User talk:Rua/Archives/2012/February

MATE (desktop environment)
I just moved MATÉ (desktop environment) to MATE (desktop environment), as the official website now reflects this. Since you commented on it on the article's talk page about a month ago, I wanted to see if perhaps you had some input or knowledge of anything that would contradict this. If I'm overlooking something and am wrong on this, I have no issue on being reverted. Thanks. - SudoGhost 10:11, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

strong vs. weak
There were various problems with the former text. Among them was the assertion that strong vs. weak was "especially important" in Gothic when in fact quite the opposite is true. Aside from the names, even the grouping of "strong" and "weak" nouns -- in particular, the grouping of various vowel-stem nouns as "strong" -- makes little sense. In Old English, for example, there is almost nothing in common between "strong masculine" (a-stem) and "strong feminine" (ō-stem) nouns. It is true that the terms "strong" and "weak" appear in traditional grammatical descriptions but modern grammars use them less and less. Recent works (e.g. Ringe's book on the development of the Germanic languages) tend to not use the terms "strong" and "weak" at all. Instead they use the terms "indefinite" and "definite" for adjectives and simply describe nouns by their stem, and IMO we should follow this convention. Benwing (talk) 00:59, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree with you but I don't mind using the terms 'strong' and 'weak' to describe the two sets of declensions for adjectives. For nouns, I don't think it's very appropriate, but established practice is hard to break at times... CodeCat (talk) 02:39, 28 February 2012 (UTC)