Talk:Ending

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[edit] AfD

I put this up for deletion (see reasons there). The only part of this article that informs the reader about the topic of word endings is the first:

In linguistics, an ending is a group of one or more letters added to the end of a stem to denote inflection, i.e., either declension of nouns and adjectives or conjugation of verbs. It is distinguished from a suffix in that it does not carry additional semantic meaning but serves only to establish the word's use in the sentence. Examples in English include the -s added to nouns to form the plural and the -ed added to verbs to form the past tense.

... and it is wrong. "A group of one or more letters": not linguistics. Confuses letters with sounds. "To denote inflection": it might not be inflection (could be a clitic). "Either declension ... or conjugation": Could be other things as well. "It is distinguished from a suffix...": if it's an ending and it's not a clitic, then it's a suffix by definition. "Does not carry additional semantic meaning": well, besides the fact that semantics implies meaning, what about the plural -s? It doesn't carry meaning?

The rest of the article has nothing to do with the core idea except tangentially.

When I came by, "Ending" was linked from a few other places. In some cases it was wrongly linked (e.g. from "ending song"), comprehensibly because the word is so general. It was linked from two linguistics-related articles; in one I replaced it by a link to suffix (which was the intended meaning) and in other it was simply part of the expression "verb ending" (self-explanatory in its context).

Moreover, "ending" is not a linguistics term. It's a common word that you can find in non-professional grammars or in informal speech. I don't think this very general word should have an article, so I proposed to delete it. I could live with it being renamed to "word ending" and turned into a disambiguation page, if there's something to disambiguate to (suffix, (en-)clitic, etc.). --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 13:37, 18 March 2006 (UTC)