Talk:aerophobia

Is aerophobia countable? SemperBlotto 21:31, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, on the one hand, you can pluralize just about anything, if you set your mind to it. (See here for a very nice explanation and example of this.) Diseases and other syndromes are classically uncountable, but if I can say "The flus of 1918 and 1957 were particularly virulent", it's not much more of a stretch to do so for aerophobia.

Imagine two doctors leaving the psychiatric clinic for the evening. One says "What a day! I had three schizophrenias, two aerophobias, and a manic-depressive paranoid triskadekaphobia. What about you?" The other perks up and says, "Oh, are those aerophobias yours? We're going to have to keep them under wraps, or something. My Vernephobic hallucinogenic cephalomania saw them in their wetsuits and diving helmets in the waiting room and became convinced they were both Captain Nemo, and she spent her entire session tucked into a little crevice in the wall of my office shooting out clouds of camouflaging ink."

But I don't think these contrived examples prove much. If we're going to retain a countable/uncountable distinction (which I have no problem with, as it is a useful distinction) we need to say that "uncountable" means "has no plural in everyday use", which aerophobia surely doesn't. —scs 22:45, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Utterly disagree. If it is potentially countable, it has a plural which should be included. bd2412 T 23:26, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Then we can get rid of the countable/uncountable distinction entirely, because every noun is potentially countable. —scs 23:33, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

There may be different types of aerophobia, in which case there are aerophobias. bd2412 T 00:38, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Being a count noun or mass noun (why waste syllables on the longer terms?) is not a property of the noun itself, it's a property of a particular sense of it. For pretty much any mass-noun sense you can construct an auxiliary count-noun sense; that doesn't mean the distinction is useless. 66.96.28.244 01:08, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Certainly there may be different types. The question is, how speculative do we want to be about this possibility, or about the ways people will choose to talk about the types when (or if) there are interesting distinctions to talk about? For example, we already know there are different types of beer, whiskey, wine, gin, vodka, and milk. But for myself, I find that my tongue, while it's fine saying "beers", "whiskeys", "wines", and "vodkas", does not want to say "gins" or "milks"; I would want to say "different brands of gin" or "different densities of milk".

As usual, if we're going to be descriptive, we don't sit around inventing word forms in case the world finds a use for them later; we wait for the world to say them first, then write them down. —scs 01:33, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

We're not inventing word forms - the words are what they are, even if they have never actually been used. Someone invented a thing called a spork. After introducing the thing to enough people, it came to be known that the thing was called a spork, and it became a word suitable for inclusion in the dictionary. At that point, even if no one has ever thought of what to call a multiple of this thing, the plural was "sporks" by default.

Same case with verb forms or adverb forms. Consider cosmopolitanism - what adverb would you use to say that a system operated in a manner consistant with cosmopolitanism? It operates cosmopolitanistically. The word gets two google hits and no google books hits, but it is already a word by dint of its being the proper adverb form of an -ism. In the 1980s, politicians "borked" a Supreme Court candidate - you already know the present participle of that verb before anyone writes it down.

Now, back to aerophobia. Say you have a mild aerophobia, and I have a cripplingly strong aerophobia - we have the same general affliction, but two different types of it. Hence, we have aerophobias, even if the plural form of the word has never been used. The plural form came into being the moment the singular existed. bd2412 T 03:30, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, first of all, you don't need to try to convince me by constructing examples like that, because I'm the one who started this thread by constructing examples! So if my own too-cute examples haven't convinced me that aerophobias is a word worthy of inclusion in our dictionary, I'm not sure yours will, either! :-)

I do also understand how humans construct regular plurals, and that they can easily do so even for words they've never heard. Even small children and computer programs can work out that the plural of wug is wugs. So if we presume to list hypothetical plurals for words whose plurals have not yet, for whatever reason, ever been uttered or written by an actual human, it seems to me we're suggesting that the eventual human who may eventually first have occasion to utter that plural might not be able to without our help. We're also presuming (predictively, and prescriptively, and perhaps a couple other pre words in there as well) that the first pluralizers of this term won't, for whatever reason, adopt an irregular one.

My point is that I don't believe that mechanically-generated plurals have any utility; listing them explicitly adds no value to the dictionary. If and when a new plural is first needed, that first speaker can apply the pluralization algorithm just as well as we can.

(Why, then, do we list the regular plurals for all the existing nouns that do have them? Because among the set of existing nouns that do have plurals, not all of them are regular, so there is utility in distinguishing those that are from those that aren't. Even so, it would also be possible to list plurals explicilty only for those that are irregular, and indeed some real dictionaries -- for example my American Heritage -- use this more minimal strategy.)

Finally, with respect to your point (below) about redlinks generated by the current {en-noun} template, I'm not sure it's such a good idea for that template to create them, and this is one of the reasons. (I'm also not at all sure that every declined form, especially when perfectly regular, deserves its own entry, but that's a different issue.) At any rate, if aerophobia had simply used (or been edited to use) {{en-noun-unc}} in the first place, as it arguably should have been, the question or the temptation to create aerophobias wouldn't have come up.

—scs 21:37, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually the same effect can be achieved by using {{en-noun|-}} - but that merely labels the word as uncountable, which may not be the case. What do we do with a noun that is clearly countable, but for which no plural form is attested? Just today, someone discovered a new bird species in India, and named it Liocichla bugunorum. Honestly, I have no idea how that should be pluralized, but is it uncountable? If it is countable, then we must adjust the template to indicate that it is countable, but no plural is attested. bd2412 T 04:58, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I would say aerophobia (plural not attested) or perhaps, since we did find a few examples, though not enough to satisfy CFI (plural not attested, probably aerophobias) --Enginear 19:12, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Can we set up the template to have that as an option, perhaps coded by writing something like {{en-noun|n}}? bd2412 T 19:21, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

I like this "plural not attested" or "no plural attested" idea. I'm still wondering, though, what the difference is between "plural not attested" and "uncountable". —scs 20:30, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Aerophobia might not be the best example. Earlier today, I added an entry for the rather obscure area of doctrinal study called pantheology, and the corresponding term for one versed in that are of study, a pantheologist. I also put in entries for the respective plurals of these nouns, pantheologies and pantheologists. Now, strictly speaking, pantheology is well attested by our standards, pantheologist is barely attested, and pantheologists is not attested, with only a handful of Google hits and no Google books hits. However, a pantheologist is not an abstract concept like happiness or Italy, but is a type of person, like an economist or an optometrist. If we agree that more than one person can be a pantheologist, then the word is definitely "countable", but the plural - although obvious - has not been used in print enough to be properly attested. bd2412 T 21:44, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with scs We don't sit around inventing word forms in case the world finds a use for them later; we wait for the world to say them first, then write them down. Plurals should be subject to the normal CFI. In this case: 0 hits on books.google, 1 non-dictionary/word list hit on Google (people's aeophobias), 2 hits on MSNSearch, 0 hits on any of the other search engines used by Metacrawler. Not, strictly speaking, as far as I can see, the three permanently archived hits required by CFI, but might sneak through. (For comparison aerophobia gets 250 books.google hits.) We can therefore say "has no plural in everyday use". --Enginear 15:12, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I'll have to revisit quite a few of my plural entries, then - although many were made from redlinks generated by the templates... bd2412 T 17:10, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

These word forms aren’t inherent as such, but they are certainly valid logical inferences based upon the rules of English grammar. However, to make logical inferences is to prescribe, which seems to be the cardinal sin here on Wiktionary, regardless of the common sense involved in making such inferences, and irrespective of how correct they are. Surely being correct is superior to being incorrect. I would define “superiority” in a linguistic sense (something that many descriptivists refuse to accept exists) as possessing the trial optima of “logical consistency”, “greatest functionality”, and “historical congruence”. Consequently, I consider words such as irregardless to be just plain wrong (although ain’t is fine as long as it doesn’t bring about a double negative and is used only as a synonym of aren’t); having brother, sister, and sibling is better than having either only the first two or only the latter; dilemma’s second definition and decimate’s fifth definition are incorrect due to being more vague, and thus less functional; “historical congruence” means that full scale phoneticization of English is out of the question. I believe that this stance is much more sensible than either extreme descriptivism or extreme prescriptivism; the folly of the latter has already been made evident — so, soon, shall the former’s. Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 14:50, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

• aerophobia is not countable - even I can see that. Παρατηρητής
  • There are countable constructions of the word, particularly if there are different kinds of aerophobia. Consider claustrophobia by analogy - for which a plural, claustrophobias, is attested in literature. similar attestation is available for agoraphobias as a plural of agoraphobia. How do we deal with an entry for a term that is countable, but for which the plural is unattested? bd2412 T 15:25, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

We put a usage note on the page to say countable but unattested. This talk will also go to the singular word. Rfvfailed. Andrew massyn 19:13, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Made uncountable as with all other phobias I have seen, there's not enough usage for the plural for this to be an exception as most of the web hits are just dictionaries. Conrad.Irwin 11:38, 1 June 2008 (UTC)