Disputatio Usoris:JimKillock

Salve, Iacobe!

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-- Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 17:16, 25 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

Vicipaedia:Taberna#Broadcast standard CC-BY videos available from ZDF, could be Latinized

Hi, I replied to your message. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:52, 20 Iunii 2020 (UTC)

Could you produce a subtitle file for commons:File:Die Himmelsscheibe von Nebra (CC BY 4.0) .webm? I've just created the page and I'll translate the subtitles. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:19, 22 Iunii 2020 (UTC)

Sure Andrew, I will have a go later at the German today. JimKillock (disputatio) 14:22, 22 Iunii 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at Meta

I will join in: I just wanted to explain first. For me, for Latin, this was not the ideal time to get down to basics at Meta -- but the Ancient Greek people have waited at least 14 years for a proper discussion, so there's every reason not to make them wait longer. I'm just slightly worried about the benighted members of a certain committee, a couple of whom would stop Latin if they could and make us all turn to Volapük or Manchurian or English.

About a year ago I promised, aloud, to do some reading which would help me to extend the article en:Latin language saying how Latin is used as a special language in the 19th/20th/21st centuries. The information is absent from the article. Bad luck: my reading showed me that, as far as visible, none of the four scholars who have written histories of Latin in the last few years even asked themselves about this. They know about botanical Latin and Catholic church Latin, obviously, but they don't even know full details about current practice among those communities -- which is easily found out -- and they didn't even think about how many other special Latin-using communities there are. The communities themselves have little knowledge of this picture and no contact with one another. Some of the major ones are hinted at on our page VP:Fontes nominum propriorum: I started to compile that page several years ago and that was when I began to notice I was doing original research. It still amazes me that that is what it is.

So in fact I have to write a paper on this -- which I must not allow to turn into a book. I put some of the stuff together when I was invited to It:Wikicon at Como, two years ago, of course the Italian Wikipedians get the point anyway, and I could point to the default screen display behind speakers' heads which showed that the EU, and our university host as well, had adopted a Latin name for the multilingual region we were in (Insubria). But in my personal perspective, I still have to write the paper and get it published. Then I can extend en:Latin language: then I feel I could really prove, whenever necessary, that Latin is not (in meta's dismissive terms) simply an ancient language but also a special language. Then Vicipaedia is safe to go on bringing together and supporting all those special Latin-using communities that began to split up by about 1700 and have largely not yet learned what a new encyclopaedia can do for them. ... OK, never mind, I think we are safe really. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:11, 10 Septembris 2021 (UTC)

I would be very interested to read that when you publish :) I agree about the classifications you make. Re: Anncient Greek, there is a parallel piece of work to be done to show that it is functional and productive; these seem to be the main requirements that will be insisted on, probably rightly.

On the Committee, they do seem wedded to their position, but the fact that it isn't documented or justified seems very problematic to me. Really, they need that all in place to meet their transparency requirements, so I think they are in a kind of policy limbo, but haven't quite realised that yet. It's a good reason to revisit the question in itself, since they lack the consultation and documentation for the decision they made.

Ultimately, they are accountable to the WM Board, so I think the right thing to do is to show with evidence that these projects meet the mission of WM and WP, rather than some other Bowlderised version of the mission. On that, thins like trying to document branches of knowledge; these seem pretty clear to me, but will need teasing out and going through the examples. Many of the points about possible audience don't seem to be relevant once you look at the mission either. The Wiki is meant to produce what canbe produced, the audience are meant to choose what they want to read and why. There isn't a strong role for language policy in the latter, it seems to me it has more to do with relevance, accuracy and sustainability, which is all on the producer side. Since disqualification for those reasons is harder, some keep shifting the argument back to the consumer. But the mission is deliberately silent on the consumer. They are meant to choose what they want from the greatest possible menu, so WM policy concentrates on production.

Thanks for helping with the questions btw and pointing out that Classical Chinese has a Wiki :) --JimKillock (disputatio) 22:53, 10 Septembris 2021 (UTC)

I'll add this point right here too because the last thing I want to do is to muddy the waters for the ancient Greeks. They would find it much easier to prove what they need to prove if they could include church Greek as we include church and botanical Latin. This is a little harder in the Greek case because there are noticeable grammatical differences. But in Thessalonica three years ago I bought a book about travels to Mount Athos with a long preface by an archbishop and an academic introduction by the editor, the first in church Greek, the latter tending towards ancient (in a similar Latin case, and cases surely exist, the two registers would be barely distinguishable). The fact is, anyone who's studied any of the historical forms of Greek can just as easily read all of them: and not very many people actually write in the full ancient register. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:16, 11 Septembris 2021 (UTC)

That is interesting. The question I have is whether to take a specific look at Greek in the evidence gathering. I had thought not to, as it just adds to the work and would distract for the core question. But it might be necessary from LangCom's perspective (because they think Ancient Greek has no prospects). --JimKillock (disputatio) 09:21, 11 Septembris 2021 (UTC)

Ancient and active?

This is really depressing from the point of view of an ancient languages collaboration. Thanks to your table at Meta of ancient language projects, it's rather easy to check (1) how many of them I had contributed to (the first thing I did) and then (2) how many recent changes each of them has. Answer to (2): excluding system messages and interventions by global housekeepers, none -- in all cases except Latin. It really worries me that by linking Latin with this geriatric group [of projects] we are risking Vicipaedia's position. We need to promote ourselves as an Esperanto equivalent, not as an Anglo-Saxon equivalent. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:03, 18 Septembris 2021 (UTC)

@Andrew Dalby: I agree we are basically going to have to regard this as being two tiers. Sanskrit and Literary Chinese have the potential to be poster children and superstars just because of the size of their userbase. They may or may not be right now.

• Sanskrit looks active to me
• Literary Chinese looks active to me

The big plus of working with Sanskrit and Literary Chinese is that there are serious resource challenges for them which are easier for US grantmakers to understand, both from a cultural and religious perspective, ie diversity, and development perspective, ie they are important for middle income countries. So I think getting them help is always going to be easier than for Latin, which is written exlusively by retired Classists in the green hills of England, or maybe Papal officials, in the mind of most grant makers I suspect.

Yes, the other projects are probably bad to irretrievably bad. There is a bit of activity at AS and a couple of others I think, but some including Pali look entirely inactive.

If LangCom were a bit more open minded they'd see an opportunity to review out some of those, and to force improvement otherwise – for me the minimum is that the writing is linguistically defensible; I am not sure if that applies to several.

If we don't get answers from the Ancient Langs, at ALPES as seems likely, we could just narrow it to "Classical Languages", we'd need a new acronym!

Likewise, if we prefer, we could expand the remit to include ConLangs, although that way too, you get some struggling projects. --JimKillock (disputatio) 09:26, 18 Septembris 2021 (UTC)

@Andrew Dalby: I've split the table out on ALPES, which shows more easily where there is hope and where it is perhaps slimmer. --JimKillock (disputatio) 12:30, 18 Septembris 2021 (UTC)

You're right about Sanskrit and Chinese, I must have looked in the wrong place. That's very reassuring: it's the ones that, alongside Latin, are most obviously relevant/active in the real world. It's a pity about Pali, which is also active outside, and I wonder if that's because Devanagari script was chosen. Few if any real users of Pali use that script. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:36, 18 Septembris 2021 (UTC)

It's definitely these kinds of things an audit and external expertise can tease out. I hope! --JimKillock (disputatio) 12:54, 18 Septembris 2021 (UTC)

Back in circulation

Good to see you around -- you've been a bit quiet recently?

If you discover Latin names for a place for which we had no Latin name, don't hesitate to move our page. It's a good start, even if aomeone afterwards might find a better alternative. You know this already, but it struck me afresh because, when I was improving Iosephus Bazalgette, I noticed you had verified Latin names for his places of birth and death. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 13:37, 2 Ianuarii 2022 (UTC)

Thanks @Andrew Dalby: I will try to do that. Last year I basically ploughed through a bunch of books doing this, but didn’t always try to add them here. Sometimes I dropped a note on talk pages.

I've been very busy at work through Oct and Nov; so am trying to catch up on the ZDF video project. I have a couple more nearly ready to go, and then it is back to finding translators. I will also have another go at figuring out a "Pellicula mensis" tool; I failed on my last attempt as the code I was copying was too involved, so will try to duplicate the "Imago mensis" tool you already have. --JimKillock (disputatio) 14:29, 2 Ianuarii 2022 (UTC)

I responded

... at "De orthographia". Your own subpagename Usor:JimKillock/Nomina Latina Vigorniensis Comitatus would be a case in which an apex or macron could be used, since the 4th declension genitive "comitatús" differs from the nominative only in the length of the final vowel, while the genitive "Vigorniensis", like all similar forms, does not differ from the nominative at all. Hence the reader can tell that the second two-word phrase is in the genitive only by elimination -- there is no other way but nominative + genitive to make sense of the whole word group -- whereas the listener, and the reader who is helped by an optional apex, get a positive clue. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 16:13, 3 Ianuarii 2022 (UTC)

... again

I found I supported a move, but not the move that you prefer, Jim! Sorry about that. We'll see if anything finally happens.

I didn't add this semi-etymological reflection over there. "Neo-Latin" seems to me a term on its own. You might say "Neo-Sanskrit" or "Neo-Hebrew", but people don't. On the other hand, "New ..." and "Modern ..." have many analogues in standard language names. The difference between them is that "New ..." was used in the 19th century and "modern" is used in the same sense in the 20th/21st century: they both refer to the latest or current period of a language. Hence the New English Dictionary is what the OED was called at first, not because it was a new dictionary but because it was a dictionary of what was then technically called "New English" (Old, Middle, New) and is now technically called "Modern English" (Old, Middle, Modern). This, apart from what I said on that talk page, makes me think that "Modern" is the best general term. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:29, 25 Aprilis 2023 (UTC)

No worries Andrew. We're all entitled to an opinion :) I agree that "neo-Latin" is an imperfect term, but it's the one that's used, for better or worse. Modern Latin works as a term for post 1700 Latin but I find it hard to see how it can apply to Petrarch et al. However the policy is meant to apply terms that are in widespread use. It's hard to write a encyclopedic article without adopting the used terminology and definitions, which I guess is why the policy is written like that. JimKillock (disputatio) 13:04, 26 Aprilis 2023 (UTC)

Southwark

I tried manfully to find out what was your source for "Opus Australis" as a name for Southwark (it's because Keir Starmer was born there that I noticed you'd changed the label on Wikidata). I tracked you to Wikibooks, but lost the scent there. If "Opus Australis" appears on Open Street Map, it ought to be changed to Southwark. Apart from the apparent lack of a source, there's a little mistake in the Latin.

The oldest form of the name apparently meant "fortification of the Surrey-men" (see here). Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:15, 6 Iulii 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Andrew Dalby I guess it should be "Opus Australe"? This might have been me misreading the form I saw of course. The source will probably have been either one of the Oxford place name books, or the book of London place names I have, both of which mention any recorded Latin names. Possibly it would have been recorded in one of the "legal Latin" cribs that were printed in the 15-1600s. My other source for names was some lists of UK names compiled more recently by the Catholic church, who basically use the crib sheets. I'm away from my books right now but I should be able to dig it out. JimKillock (disputatio) 17:37, 6 Iulii 2024 (UTC)

Found it: S. Maria Salvatoris in Australi Opere etc, found at A List of the Latin Names of Places in Great Britain and Ireland. There are some alternatives, on the lines of Sudouerca. JimKillock (disputatio) 17:45, 6 Iulii 2024 (UTC)

PS also found at The Record Interpreter: Wikisource JimKillock (disputatio) 18:26, 6 Iulii 2024 (UTC)

You got it! Well done for finding it so quickly. Since I doubt whether "Opus Australe" would be understood as a place name by readers, and also whether it's a fair translation of the original name, I might suggest going for "Sudoverca" from the same source in preference: but "Opus Australe" must at least be mentioned as alternative. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:25, 6 Iulii 2024 (UTC)

I'm easy on choices at Latin Wikipedia, that is a matter of preference, and there's nothing clearly settled. I imagine the form was used with more formal church documents, at some point, as it's used for several church names. JimKillock (disputatio) 18:29, 6 Iulii 2024 (UTC)

I'm a bit more tolerant on the translation aspect - there's a lot of literalism and often there are mistakes. Here, it's not very far off - Surrey is "south men / tribe" or similar, and "work" is the same general sense (work, fort, etc, all fairly interchangeable". But Sudoverca is fine and as you say recognisable. JimKillock (disputatio) 18:32, 6 Iulii 2024 (UTC)

True, it's not far off. All right, here it is, properly defined, in medieval Latin verse: Opus Australe. That proves to me that it wasn't just the odd vicar playing with Latin words. Lovely. And if Open Street Map says "Opus Australe" it must stay. I eat my words. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:03, 7 Iulii 2024 (UTC)

Just to say, @Andrew Dalby OSM gets its Latin from Wikidata, so it is a bit circular! But great that you've found some actual uses :) JimKillock (disputatio) 11:36, 7 Iulii 2024 (UTC)