[Gnso-epdp-idn-team] revisiting singular/plural confusion

[Michael Bauland]

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

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