Diskussion:søskende

Gender, singular?

Hello. The article says under “inflection”: “søskende fælleskøn (kun pluralis søskende)”. That strikes me as strange: If it only exists in the plural, the word doesn’t have a reason to have any gender, does it? I have taken over “common gender” in the translation section of the French article frères et sœurs, but now I’m wondering… On the one hand, any dictionary I’ve been able to check confirms the word only exists in the plural. But then again, Google has more than 100 000 hits for “en søskende” (still almost 15 000 for “et søskende”, but quite some of them used as an adjective). The hits for “en søskende” include very “serious” sources like newspapers, proofread books, legislation, which would be good enough to record the form both in the German and the French Wiktionary, regardless of what any other dictionary says, but I don’t know what your criteria for inclusion are.
In any case, I think someone should have a look at that “fælleskøn – kun pluralis”, after which I guess the mention in the translation section of another Wiktionary should align to what has been decided here. Sigur (diskussion) 10. jul. 2022, 18:22 (UTC)

Okay, so I’ve seen that you can justify mentioning a gender by “en af søskende”, even if you don’t accept a singular. As for the singular, I’ve added it to the English article, with some quotations, but I don’t know whether your approach here is more “prescriptive” so that you might want to exclude the singular, even though it is relatively widespread. Sigur (diskussion) 11. aug. 2022, 09:44 (UTC)