same reasons as before:

  • There was consensus, I believe, that "weak position" is not an established term for e.g. case endings after a preposition. What the article currently claims about Vulgar Latin is wrong: "omitting" a noun ending would leave behind an ungrammatical bare stem. Instead, there was paradigm levelling (case neutralization) along with a change in the selectional properties of all lexical categories (not only prepositions). This loss of case marking must have appeared in some syntactic environments earlier than others, but "weak position" is not commonly used to refer to these environments.
  • The stuff about weak declension in German(ic) does not belong here, because again there is no particular term "weak position" (the external link uses this expression in order to explain when German articles, adjectives, and nouns have to take "strong" or "weak" endings, and those are the notable terms, and even they don't deserve articles of their own). In the unlikely case that someone searches for "Strength (grammar)" or "Weakness (linguistics)", they should just be redirected to Declension or Inflection.

CapnPrep 12:36, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I just noticed that there is actually already an article about Weak inflection, so I will make the appropriate changes to this page if no one objects. CapnPrep 14:36, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Go for it! I tried to fix the inarticulateness of the vulgar Latin discussion but didn't really fact-check it. It seems plausible to me that case endings were omitted in writing where not needed to disambiguate the preposition (e. g., in with accusative vs. ablative); that kind of shorthand was quite common in the blackletter-on-vellum era. The OP may have confused this phenomenon with the linguistic phenomenon you describe. Michael K. Edwards 18:20, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

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