Latin Wikipedia

Last updated

Latin Wikipedia
Wikipedia-logo-v2-la.svg
The logo of Latin Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from various writing systems
Latin Wikipedia main page screenshot 15.12.2013.png
Main Page of the Latin Wikipedia
Type of site
Online encyclopedia
Available in Latin
Country of origin United States
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Created by Jimmy Wales
URL la.wikipedia.org
CommercialNo
Users 143
LaunchedMay 2002
Current statusActive

The Latin Wikipedia (Latin : Vicipaedia or Vicipaedia Latina) is the Latin language edition of Wikipedia, created in May 2002. As of August2024, it has about 139,000 articles. While all primary content is in Latin, modern languages such as English, Italian, French, German or Spanish are often used in discussions, since many users find this easier.

Contents

Professional Latinists have observed a gradual improvement in the encyclopedia. According to Robert Gurval, chairman of the UCLA classics department, "the articles that are good are in fact very good," though some contributors do not write the language perfectly. [1] The Latin Wikipedia was the first edition of Wikipedia written in a defunct language; others such as the Old Church Slavonic Wikipedia came later. [2]

Modern vocabulary and coining policies

When the Latin Wikipedia began, the predominant topics were those having to do with classical history, but beginning in 2006, a group of new contributors greatly expanded the coverage of 20th-century topics, such as pop culture and technology. [1]

The official policy of Vicipaedia is that neologisms and user coinings are not allowed ("Noli fingere!" Latin for "Don't coin/make up things"). [3] In order to deal with concepts that did not exist in Classical or Medieval Latin, terms from modern Latin sources are used, such as botanical Latin, scientific Latin, 18th- and 19th-century Latin language encyclopedias and books, the official Vatican dictionary of modern Latin, [4] as well as current Latin newspapers and radio shows, such as Ephemeris [5] and Radio Bremen. [6]

As in any language with a broad international character, often more than one correct term exists for a given concept (just as in English a certain car part is called a "bonnet" by British speakers but a "hood" by Americans). In Latin the existence of multiple synonyms is even more prevalent since the language has been in continuous use over a wide geographical area for over 2000 years. Sometimes the same concept is represented by different terms in classical, medieval, scientific and modern Latin. In general Vicipaedia adopts the oldest or classical term for the page name, with redirects from any others; major alternatives are listed in the article with footnote references. There is often lively debate among editors about shades of meaning. The practice of avoiding invented words and giving references for alternative terms agrees well with the general Wikipedia insistence on verifiability and the rule against original research.

Many universities and other institutions [7] have official Latin names. In fields where Latin is the current standard language, Vicipaedia normally adopts official names as pagenames, even if they belong to scientific or technical, rather than to classical Latin. This applies to:

When occasionally a term for a modern concept cannot be found, the customary practice is to do exactly what most other languages do: to borrow an international word (often from a Romance language or English). Such direct borrowing was done for the particle names photon (Latin : photon ), and gluon (Latin : gluon ) and for the unit of temperature Kelvin (Latin : Kelvinus ). The word is given a Latin morphology if this can be done easily, or, if not, used unchanged in its foreign form; but many international words already have a Latin or Graeco-Latin appearance, because Greek and Latin have always served as sources of new scientific terminology.

Orthography

Latin Wikipedia made it policy [8] for all to follow the more widespread contemporary late 20th century orthographical habit of distinguishing u (pronounced as [u]) from v (pronounced as [w] in Classical Latin and as [v] in Ecclesiastical Latin) but not i (pronounced as [i]) from j (pronounced as [j] in both Classical and Ecclesiastical Latin). This orthographical practice was not without detractors, who claimed that it is a copy of the Italian spelling reform in which the i/j distinction is lost but the u/v distinction is maintained. [9]

The Latin Wikipedia logo reads "VICIPÆDIA", displaying the "Æ". However, in accordance with contemporary practice, Vicipaedia does not use ligatures in its articles for the diphthongs written ae ("Æ", "æ") and oe ("Œ", "œ"), even though in Latin a diphthong like the ae in aes is pronounced differently from an hiatus like the ae in aer, both in the classical and even more so in the Italianate pronunciation. The ligatures were adopted by the Romans to save space, and æ and œ in particular were later maintained by Latin typographers to distinguish the diphthong from the hiatus. Latin Wikipedia has chosen another convention, namely to write hiatus with the diaeresis: , . If Latin Wikipedia users prefer, however, they can activate a gadget under user preferences that automatically displays ae and oe without the diaeresis as ligatures on the pages.

Latin Wikipedia, in common with the majority of modern printed Latin, does not require the marking of long vowels in words (in Latin textbooks this is usually done by adding a macron over a character, as for example, the e in stēlla.) Thus, both terra and terrā are written simply as terra, although the former is in the nominative case, while the latter in the ablative. The context usually makes clear which one is being used, though the use of macron or apex is allowed when the distinction is necessary.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diacritic</span> Modifier mark added to a letter

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ⟨ó⟩, grave ⟨ò⟩, and circumflex ⟨ô⟩, are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.

Latin phonology is the system of sounds used in various kinds of Latin. This article largely deals with what features can be deduced for Classical Latin as it was spoken by the educated from the late Roman Republic to the early Empire. Evidence comes in the form of comments from Roman grammarians, common spelling mistakes, transcriptions into other languages, and the outcomes of various sounds in the Romance languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Æ</span> Ligature of the Latin letters A and E

Æ is a character formed from the letters a and e, originally a ligature representing the Latin diphthong ae. It has been promoted to the status of a letter in some languages, including Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. It was also used in Old Swedish before being changed to ä. The modern International Phonetic Alphabet uses it to represent the near-open front unrounded vowel. Diacritic variants include Ǣ/ǣ, Ǽ/ǽ, Æ̀/æ̀, Æ̂/æ̂ and Æ̃/æ̃.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ø</span> Letter of the Latin alphabet used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sámi languages

Ø is a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sámi languages. It is mostly used as to represent the mid front rounded vowels, such as and, except for Southern Sámi where it is used as an diphthong.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ä</span> Letter of the Latin alphabet

Ä is a character that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it represents the open central unrounded vowel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Œ</span> Ligature of the Latin letters O and E

Œ is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used in borrowings from Greek that originally contained the diphthong οι, and in a few non-Greek words. These usages continue in English and French. In French, the words that were borrowed from Latin and contained the Latin diphthong written as œ now generally have é or è; but œ is still used in some non-learned French words, representing open-mid front rounded vowels, such as œil ("eye") and sœur ("sister").

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ë</span> Latin letter E with diaeresis; used in Albanian, Dutch, French, and Afrikaans

Ë, ë (e-diaeresis) is a letter in the Albanian, Kashubian, Emilian, Romagnol, Ladin, and Lenape alphabets. As a variant of the letter e, it also appears in Acehnese, Afrikaans, Belarusian, Breton, Dutch, English, Filipino, French, Luxembourgish, Piedmontese, Russian, the Abruzzese dialect of the Neapolitan language, and the Ascolano dialect. The letter is also used in Seneca, Taiwanese Hokkien, Turoyo, and Uyghur when written in Latin script.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English alphabet</span> Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters

Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century. During the centuries that followed, various letters entered or fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised:

In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Dravidian languages, some Finno-Ugric languages, Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan, and Xhosa. Some languages in the past likely had the distinction even though their descendants do not, with an example being Latin and its descendent Romance languages.

English rarely uses diacritics, which are symbols indicating the modification of a letter's sound when spoken. Most of the affected words are in terms imported from other languages. The two dots accent, the grave accent, and the acute accent are the only diacritics native to Modern English, and their usage has tended to fall off except in certain publications and particular cases.

Romanization of Greek is the transliteration (letter-mapping) or transcription (sound-mapping) of text from the Greek alphabet into the Latin alphabet.

French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language. It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100–1200 AD, and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite enormous changes to the pronunciation of the language in the intervening years. Even in the late 17th century, with the publication of the first French dictionary by the Académie française, there were attempts to reform French orthography.

Diacritical marks of two dots¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in several languages for several different purposes. The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerous others. For example, in Albanian, ë represents a schwa. Such diacritics are also sometimes used for stylistic reasons.

Syllable stress of botanical names varies with the language spoken by the person using the botanical name. In English-speaking countries, the Botanical Latin places syllable stress for botanical names derived from ancient Greek and Latin broadly according to two systems, either the Reformed academic pronunciation, or the pronunciation developed initially in some large part by British gardeners, horticulturists, naturalists, and botanists of the 19th century. The two systems of pronunciation are sometimes referred to as the "classical method" and the "ecclesiastical method". The two systems differ significantly in pronunciation,α but little in syllable stress.

Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography, which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography, introduced in 1982, corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics.

The modern Corsican alphabet uses twenty-two basic letters taken from the Latin alphabet with some changes, plus some multigraphs. The pronunciations of the English, French, Italian or Latin forms of these letters are not a guide to their pronunciation in Corsican, which has its own pronunciation, often the same, but frequently not. As can be seen from the table below, two of the phonemic letters are represented as trigraphs, plus some other digraphs. Nearly all the letters are allophonic; that is, a phoneme of the language might have more than one pronunciation and be represented by more than one letter. The exact pronunciation depends mainly on word order and usage and is governed by a complex set of rules, variable to some degree by dialect. These have to be learned by the speaker of the language.

The traditional English pronunciation of Latin, and Classical Greek words borrowed through Latin, is the way the Latin language was traditionally pronounced by speakers of English until the early 20th century. Although this pronunciation is no longer taught in Latin classes, it is still broadly used in the fields of biology, law, and medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Umlaut (diacritic)</span> Diacritic mark to indicate sound shift

Umlaut is a name for the two dots diacritical mark as used to indicate in writing the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels.

French exhibits perhaps the most extensive phonetic changes of any of the Romance languages. Similar changes are seen in some of the northern Italian regional languages, such as Lombard or Ligurian. Most other Romance languages are significantly more conservative phonetically, with Spanish, Italian, and especially Sardinian showing the most conservatism, and Portuguese, Occitan, Catalan, and Romanian showing moderate conservatism.

Diaeresis is a name for the two dots diacritical mark as used to indicate the separation of two distinct vowel letters in adjacent syllables when an instance of diaeresis occurs, so as to distinguish from a digraph or diphthong.

References

  1. 1 2 Gomes, Lee (29 September 2007). "Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Latin Isn't Dead on 'Vicipaedia' – Online Reference Features Britannia Spears, Disneyi; Disputing Computatrum". The Wall Street Journal . Retrieved 30 September 2011.
  2. Kamusella, Tomasz (17 June 2021). Politics and the Slavic Languages. Routledge. p. 95. ISBN   978-1-000-39599-0.
  3. la:Vicipaedia:Noli fingere/en
  4. "Parvum Verborum Novatorum Lexicum". Vatican.va. Retrieved 7 October 2012.
  5. "Ephemeris". Ephemeris.alcuinus.net. 27 April 2009. Retrieved 7 October 2012.
  6. "Radiobremen". Radiobremen.de. 2 February 2009. Archived from the original on 18 June 2010. Retrieved 7 October 2012.
  7. For example, the Royal Society, whose charter () is in Latin.
  8. la:Vicipaedia:De orthographia/en
  9. "Schola Latina Universalis". Avitus.alcuinus.net. Retrieved 7 October 2012.