revisiting singular/plural confusion
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Hi all, I hope you don't mind, that I get back to the topic of singular/plural from today's call. I don't think that these forms should automatically be put into a contention set. Sure, you could confuse the following two * hotel * hotels And possibly also * child * children But there are many more forms that are based on the same word and could be confused, e.g. the existing * vermögensberatung * vermögensberater When someone looks at a domain myname.vermögensberatung and remembers that and later gets sees the domain myname.vermögensberater they most likely would be confused and not realise it's a different domain (I would be confused). I don't see why singular/plural should get a special handling from other changes to words. Either we set a general rule like "if words belong to the same word stem, they *may* be put into a contention set, if they are determined to be confusing" or we completely omit the singular/plural rule. To me this is a half-hearted approach which is very English-centered, where (almost) the only change to a noun is adding the plural S. In other languages, there are much more very common changes that can happen to a word. Take the Finnish word "talo" (meaning: house), you can have talon, talot, taloa, taloon, talona, ... All of these are different conjugated forms of the same word ... but just "talot" is (nominative) plural and should be put into contention with "talo", while all others are fine? Sorry, but that makes no sense to me. Finally, one reason against taking singular/plural into consideration is the required effort to look up the plural forms of a word in all languages. In Latin script alone there are hundreds of languages to consider. Best regards, Michael -- ____________________________________________________________________ | | | knipp | Knipp Medien und Kommunikation GmbH ------- Technologiepark Martin-Schmeisser-Weg 9 44227 Dortmund Germany Dipl.-Informatiker Fon: +49 231 9703-0 Fax: +49 231 9703-200 Dr. Michael Bauland SIP: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Software Development E-mail: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Register Court: Amtsgericht Dortmund, HRB 13728 Chief Executive Officers: Dietmar Knipp, Elmar Knipp
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Michael Bauland