I guess, they are all missing 'to be' so incorrect - I don't know what to call that precisely - correct versions I avoid:

"site cannot be found"

"software is updating"/"updating is in progress"

> gerund: a form that is derived from a verb but that functions as a noun, in English ending in -ing, e.g., asking in do you mind my asking you?.

"Updating" in the phrase "Software updating" as a status message isn't a gerund though. It looks a lot like a gerund but it's really a casual form that drops the rest of the verb "[is] updating".

It's a participle rather than a gerund. Present participles and gerunds have the same form in English, but not in all languages that have these.

Thanks everyone, I just don't know enough grammar to explain.

Indeed - in German, verbs have:

- a gerund form which is always the same as the infinitive,

- a different gerund form (verb-'ung', kind of cognate to verb-'ing', both derived from a Latin construct I believe), and

- a present participle

...in addition to the other declensions. It's fascinating to me how Dutch and English can be seen as two parallel derivatives of the old High German language, where as what we now call German has developed along a largely different path!

I don't know enough German to be sure of a rule about when the -ung form does and doesn't occur, but I can think of verbs that don't have it (confirmed with grep!), so it's not completely productive. (First examples offhand: essen, haben, denken, gehen, although the latter does seem to do -ung with some prefixes.)

It's also interesting to think of how to describe the semantic difference between the -en and -ung nouns when both do exist. I think one case is that the -ung can often describe the result of completing the action of the verb or in some sense refer to a "complete instance" or "complete occasion" of the verb's action, but this is generalizing from just a few examples...

Wiktionary seems to agree with my guess about the meaning of -ung:

> forms nouns from verbs, usually describing either an event in which an action is carried out, or the result of that action.

> Note that the -ung suffixed form is different from the gerund which is formed by simply capitalizing the first letter of the verb. The gerund usually refers to the activity in general rather than a specific instance or result.

The -ung words also feel slightly more technical to me. When you read laws, for instance, there are quite a lot of 'ungs', more so perhaps than in colloquial writing. Maybe that is because, as you put it, "completing the action of the verb" has a more abstract meaning that referring to a specific act. In English, it feels to me like we too would (in laws, for instance) be more wont to use the '-tion' form of a verb rather than the '-ing' gerund. Perhaps also that, the longer the word, the more technical it feels in any language :)

That's interesting. "Completion" vs. "completing".

I tried this to get all of the dictionary pairs for comparison:

  import re

  german = set(open("/usr/share/dict/ngerman").read().split())
  english = set(open("/usr/share/dict/words").read().split())

  tech_de = "ung"
  gerund_de = "en"

  tech_en = "tion"
  gerund_en = "ting"

  for word in sorted(list(german)):
      if word[0].isupper() and word.endswith(tech_de):
          gerund = re.sub(tech_de + "$", gerund_de, word)
          if gerund in german:
              print(word, gerund)
  
  print()
  
  for word in sorted(list(english)):
      if word[0].islower() and word.endswith(tech_en):
          gerund = re.sub(tech_en + "$", gerund_en, word)
          if gerund in english:
              print(word, gerund)

Unfortunately the English pairs aren't quite complete because the morphological change isn't always simply a matter of s/tion$/ting/, but we get a large number of pairs in each language to look at!

I put a sample output of this up at https://sethschoen.com/gerund-comparison.txt in case anyone wants to look at it (not promising to keep it there forever!). (Note the default character encoding from the web server is wrong so you may have to change encodings manually, or download the file and reopen it, to see German umlaut characters correctly.)

They're just casual or conversational forms of the verbs. Dropping "is" from "is updating" for example.

It's kinda foggy, "Found" can be an adjective, like "Found art".

That's technically true. The typical interpretation would be "[The] site [was] not found" as a verb. If you squint hard enough you can interpret is as "[The] site [is] not [in the state of being] found".