Talk:running shoe

RFM discussion: September 2023–September 2024

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

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running shoes --> running shoe

I'd do it myself, but there are some translations to deal with, all of which seem to be plural. Once we've singularized them it's a piece of cake Jewle V (talk) 15:30, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

@Jewle V: If the singulars are attested. It could be as non-trivial as singularising poultry and cattle. --RichardW57 (talk) 10:53, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

The singular is certainly possible and probably easy to attest, I could easily imagine someone saying or writing “I put my right running shoe on before my left one”. The real issue is that the entirety of the definition and translations should be at running shoe and running shoes should be left as a stub entry, simply defined as ‘plural of running shoe’ as that’s how we normally handle plurals. —-Overlordnat1 (talk) 11:28, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I would compare/contrast this with glass / glasses. A glass would not refer to half of glasses ("spectacles") or pair of glasses in current speech. Other similar terms are scissors, pants. Thus, there is some reason to have the main entry at running shoe. OTOH, one could easily define running shoe as "one of a pair of running shoes" (finessing the fact that running shoes in the definition means "plural of running shoe). I don't think we need to be stingily "consistent" in our definitions with only one lemma for running shoe and running shoes. DCDuring (talk) 15:35, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

The issue is not whether the singular exists in English. That is not a problem. The question is what happens in other languages. Possibly it's no worse than having to enter singulative and lemma form as for Welsh for mouse. My conceptual model is where the base foreign word means 'footwear', and additional words are needed to express a single shoe. --RichardW57 (talk) 18:33, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Uncountable footwear? DCDuring (talk) 19:03, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree that there’s no such thing as uncountable footwear but if you look at Category:en:Footwear then you’ll find 12-14 things listed as plural only and 6-7 as normally plural. The plural only entries are as follows: Birks, daisy roots, dubes (perhaps this should be capitalised like Birks?), elastic sides, gamashes, heels, hold-ups, Jesus boots, purser’s crabs, rubber shoes, studs and street shoes with uppers and wellies somewhat unclearly categorised but arguably in this group. The normally plural entries are as follows: basketball shoes, bobby socks, Doc Martens, oversocks, seven-league boots and Wellington boots (with wellies somewhat ambiguously labelled). Notice that Jimmy Choos isn’t treated as normally plural (like Doc Martens is) or always plural (like Birks and dubes are), so we have inconsistency between brands too! --Overlordnat1 (talk) 23:33, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Overlordnat: In English footwear is uncountable. The inconsistencies may reflect real usage differences. Interference from much more common senses of the singular by prevent the singular from being successfully used. The applies to glasses and heels, I think. There might be a different interference involving the brandname slangs/shortenings, like Dubes, Birks. Doc Martens involves a terminal s providing an additional reason to give it a plural interpretation. The most generic terms, like sock/socks, shoe/shoes, boot/boots, legging/leggings may all be used similarly (a rebuttable presumption). The longer terms may be relatively uncommon in the singular because, say, oversock-ness might not come up in the kind of discourse where left and right do. DCDuring (talk) 01:46, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

@RichardW57: I was interested in whether the foreign words that mean "footwear" were uncountable in their languages. What would that tell us about running shoe and running shoes? DCDuring (talk) 01:46, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

@DCDuring: a corollary to that is whether such words are required to have the dual number in languages that allow it, since human bilateral symmetry makes that the most natural way to characterize sets of footwear. That might help distinguish plural-only as an indeterminate amount vs. a specific number that the grammar just doesn't express. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:22, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Doesn’t really matter what happens in other languages, as the interpretation of the terms mentioned is specific to the grammar of the language rather than the lemma wherein we refer thereto: which number the unmarked form is assigned. Hence organisms that are not usually individualized default to الْجَمْع (al-jamʕ, “plural; collective”) in Arabic: دُلْب (dulb, “plane”) may actually be multiple plane trees but دُلْبَة (dulba) is a single one, and دُلْبَات (dulbāt), plural in form, is a few, paucal in sense, and I don’t need to say anything specific at plane. This generally applies to shoes: جَزْمَة (jazma, “boots, shoes”) is collective; native speakers use to be embarrassed when I ask them how they call a single shoe then, as it would be supposedly useless to have a single shoe; the plurals given in the entry are for the universal sorter. Unable to deploy this inside baseball, intuitively understood by but never explicitly formulated to language users, we simply translate citation forms with citation forms. Fay Freak (talk) 03:18, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

It's too bad that most normal English users wouldn't recognize "dual" in the relevant sense, so that it could be used in a label. Maybe we could have a generic usage note (preferably templatized and not too long) for the various terms that are often used in English pair of expressions, that refers to the existence of dual as a case in other languages. (Would a similar approach be useful for English uncountable terms, explaining common use in expressions like '[amount] of X' (eg, '2 pints of milk') and '[container] of X (eg, 'glass of milk', 'vast sea of milk')?). DCDuring (talk) 14:13, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

• Moved. Pluralisation was easy. Denazz (talk) 12:47, 26 September 2024 (UTC)