Talk:be silent

RFD discussion: December 2016–January 2017

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion (permalink).

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be silent

Someone said we should not have this entry. But to me, this is an excellent example of translation target, per existence of single-word non-compound translations into a variety of languages, including schweigen, zwijgen, taire, taceo, молча́ть (molčátʹ), mlčet, callarse, etc.

Keep as a translation target. --Dan Polansky (talk) 06:15, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Interestingly, "be silent" is in User:Dan_Polansky/Roget_MICRA/Class_IV._Words_Relating_to_the_Intellectual_Faculties, in 585. Taciturnity. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:15, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

• Keep this as an obvious translation target. I'm often surprised at the opposition to "translation target" entries. Over the years I have found Wiktionary to be especially valuable as an online substitute for bilingual translation dictionaries, and translation target entries are part of making Wiktionary useful for this purpose. A translation dictionary would never omit a term that is idiomatic in the other language just because it is not idiomatic in English; so, in order to be a properly useful multilingual dictionary, we should make an effort to include these entries. To do otherwise is to make the translation dictionary aspect of Wiktionary seem arbitrary and frustrating for our readers. This, that and the other (talk) 06:45, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

• Keep. Perhaps we should just have {{translation only}} on the definition line for such terms. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 07:39, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

  Like day after tomorrow. Equinox ◑ 07:50, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

  I don't like {{translation only}}, but if a this is a preference of a majority, it is better than deletion. For the particular case of "be silent", the particular sense with the translations is more specific, referring to refraining to speaking as opposed to refraining from making noises, and this should be made explicit at least in the head of the translation table. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:56, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

• I'll go with the flow, keep. A lot of "be" terms are translation targets, but aren't entered. DonnanZ (talk) 11:22, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

• Comment Is be silent here equivalent to the imperative silence? --หมวดซาโต้ (talk) 11:42, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

  No, it's not limited to the imperative. Equinox ◑ 11:45, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

  (after e/c): Not really. The lemma is for the verb, like "They were all silent; no one was speaking." --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:47, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

• Delete as transparently SoP in English (this is English Wiktionary, after all). If you think a translation target rationale to be sufficient, you might see which Wiktionaries use such a rationale for inclusion and use that to propose for vote a policy change in favor of translation targets. DCDuring TALK 12:13, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
  • WT:CFI says: "In rare cases, a phrase that is arguably unidiomatic may be included by the consensus of the community, based on the determination of editors that inclusion of the term is likely to be useful to readers." How this got there is another matter, but it seems to reflect the consensus of editors although objective evidence for that consensus is missing, AFAIK. German Wiktionary allows translations in non-German entries so they do not need German translation targets/translation hubs. A draft of CFI expansion is at User talk:Dan_Polansky/2015#Let's draft a vote for CFI translation criteria 2. A rationale is at User talk:Dan_Polansky/2015#Let's draft a vote for CFI translation criteria, at the bottom of the thread. --Dan Polansky (talk) 04:44, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Why do we need "translation targets" in the first place? I see no problem with writing "# to [[be]] [[silent]]" as the definition line of the Finnish verb vaieta (“to be silent”). --Hekaheka (talk) 22:57, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

@Hekaheka You're thinking about the Finnish-English, not English-Finnish dictionary. I want to be able to say how to say молча́ть (molčátʹ, “to be silent”) in Finnish and other languages but the English Wiktionary won't have an entry for it if it's deleted. I would need to go to the German Wiktionary to check e.g. if schweigen has a translation into Finnish or French se taire but they don't. So, there's no way to translate some even very common words in other languages into a third language if the English entry is missing. It's a bridge between "молчать" (Russian), "vaieta" (Finnish), "schweigen" (German), etc.--Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:37, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Got it. "Translation hub" would describe this function better. --Hekaheka (talk) 02:58, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

@Hekaheka "Translation hub" or "Translation target", not sure what is best. How do you vote - keep, delete, abstain? Now, to translate the Finnish "vaieta" into Estonian (vaikima), next time you go to Tallinn, you don't need to look for a Finnish-Estonian dictionary. It's a problem for me to find certain translations of words, when the English term is not idiomatic or too ambiguous, as in this case. I have to use Russian-other language dictionaries, if they exist. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:40, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

I like that description - a "translation hub" is exactly what makes sense where there are multiple single-word foreign translations. bd2412 T 03:06, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

• Delete per DCD.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:28, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
• I can't recall how we've handled translation targets in the past, but I vote keep on the condition that the definition consist of "See be and silent" (rather than actually being defined as it now is) with a notice at the top of the entry stating that this is a translation hub of an SOP term, if this is not already how we treat such entries. The translation table should retain the current gloss. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 05:22, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
  • @Andrew Sheedy: Why not like this:

    (translation hub) To refrain from speaking; to say nothing.

  • And the label could link to Wiktionary glossary explaining what a translation hub is. --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:24, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
    • @Dan Polansky I'm not a fan of that, mainly for the reason that "translation hub" isn't an actual contextual label. I envision something more like the banner on phrasebook entries (which, come to think of it, do include a definition of the word, so maybe I wouldn't oppose retaining a gloss definition). I just think it should be fairly clearly noted that the term is SOP and exists entirely for the sake of translations. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 16:30, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
• I think that translations of "be silent" should go under "silent", suitably labelled. Who would guess that a separate entry "be silent" existed, or think to look there? Mihia (talk) 21:52, 6 December 2016 (UTC)
  • @Mihia: It would be anyone who arrived at be silent from schweigen, with the intent to land at the Spanish term for schweigen, which they learn to be callarse. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:42, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
• Abstain until we have a policy on so-called "translation targets" that has been agreed by consensus. — SMUconlaw (talk) 07:51, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
• Delete. I don't think anyone would look this up and, though the way English handles this idea is not unidiomatic, the copula + adjective construction is too common to work as a lemma IMO. Probably a better way of handling this is by having more flexible translations at silent – so the French translation might say silencieux; cf. se taire (“to be silent”). Ƿidsiþ 08:17, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
  • The question is whether this approach would work for all so-called "translation targets". I have a feeling it would not, but can't come up with any examples... This, that and the other (talk) 10:53, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
• Keep unless there's consensus to have this table separately at silent#Translations, with a header along the lines of {{trans-top|Verbs meaning "be silent"}}. I don't know whether this solution would work for all SOP translation targets, but it would work for this one. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 11:44, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
• Delete. I'm surprised so many people support a keep on this. There are thousands of be + adjective forms which could be one term in a given language, it would be impossible to include all of these on Wiktionary. Surely having the relevant sense at silent is good enough, and indeed that is where most users would look. ---> Tooironic (talk) 02:28, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

  What is another example from these thousands "be adjective" terms that is supported by the translation target/translation hub rationale? --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:42, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

  I can only think of [[be born]] (participle, not adjective), which should be kept for the same reason. We don't need to have an entry for to [[be asleep]], since we have an entry for [[sleep] (verb) but modern English lacks a verb for "not to speak", even if Old and Middle English had a word for it and all Germanic languages do. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 13:30, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

• Keep as "transliation hub" per above. —Enosh (talk) 21:51, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
• Abstain. This matter really needs a conclusive vote. Personally I'd be in favour of something similar to {{no entry}} for translation hubs, with the translations listed, but it the users being pointed to the individual entries that constitute the English SoP term. Either way, it'd be a shame to lose all those translations. They're a valuable resource. — Kleio (t · c) 21:58, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
• Delete per Tooironic. In some languages, it's very common for a stative verb with the meaning "be x" to take the place of an adjective meaning "x". It would be a great disservice to our users to not list these under the translations of x. In fact, they should be listed under the adjective sense, so that if a language happens to have both an adjective and a verb, they should be listed together. For example, for Dutch: {{t|nl|stil}}, {{t|nl|zwijgen}}. This way, the verb zwijgen is offered as a possibility for the user, and they can then themselves decide which fits their use better. —CodeCat 23:14, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

  @CodeCat: Can you please give some examples of these stative verbs? On another note, this discussion is not necessarily about removing schweigen from silent; schweigen is already there, wrongly placed in the first translation table. Removing duplication at any and all costs leads to poor usability. --Dan Polansky (talk) 06:45, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  It seems some schweigen words were first added to the translation table in silent in diff, in April 2012. I for one would not think to look there to find verb translations for "be silent". If "be silent" were to be deleted, it would be best I think to create a separate translation table in silent with the heading "refrain from speaking; not speak" or the like. --Dan Polansky (talk) 06:52, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  Yes, simply separating translations for different parts of speech by commas won't do any good and would confuse the hell out of users. At least a separate translation gloss is required for the static verb sense ("to be silent, to refrain from speaking" (or similar). --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 08:21, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

• Delete per DCD and Tooironic. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:19, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

  Then again, in relation to what Tooironic said: What are some of those "thousands of be + adjective forms" supported by the translation target/translation hub rationale? --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:22, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  @Dan Polansky: be green, be blue, be red, be good, be bad, and many others. These adjectives must be translated as verbs in dozens of Bantu languages, for example. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 08:06, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  @Μετάknowledge: Thank you. I am interested in these Bantu terms, above all. If Bantu languages would spoil the translation hub rationale, we would have to refine the rationale to require that the supporting terms are from multiple language families, e.g. at least one Germanic and one Slavic. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:10, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  Many Amerindian families have similar behaviour. Note that Germanic and Slavic are both Indo-European, and thus belong to the same language family. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 08:12, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  The idea and reasoning of a "translation target" (hub) is misunderstood. It's understandable because it's not defined. We don't create thousands of "be + adjective" entries to cater for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc., etc. translations. Adjectives have verb meanings and usage in a great number of languages. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 08:18, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  My bad with "language family". If certain language groups such as Bantu and Amerindian would spoil the translation hub rationale, they need to be excluded from the operationalized criteria used for that rationale. In User talk:Dan_Polansky/2015#Let's draft a vote for CFI translation criteria 2, we have "A translation does not qualify to support the English term if it is [...] a phrase in a language that does not use spaces to separate words"; I don't know whether that would help here. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:27, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  "be silent" has the further distinction that an ancestor language of English itself has a single word for it, as pointed out above. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:29, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  I didn't mean the use of spaces. I meant that in a large number of languages an adjective (by default) is normally also a verb. There are many other similar cases (e.g. German and Dutch adjectives are also adverbs). We don't need to cater for that. "be silent" is a case when it's different from normal. Even languages where adjectives are not verbs at the same time have a separate verb for this sense and there's a big number of these languages. English actually stands out as an odd one here. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 08:42, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  There seems to be an interesting principle here: the support for "be silent" can be obtained from languages that do not support a great number of "be adjective" terms, and therefore, taking these languages into consideration does not open the floodgates. Let us therefore, in each translation hub deliberation, exclude those languages from the consideration whose inclusion in it would lead to an overflood. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:24, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

  Yes, agreed. This is the status quo, anyway. Consider some example languages where adjective=verb: Chinese 漂亮 (piàoliang, “(to be) beautiful”), Thai สวย (sǔai, “(to be) beautiful”), Vietnamese đẹp (“(to be) beautiful”), they don't require any special translation targets, which would, of course, cause an overflood for each adjective.

  The Thai sentence เธอสวย

  təə sǔai

  You're beautiful.

  literally means "you" + "(to be) beautiful", no copula is needed with adjectives. The adjective is also the verb.

  You can this add this consideration into a future vote on translation targets if you're ever planning to go ahead with this. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 11:49, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

• Keep as translation target. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 11:53, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
• Comment. If we keep this, we'll have to start creating some more, like be shy (it's a verb in Chinese, 害羞), be patient (耐心), be happy (開心), be stuck (卡), etc. I also note we currently have entries for be born and be like, among others. ---> Tooironic (talk) 15:49, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

@Tooironic We will avoid the overflood of "be + adjective" entries. See mine and D. Polansky's comments above. "Be silent" and "be born" are special cases to house translations into Indo-European languages including Old English and not claiming idiomaticity. It's interesting that you make so many SoP or borderline entries and are worried about this one. ;) --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 20:37, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Haha, I knew you'd say that. :P For the record, for the thousands of entries I've created, only a handful have been found SoP and deleted. I just find it strange one of Wiktionary's basic rules of avoiding SoP can be bypassed simply because a collocation happens to be translated into one word in a particular language family. It screams of slippery slope to me. ---> Tooironic (talk) 00:59, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

What about "be afraid". It has single-word equivalents in many European languages. --Hekaheka (talk) 12:55, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

@Hekaheka "To be afraid" has at least an idiomatic synonym - to "fear". --14:27, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

@Tooironic: Per User talk:Dan_Polansky/2015#Let's draft a vote for CFI translation criteria 2, Chinese does not count toward translation hub rationale since it does not use spaces to separate words. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:02, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky The comment @ "4:27, 17 December 2016" above was mine, I stuffed up my signature.

If I remember correctly, in some instances User:Tooironic voted to keep entries because they had idiomatic translations in Chinese but I can't find such examples right now. I disagree that languages using scriptio continua should be treated very differently but they need an extra clause in our CFI - because determining word boundaries and defining "word" is more complex with such languages. We do have active editors with most languages in these categories - Chinese (all varieties), Japanese, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese, Tibetan. Vietnamese has also a similar challenge, even if it's not a scriptio continua language (spaces are inserted after every syllable in 99% of cases, making it more difficult to determine multi-syllabic word boundaries).

In fact, many Asian languages, which are also scriptio continua have idiomatic terms for SoP's like older brother. The Chinese term 哥哥 (gēge) or Thai พี่ชาย (pîi-chaai) are definitely idiomatic and I don't see why they can't be used for "translation target/hub" rationale. As I said, just the CFI for these languages need to be addressed. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 00:31, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Delete. There is no reason a translation target needs to be a single word. Kiwima (talk) 20:13, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

@Kiwima I don't know what your comment means ("there is no reason a translation target needs to be a single word") but you comment was inserted in the middle of someone else's. I have moved it down. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:24, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• I am curious as to whether advocates of keeping this would also favor keeping, say, grow silent, fall silent, keep silent, stay silent (≈ remain silent), or the less common become silent, seem silent, appear silent. Are there no languages that have inchoatives (grow s., fall s., become s.) distinct from statives? Are there no languages that have single words for seem s., appear s. ("seemingly silent, but perhaps not actually so")? What about keep s., which indicates active self-restraint or restraint by others? What about the continuative aspect stay s, keep s.? I also recall reading about a language which incorporates the equivalent of the English as far as I know or last time I looked into verbs to express the epistemic state of the proposition from the speaker's point of view.

Is there a principled basis for limiting the translation-target rationale in any way? Based on the discussions we've had, it seems that our "principle" is simply majority rule of the active interested. DCDuring TALK 14:30, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Re the first question: I wouldn't, even if there are some idiomatic terms in Slavic languages for "to fall silence". As for the principle for limiting translation-target rationale, I don't see a majority rule applied here. The rationale is not defined yet but it's just for making easier to find translations between languages for very common terms, which exist in many languages. E.g. there's no way to find a Kyrgyz translation using an English-Kyrgyz dictionary, you have to use a different language, e.g. use a a Russian term: [1]. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 06:38, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

To clarify: it's fall silent, as in "When the skater fell, the crown fell silent".

Obviously, it is majority rule in the RfD process, with a bias toward keeping any existing entry ("No consensus to delete"), as if we had a shortage of good entries. DCDuring TALK 13:58, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Comment. We list swie as English. We can move all these translations there: voilà, a translation hub. I think that takes care of all the keep-voters' arguments, so even they'd agree to delete. Right?​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:11, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

My position has been that rare English terms should not be used as translation targets/translation hubs. That position is captured in the criteria draft: User talk:Dan_Polansky/2015#Let's draft a vote for CFI translation criteria 2. For instance, I want Czech anglistika to be in English studies rather than Anglistics. For swie to serve as a translation hub, swie would have to be in the definition lines of the non-English terms, which I submit would be awkward. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:23, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Thinking of swie, there is another tentative inclusion principle that I like: a high-frequency multi-word sum-of-parts term should be included if it has at least one single-word synonym and all its single-word synonyms are rare. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:29, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

It seems that the main argument for keeping this is "translation target". As far as I know in most languages you can say be+silent by combining be+silent in that particular language. French: être silencieux; Spanish: estar silencioso; German leise sein, Swedish: vara tyst, Finnish: olla hiljaa... --Hekaheka (talk) 18:21, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

@Hekaheka. The gloss is specific for "refrain from speaking". {{trans-see|silent}} can be added to the bottom. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 00:31, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

My concern is mainly what should be done with languages that have no adjective for silent (or any other) and express such a meaning exclusively with a stative verb. If we have no translation at silent and expect users to know to look at be silent it would be very cumbersome to our users for no real reason. An example I can think of is the Zulu word for "open", which is expressed exclusively with one of two stative verbs -vuliwe and -vulekile, both meaning "be open". These should be placed at our entry open; to have no translation there at all, merely because the Zulu word is not an adjective, would be ridiculous. —CodeCat 00:37, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Zulu seems not very different from many East Asian languages where adjective=verb (almost). See my post @11:49, 11 December 2016 above. You can just add Zulu translations in silent and open (the adjective sense). {{trans-see}} is very convenient in directing users to correct places for translations, e.g. {{trans-see|to refrain from speaking|be silent}}. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:05, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

No consensus after extensive discussion. The votes to keep or delete are roughly even. bd2412 T 18:55, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Redirect to keep quiet?

If we have an entry of the same meaning which is not a translation hub, why have this translation hub? Korn [kʰũːɘ̃n] (talk) 17:19, 19 June 2018 (UTC)