Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 July 25

= July 25 =

Link in template may be lacking apostrophe
Could anyone please help me with this apostrophe-related issue? I originally wrote this (along with the post title) on the help desk:

"Specifically, the template for Optical telecommunication. The link for the international maritime signal flags is labeled '[s]hips flags'. Could anyone please tell me if it should be "ship's flags' or 'ships' flags' instead?"--Thylacine24 (talk) 02:47, 25 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Re Template:Optical telecommunication. Strictly it should be ships' flags (the flags of ships), but I think some people might regard that as overly fussy when it's simply being used in a template as shorthand for the also more strictly correct international maritime signal flags. If I was going to change it, I would change it to that.--Shantavira|feed me 08:20, 25 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Not fussy at all. Ships' is correct in standard usage because it is both plural and possessive. Loraof (talk) 20:25, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Morphological gaps
One notorious example of a morphological gap from the Russian language is the formal lack of the genitive plural for the noun мечты (dreams, except for ungrammatical мечт), while the same word could be conjugated in all other cases of the plural form. Another instance from the same language is the lack of first person, singular, future tense for the verb победить (to win), where it exists for all other persons of that tense. From the point of historical linguistics, why this happened to such relatively common words? Brandmeistertalk  14:13, 25 July 2019 (UTC)


 * I don't know anything about those cases, but the gap at English "amn't" is basically because historically "amn't" became "ain't", which then drifted off to have its own meanings and connotations. In Latin, the verb inquam has no infinitive because its main use is to introduce direct quotations... AnonMoos (talk) 16:36, 25 July 2019 (UTC)