Talk:great-great-grandfather

great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather

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Seriously? Does anyone really use such a term in speech? Greats after a certain number start to get difficult to count. 2602:306:3653:8920:C531:D028:8E0:2504 00:54, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Speedied. I redirected it to great-grandfather. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 00:59, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Does anyone? Yes, they do:

• 2012, Matt Chandler, The Explicit Gospel, page 119:

  Do you know your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfatherʼs name? It wasn't that long ago.

We established a rule specific to constructions like these by a vote some years ago, at Wiktionary:Votes/2014-01/Treatment of repeating letters and syllables. The rule is, if it is attested (which this one is), it is hard-redirected to the entry having three repetitions, in this case great-great-great-grandfather. bd2412 T 02:47, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Five greats is the most I hear outside of genealogical circles (which can go on indefinitely, but these days are typically abbreviated to the jargony "4th Great, 6 Great, 8G"). That's probably because few people other than genealogists know their genealogy back more than seven generations in any line, and also likely because it's increasingly easy to lose track of how many times you say "great" with each repetition. But I agree: as long as it's noted that one can keep adding more, there's no good reason for each repetition to have a separate entry. Even those famous genealogists and coiners of words, the Romans, stopped at three greats (avus=grandfather, proavus=great-grandfather, abavus=great-great-grandfather, adavus or atavus=great-great-great-grandfather), and thereafter resorted to other means of counting generations. P Aculeius (talk) 03:09, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

• It basically becomes an RfV problem. You'd be amazed at how many greats get three attestations in print. bd2412 T 03:23, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

• Given my druthers, I'd have redirected to great- Purplebackpack89 03:16, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
• Another consideration: what do we do for translations of these terms? For example, Serbocroatian has a unique word navrndeda for great-great-great-grandfather, which is a redirect right now. In fact, it has terms like this up to the 11th generation, albeit we lack entries for some of them and they get harder to attest after the 8th. Vorziblix (talk) 03:59, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

If it's attestable in Serbo-Croatian, then there should be a Serbo-Croatian entry. But there doesn't have to be a corresponding English entry in order to translate it into English; if vasoflorbella means "beautiful flowers in a vase" in Broglish, that doesn't mean that beautiful flowers in a vase should have its own entry in English. P Aculeius (talk) 04:36, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Sure, the issues being that (1) beautiful flowers in a vase isn’t itself a word in English, in contrast to great-great-..., (2) probably few or no other languages have a word meaning beautiful flowers in a vase, so that having translations for it isn’t particularly useful, but a larger number of languages have extensive systems of kinship terms, and (3) we do already have entries that exist only for translation purposes, such as day after tomorrow, so current consensus seems to be that such an argument doesn’t necessarily hold. Vorziblix (talk) 09:31, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't be so quick to assume that few or no other languages have a word meaning "beautiful flowers in a vase". There is a language with a single word for "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant". —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:24, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

You’re right, polysynthetic languages entirely slipped my mind. At any rate, however the community chooses to deal or not deal with this is all right with me. Vorziblix (talk) 20:04, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

• great-great-great-grandfather should be made a soft-redirect to allow entering the translation, IMHO. This is enabled by Wiktionary:Criteria_for_inclusion#Repetitions via "The above treatment may be overriden by consensus, for example where a variation having four repetitions is more common, or where an additional repetition would cause the word to shift to a different pronunciation or intonation." --Dan Polansky (talk) 06:28, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I think that would make sense, especially given that previous consensus seems to allow for entries such as dark red, in the future, day after tomorrow, &c. for translation purposes. Vorziblix (talk) 09:31, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

• Keep if it meets citation requirements – why not? Ƿidsiþ 08:40, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
• RFD kept as a redirect as per WT:CFI#Repetitions. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:22, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Pronunciation

Where do the stresses go here? --Backinstadiums (talk) 06:45, 8 April 2022 (UTC)