Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ending

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was no consensus to do anything except not keep it in its current form, so I'm being bold and redirecting it to Affix. Angr (talk • contribs) 13:31, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ending

This article is about word endings. It is written very amateurishly, it contains inaccurate information, a lot of irrelevant information too, and most importantly, it doesn't have any content that isn't present already, and better explained, in other articles (suffix, inflection, declension, clitic, etc.). Besides that, "ending" is a very common, general word, unsuitable for an article title, and it's not a linguistics term but at most a shortcut or an elementary college grammar term. I thought about turning it into a disambiguation, but there's nothing to disambiguate to. Given all that, I say delete. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 03:20, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

• Keep Interesting, it may be poorly written, so give it time. It was made less then a week ago, so quality isn't a big issue MadCow257 05:03, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Delete changing my vote per Brian Crawford MadCow257 15:08, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

• Rename to Word ending and keep. Looks like a perfectly valid article to me. GeorgeStepanek\^talk 06:08, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
• Disamb to suffix, inflection, declension, clitic, etc. Ending is not an acceptable term for an encyclopidic article about grammar. Eivind^t@c 10:27, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
• Comment: Poor writing can be fixed, but this is completely wrong. Renaming and disambiguating as above might work, though. I'll propose something in the talk page. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 13:24, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Okay, you posted this while I was writing my questions below. I guess that's an answer to #s 1&2, basically, right? Bobby P. Smith Sr. Jr. 13:38, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
• Comment/questions - These questions are for Pablo or any others who have expertise/knowledge in linguistics (I have none): 1.) According to Morpheme and Affix, the bound inflectional "-s" clitic for the english plural is a morpheme, and thus carries semantic meaning - does that mean that this article is wrong to assert that the "-s" carries no semantic meaning, or is it debatable, or what? 2.) According to Inflection, things like "-ed" to indicate past tense are inflectional morphemes (and thus, according to Morpheme, carry semantic meaning) - is the article wrong to assert that inflectional changes to the end of a word carry no additional semantic meaning, or what? 3.) To what extent is the idea of an inflectional morpheme added to the end of the word (as opposed to a derivational morpheme, which appears to be classed as an affix [?]) covered by the term "desinence"? I mean, is "desinence" synonymous with "ending" as used in this article? 4.) Should "desinence" perhaps have its own article, to which "ending" or "word ending" should redirect? 5.) Should a page be created at "ending or "word ending" that simply offers wikilinks to both "desinence" and "suffix", or something like that? Bobby P. Smith Sr. Jr. 13:36, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
  • • 3.) "Desinence", "declension"/"decline" and "conjugation" are basically obsolete terms, but they at least have a more-or-less specific meaning. An affix is (put simply) something you tack onto/into a word, be it a prefix, a suffix, an infix, or a circumfix. Inflectional and derivational morphemes can be affixes of any of those kinds, or not affixes (for example, vowel changes, as in sing - sang - sung, are inflection). If "desinence" has an article, it should redirect to "suffix". "Word ending" should maybe exist because the expression is so common, but it should also redirect to "suffix", or be a disambiguation. "Ending" should not exist; it's too common and misleads editors (too many things have "endings" of some sort). --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 13:48, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
      • Delete per Flores. Thanks for the answers. The "word ending" disambig page could be pretty useful - could include wikilinks to the various linguistic concepts touched on by the subject of word endings, and would be easy to create. "Ending" is indeed pretty useless even as a disambig, unless there are a bunch of pages on various types of ending (in drama, literature, music, etc.) that I'm just unaware of. Bobby P. Smith Sr. Jr. 14:06, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. I have two degrees in classics, and I can tell you that this is not just useless, but wrong. Brian G. Crawford 14:53, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
• Keep and rename as Word ending and take out that last paragraph, which is factually incorrect. ProhibitOnions 20:43, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
• delete the problem with this page is that it is original research. The idea of an "ending" in linguistics being any kind of declension or conjugation is perfectly valid, but is not a widely accepted terminology. the more accepted terminologies (i.e. declensions, conjugations) already have pages explaining their significance. Niffweed17, Destroyer of Chickens 22:09, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as original research (i.e. not matching standard terminology in linguistics). Henning Makholm 04:03, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
• No vote: I can't decide between deleting content and Redirect to Inflection, or Rename Grammatical ending. It's not scientific and certainly not proper linguistics by any stretch, but it is about grammatical inflection in some languages and it's a notable (albeit simplistic) concept in second language acquisition, and a lot of students learning second language would probably use this terminology. Peter Grey
• Redirect to inflection, and merge any useful information there. Inflection by varying endings is a significant feature of Indo-European languages, so that in popular speech, people speak of "word endings" to mean inflections. Suffixing rather than prefixing or vowel gradation or ablaut seems to be somewhat more common among most languages. Smerdis of Tlön 06:21, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.