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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of German cognates with English

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Has now been transwikied to Wiktionary, but consensus is that this would be unsuitable for Wikipedia even if there were not also WP:OR/WP:V concerns.  Sandstein  10:14, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

List of German cognates with English

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List of German cognates with English (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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I created this article over a year ago to get some of these massive unsourced and partially incorrect tables off the main German language article. In over a year since then not a single source has been added, and the expert attention tags have not been answered. The only contributor to the original lists and the new article is the IP editor in the 95.11?.*.* range, and these sorts of contributions from them [1] [2] [3] [4] are painfully and obviously incorrect - there are doubtless many other errors in the text. Overall, the content from the solo contributor is incorrect and unsourced, and nobody is willing and able to do the cleanup. Knepflerle (talk) 09:48, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 03:01, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Although this is good information the whole concept is way beyond the scope of an encyclopedia. The relationship between English and German should be explained in English language, as I am sure it already is. But it's not the job of an encyclopedia to list every word. There could be an entire wiki-project that explains the origin of every English word and divides them into groups based on that. Steve Dufour (talk) 06:03, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Transwiki to Wiktionary as an appendix, per User:70.29.210.242 above. JIP | Talk 07:10, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I liked it, I thought it was interesting, and I saved it to my computer to look at again, and... I can't think of how to turn this into something that can be kept. It's interesting original research, and I appreciate the effort involved of going through the German-English dictionary and locating spelling variations. Another good exercise is to look for words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, like "rot" and "gut" and "gift" and "after" (which refers to a a part of the body in German). Mandsford (talk) 16:47, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • This isn't entirely original research; much of it appears in High German consonant shift. But I can't see a way to keep it on Wikipedia. Agree that Wiktionary might want it as an appendix.—S Marshall Talk/Cont 21:46, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. To illustrate cognateness and the effects of the German shifts, a few well-chosen examples will suffice, and these can then be included in the German language article. As to this list, tens of thousands of words in the English language vocabulary have come to us through Old English from a common ancestor with German in the family of West Germanic languages, and most of these words have a present-day German cognate. So a full list will run to 10,000 or more words, obviously unmanageable and without clear usefulness. Lacking a clear inclusion criterion that can make the list manageable and useful, it should not remain.  --Lambiam 21:49, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Arguments that speak in favor of this article:
    • The deletion of the article means a loss of constructive information.
    • It is true that there are many thousends of English cognates with German. However the tables contain only a little fraction of representative cognates. The editor claims that this tables are "partially incorrect", but they are not. And self-evident facts have no need to be sourced.
    —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.114.224.25 (talk) 22:20, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Unfortunately you're not the best judge of the tables being correct, being the one who made the errors in the first place.
    There's a very good reason we ask for sources - it was a "self-evident fact" to you that "lady" was cognate to "ledig" [5]. It wasn't "self-evident" to anyone else however, because it's just not true. Check any good etymological dictionary of the English language such as the OED: "the word has no formal parallels in other Germanic languages" (it says it's most likely related to "dough", bizarrely, and influenced by French "dame" and Latin "domina"). Same for "early" and "ehrlich" [6] - "self evident fact" to you, but contradicted by reliable sources such as the OED (which says it is probably distantly related to German "ehe" instead). And those are only the first two examples that stuck out.
    WP:V says "Any material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation.": given the errors so far, your "self-evident facts" are challenged, and thus need sources. Knepflerle (talk) 15:32, 19 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Other bloopers that I noticed: Ärger – anger; blasen/blosa – blow; Speise – spice.  --Lambiam 21:54, 19 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    To 95: You did not respond to my complaint that the list lacks a clear inclusion criterion. WP:LSC requires that the lead section presents an unambiguous statement of the membership criterion, which it does not. You also don't explain why a few well-chosen examples would not suffice.  --Lambiam 22:04, 19 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    A sourced assumption is not an inch better than an unsourced one (He was early and came in the morning hours). Furthermore a table has to contain a certain minimum number of words, so that all relevant cases can be represented. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.115.83.17 (talk) 11:28, 20 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per Lambian's and Knepflerle's reasoning. Also, etymology is too tricky to rely on "self-evident facts". Nuujinn (talk) 13:24, 20 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    According to Knepflerle's reasoning every word that doesn't fit in his concept has to be sourced or will be deleted. But the dialect words, which I learnt as a little child, are self-evident facts that cannot be denied by anyone. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.114.225.171 (talk) 12:50, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    You can't deny you've been making errors in this list - they've been pointed out above, backed up by reliable sources. What do you want us to do - put a tag at the top of the list saying "this list doesn't agree with any other reputable etymological source - but some anonymous editor says it's true"?
    Noone's denying that you learnt these words as a little child, it's just that a lot of the connections which you are guessing exist between them and the English words don't exist, are spurious, incorrect, not true, not fact. It's as simple as that. Knepflerle (talk) 15:20, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Everyone can make errors that can be corrected, or false cognates can be erased. But this doesn't mean that the whole article has to be deleted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.114.225.171 (talk) 16:12, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    But there's the rub: the way to check for errors (and to avoid them in the first place!) is to use sources. You have been unwilling to do so, and nobody else has improved this article in over a year despite the relevant tags. Knepflerle (talk) 17:35, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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