Talk:sleeping

The Spanish in this article seems wrong to me. The verbal use is "dormiendo": "I was sleeping" -> "Yo estaba dormiendo". The noun/gerund sense is probably "dormir": "I like sleeping" -> "Me gusta dormir". The adjectival sense is sometimes "durmiente": "Sleeping Beauty" -> "Bella Durmiente".

But my Spanish isn't fluent and I'm not sure how it fits in with the other languages on this page.

I found a page which seems to agree with me: http://spanish.about.com/library/weekly/aa080702a.htm

— Hippietrail 07:23, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I agree - there is a problem here which I have marked with a comment in the article ("<!-- These translations are OK but could mislead the user into using them when the adjective is required. How can we signpost this? See Talk page. -->"). Italian has:

"I am sleeping" - "Sto dormendo" (this is the present continuous in English and Italian); "I was sleeping" - "Dormivo" (this is the imperfect in English and Italian)

Here, "sleeping" is a present participle and part of the imperfect respectively.

As with Spanish, the noun is translated by the infinitive: "I like sleeping" (= "I like to sleep") - "Mi piace dormire". Similarly, the adjective is usually the equivalent of "asleep" ("addormentato"), which I have marked up in the article.

French behaves similarly.

I think the translations need more comments to prevent users from choosing the wrong one.

Indeed, very confusing the distinction between e.g. french dormant and endormi (or similar, I don't speak french) doesn't seem right here, endormi sounds something like fallen asleep, but fallen asleep and sleeping are different, aren't they, I'm not sure. dxsfvdxschg 02:54, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

No, there's complete mess there... dxsfvdxschg 03:00, 9 March 2008 (UTC)