I thought this would be the best place to continue a discussion on whether entries marked as [ctr] should have their English glosses formatted as "counter for..." or not, that started in the
帖 entry, after I had removed the "counter for" parts of all senses.
Summary of what's been said so far:
Robin: "The overwhelming majority of our counter entries include "counter" in the glosses. I think we should stick to that. It's a lot clearer that way."
Marcus: "The majority of entries do, but I don't think they should. If there's a consensus that we don't need them, I'd be happy to go through
older entries, removing the "counter for" parts."
Robin: "I feel quite strongly that "counter for" should stay. Many people don't pay attention to the PoS labels and won't notice that the counter senses are actually counters, especially on websites/apps that don't clearly divide the senses by part of speech (WWWJDIC, for instance).
I think it's better to be explicit."
Jim: "I really didn't think this through when I replied to Marcus, but on reflection I think I agree with Robin that having an explicit mention of "counter for" in the glosses is the best way to go.
I did a quick count and of the approx. 118 entries with "ctr" as a PoS, 94 have the word "counter" in them, so it's pretty much the default style.
I'm proposing to put back the way it was, with minor changes."
My position is that we don't need the "counter for..." bits in [ctr] entries because I don't think it's especially helpful and it's also inconsistent with how we normally format our entries.
1) If a dictionary user is looking for the meaning of a counter, I'd say it's highly probable they've come across it while it's actually used as a counter, e.g. suffixed to a number. If you're looking at "2畳", I think it's more confusi
g than helpful to append each gloss with "counter for...".. The best and most immediate translation would be "2 ... tatami mats", "not 2 ... counter for tatami mats." I doubt that "counter" is even immediately or correctly understood by a majority of the dictionary's users, though this is of course only speculation.
2) If we're going to describe what the word is instead of providing a translation, we need to tag those glosses as [expl]. This pertains to the whole [expl]/[note] thing that's been discussed on both lists a couple of times and it's an area where we need to be more consistent (I'm thinking especially of explanatory glosses for grammatical particles) . "2畳" doesn't mean "2 counters (for tatami mats)", it means "2 tatami mats".
3) While I don't necessarily disagree with Robin that people might not pay attention to the PoS tags, I don't particularly like the argument. I think it's really a formatting issue that we should leave up to each dictionary implementation to deal with as they see fit. If we wanted to make the PoS info more visible we could certainly add [note="counter"] to each sense, but that's just duplicating data/info, and then you might as well argue we should do that for all PoS info.
Best,
Marcus