Wikidata:Property proposal/term of venery

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collective noun for animals

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Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Lexemes

Descriptionapplicable term to describe a group of such animals (e.g. "swarm" for "bees" as in "a swarm of bees")
Data typeLexeme
Domainlexeme for nouns about animals in languages where this is thought to be useful (initially English, add more if needed)
Allowed valueslexeme for applicable collective noun
Example 1bee (L4717) → swarm (L20989)
Example 2bird (L3417) → flock (L20990)
Example 3parrot → company (L3945)
Planned useadd to some

Motivation

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Seems we miss that for now. (Add your motivation for this property here.) --- Jura 05:01, 15 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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  •  Comment Shouldn't this be modelled on Q-items? It looks like special case for Wikidata:Property proposal/holonym. KaMan (talk) 05:15, 15 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Support but maybe it should be just "collective noun"? What about "fleet of ships", "range of mountains", "forest of trees" and I would think "player" could be linked to "team" similarly as well? ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:47, 17 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • If you think it can work for those, feel free to adapt it. --- Jura 09:32, 18 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • Wouldn't that conflict with languages that have a morphological collective derivation? Those are two very different things here. This proposal is clearly about a specific form of collocation or set phrase. "Collective" as you define it is a much broader category (note that we don't typically say "a team of players" the way we say "a gaggle of geese" or "a school fo fish"). The german Berg/Gebirge do not have the same relation at all as English mountain/rang (for starter, there is no such construction as a "Gebirge of Berg" in German). Circeus (talk) 01:10, 3 October 2018 (UTC) Sorry, I didn't realize this was in response to the original "term of venery" proposal. Circeus (talk) 01:45, 3 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • This should be between senses, not lexemes, since it doesn't apply to all senses. As KaMan pointed out, this is a subset of holonym. If the proposal for holonym is rejected on the basis that we should model the relationships via items, then I would be opposed to this one for the same reason - either we want to model these types of relationships via items and not lexemes or we don't. However, if holonym is added, then I think that "collective noun" (not limited to animals) would be a reasonable subproperty. - Nikki (talk) 11:28, 19 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @KaMan, Nikki: I don't think this is a case of holonymy - the membership relation is between "bee" and "swarm of bees", not between "bee" and "swarm" - a swarm could be a swarm of any number of different things (gnats, docker instances, etc.) so it's not true to say that "swarm" always (or usually/optionally) has member "bee". This is quite different to "tree/bark", "body/ear" etc. relationships. ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:22, 19 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Unless we start making items much more like lexemes, I don't see how this usecase could be solved with items. Somehow this would also defeat the point of having L-entities. --- Jura 10:35, 21 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Comment The relationship between this and classifier (P5978) needs to be clarified. Deryck Chan (talk) 13:02, 19 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Deryck Chan: classifier (P5978) was specified to be used only for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese words; I am really not familiar with any of those languages, but my perception was it had something to do with combining a noun with a number (one, three, etc.). This proposal for a standard collective noun is not associated with a particular count of the entities involved, but is for when they are in a large (uncounted) group. A "flock" of sheep, in English or a "school" of fish. It's not just English that does this - "banco de peces" in Spanish, "banc de poissons" in French, and you'll note that "banc"/"banco" bears no relationship to the English word "school" so this can't be resolved with item links, it needs to be a lexeme. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:32, 19 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • @ArthurPSmith: The way CJKV counting nouns / classifiers work is similar to collective nouns: 一塊石頭 (one piece [of] stone), 兩碗湯 (two bowls [of] soup). Closely related languages can disagree on what counting nouns to use: 一塊石頭 (zh/cmn) vs 一嚿石 (one lump [of] stone, yue). I think we can say that CJKV almost always require the use of counting nouns when one specifies a numerical amount, whereas English, French and Spanish do not. But if we decide these should be separate properties, they should be linked by related property (P1659) and the boundary between them should be specified (European vs Asian languages? Mandatory vs optional use of collective noun?). Deryck Chan (talk) 11:20, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • Maybe in English words like cup, bushel, truckload are close to what P5978 was designed for? None could be used with this property. --- Jura 11:38, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • @Deryck Chan: Both your examples (stone and soup) are of continuous (uncountable in themselves) entities, while this property is for discrete (countable) entities like living organisms. Do the CJK classifiers also apply to discrete entities like organisms? ArthurPSmith (talk) 14:28, 22 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
        • @ArthurPSmith: Yes - 一头牛 (one head cow)，一只猫 (one individual cat)，一条狗 (one strip[!] dog)，一朵花 (one lobe flower - refers to one flower rather than one petal, see next example)，一块花瓣 (one piece petal). See w:en:List of Chinese classifiers. Actually, after discussing this matter with a few other editors at the Cambridge Wikidata Workshop last week, I'm becoming convinced that we should have separate properties for CJKV counting nouns and European collective nouns, but it'll be nice to have a plan when other languages come along with a similar grammatical feature to describe. Deryck Chan (talk) 16:50, 22 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
          • Ok, interesting - they are definitely close in intent, but still the meaning is different: the collective noun in European languages refers not to a single organism but to a group of them, so it's kind of transforming the countable into the continuous (or at least uncounted), which is not what the classifiers seem to do. ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:38, 22 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Support - following discussion at Cambridge Wikidata Workshop that we're better off having separate properties here. Deryck Chan (talk) 16:52, 22 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Deryck Chan: Can you retell the argument from the workshop that got you to support this? ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 17:50, 5 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sure:
    1. They have different grammatical structure. A collective noun (e.g. in English) is in the lexical category "noun" and we use them by writing "A of B" using a preposition that joins two nouns; note how "a school of fish" and "a term of venery" has the same grammatical structure, even though one uses a collective noun and the other doesn't. A classifier (e.g. in Chinese) is its own lexical category because it has its own place in a sentence: "[number] [classifier] [noun]".
    2. An English collective noun changes the default unit of counting and is therefore optional: "one lion" -> "one pride of lions". A Chinese classifier specifies the default unit of counting and is compulsory: "一只猫" (one cat, not multiple cats).
    So if we extend this property, these two criteria can be used to decide which property the counting nouns of other languages / scenarios should belong to. Deryck Chan (talk) 15:41, 11 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@ChristianKl, Deryck Chan, ArthurPSmith, KaMan, Jura1: ✓ Done: collective noun for animals (P6571) − Pintoch (talk) 20:30, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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