Disputatio:Blog

de titulo

Ugh. --Ioscius^∞ 09:19, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

ROFL! Commentarium Interrete (pervulgatum, promptum, editum, inflictum), sive Anglice "blog"? -- Robert.Baruch 02:07, 11 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Sub-rubbish

I've complained repeatedly about dictionary rubbish infesting this wiki. But how about something ever lower - blogis? That citation isn't even a dictionary, it's just one random guy's musings! It's also a completely ridiculous form, borrowings into Latin (other than Greek i-stems) never become i-stems, if it were to be Latinised, the forms following attested patterns would be blogum, blogus, bloga -ae (if it had a reason to be feminine, which it doesn't), and blog -is. Personally I would leave it indeclinable for now; the verb I suppose must be blogare following the normal pattern.

Now the point is that copying the word formation of random people on the internet makes no sense. It's worse than forming words here on Vicipaedia. We, at least, are more than one person, and can debate the proper form of words, as we actually have on several disputationes. The man that coined 'blogis' doesn't know Latin, anyway, and ridiculously argued that 'blogum' and 'blogus' must be avoided because they sound like 'bubblegum' and 'bogus' (which they don't in any reasonable pronunciation) but what kind of childish argument is that for us to be using?

'Blog' is an ugly word in any language, I say, and we shouldn't debase Latin by borrowing it unless speakers spontaneously do and we need to document it, and that is why we should leave it indeclinable as it is not Latin. This is exactly how you argued against my ringum (which is surely more reasonable than blogis) but apparently you'd rather follow a goofball posting on his own site than a reasonable (comparative) expert on these pages. Pantocrator 04:14, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

How exactly would 'blogare' be the normal pattern? The stem of the word is blogg- as is clear from inflected forms (blogging, blogged) and some derived forms (blogger). It's like rule #1 that you don't just look at the "nominative" or citation form. —Mucius Tever 12:25, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

The doubled gee is an artifact of English orthography, in which it prevents the sound of /g/ from "softening" to /dʒ/ before high vowels, so I'd say the "stem" is blog-, and since the longest-surviving productive Latin conjugation was the first, blogare would be the way to go, if one really wanted to make a verb out of the English. IacobusAmor 12:48, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Doubling a 'g' doesn't prevent softening; cf. suggestion and exaggeration, which are words regularly spelled. You'll generally see the doubling at morpheme boundaries—the phenomenon is exactly the same as that seen in Latin 'mel, mellis', where the extra letter is dropped because it is not relevant to the pronunciation. In the case of English, of course, it's not the consonant affected by a doubling, but the vowel; 'bloging' would be pronounced with a "long" o, where spelling it with two g's orthographically closes the syllable and suggests a "short" vowel. The traditional English pronunciation of Latin uses the same rules: blogat would have a "long" o, while bloggat would have a "short" one. I don't see us having the authority to overturn this. —Mucius Tever 22:53, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Of course this bloging must be pronounced something like /bloudʒiŋ/; to keep the gee "hard" with the o "long," we'd probably spell it bloguing, as in the genuine words disemboguing & voguing. ¶ Against your suggestion & exaggeration (and presumably other words), which involve polysyllabic baseforms, we have clogging, cogging, dogging, flogging, fogging, hogging, jogging, logging, slogging, sogging and probably other words formed from monosyllabic baseforms, like blog, all of which take the double gee before a high vowel and preserve the "short" o. IacobusAmor 23:06, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Yes, we probably would have a u to suggest the g is 'hard'; but not necessarily: cf. tiger, auger, bagel, etc. Many English words use an unmarked 'g' as "hard" even before a front vowel, so marking it as such is a common device but not a necessary one—and this is the reason why I don't think that doubling the 'g' contributes to the "hardness" of it: I don't think there's a rule in English that would turn a final "g" to /dʒ/ in inflections. (It may certainly happen for different spellings of /ɡ/, e.g. the 'gue' in 'demagogue', which goes to /dʒ/ in 'demagogy'.) In fact, I think that spelling final "g" as just /ɡ/ is actually the orthographic device we use to indicate that it doesn't change to /dʒ/ when inflected or derived. So I would have to consider the 'gg' seen in all those cases you mention to be simply the same process as is seen with consonants that aren't known for mutating their pronunciations: padding, lobbing, hitting, sipping, sinning, humming, slurring, gassing, etc. ¶ Disembogue I think is an example of the corresponding principle, where the "e" is added to suggest the pronunciation of the vowel "o"; but as it is not part of the stem, it is dropped to form disemboguing, where it would add nothing because the syllable is already "open", and retained in disemboguement where it needs to suggest the "long" o in a (phonetically) closed syllable by making it orthographically "open". —Mucius Tever 00:32, 11 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Doubling the 'g' is an English convention, not a Latin one. Pantocrator 12:44, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

On the contrary, making the 'g' single is an English convention. You will notice it in Latin words borrowed into English: transmitto -> transmit, transmitted, cancello -> cancel, cancellation, recurro -> recur, recurring. Every now and then English will double a letter, ostensibly to preserve the pronunciation (e.g. transfero -> transfer, transferring), but in this case that g has been double in the stem since Middle English logge. —Mucius Tever 22:28, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

I prefer blog indecl.; but if (despite "noli fingere") people want a new form, remember that a blog is a weblog, a 'blog; call it an ephemeris interretialis in full, and if you want to compress it, maybe ephemerialis (-idis, f.) or interretiemeris (-idis, f.). :) IacobusAmor 04:56, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Compounds like those aren't very nice either. I'd simply call it most of the time situs or situs interretialis, as I do in English. If you need a shorter full form, how about situs diurnus, which should hardly ever need further disambiguation by interretialis? In that case, the full lemma form could be situs interretialis diurnus (pretty much a literal rendering of 'Web log').

A website (situs interretialis) isn't the same thing as a weblog. Diurnus is 'daily', but blogs aren't typically updated daily: some are updated hourly, others weekly, others at random times. IacobusAmor 12:30, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

A blog is a type of website; it's surely not wrong to call a blog a website. While diurnus literally means 'daily', so does ephemeris! Pantocrator 12:44, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

It would be pleonastic, as we can see if we did the same thing as you've suggested and made the English a websitelog, which it ordinarily isn't. Indeed, it's lost the we- of web in weblog. IacobusAmor 12:52, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

If I seem overly excited about this, it is because we are an authority on Latin use today - as I pointed out at the ringum page - and I have certain views on how words should and should not be formed. Pantocrator 05:55, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Of course, as befits any good wikipedian. I marvel though that sometimes your "certain views on how words should and should not be formed" are very good indeed, yet sometimes (ringum case in point) they are mystifyingly ill grounded. --Ioscius^∞ 09:21, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

I should also give my opinion, as I have before, that a blog is indeed an ephemeris interretialis, neque blog, bloggum, blogis whatever garbage. --Ioscius^∞ 09:22, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Ephemeris is not wrong. However it is considerably ambiguous because the word also means newspaper (like Ephemeris!) and the astronomical table (a meaning that arose in Latin); both of which can be interretialis. That's why I suggested situs diurnus which is not likely to be used for anything else. Pantocrator 12:44, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

"Ephemeris" means something written daily, just like "situs diurnus" would. It just happens that one has a Greek root and the other is Latin. —Mucius Tever 22:38, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

I still prefer the Greek histologium. —Mucius Tever 12:25, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

It's wrong if we're an authority on Latin use — as a tertiary source with a policy of not making things up, it's our job to depend on authorities for Latin use. —Mucius Tever 12:25, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Random websites about words that should exist in Latin are certainly not authorities. It's the honest truth that Latin today is not like most living languages and can't be treated like one; we have to invent usage in many instances, and make judgements about good usage in many more.

Whether we like it or not many people do copy our usages just because of our visibility and the fact that there are few accessible standards for Latin. That's what I mean about being and authority; and as such, we ought to be discriminating. Pantocrator 12:44, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Who said random websites would be authorities? We should have similar criteria for reliability as a wikipedia like en: does. But we don't have to invent anything. The grammar, certainly, is already all there; and if some random lexical item is foreign to the Latin corpus it can sit back and remain a foreign word just like it would in any other language until we find a respectable source that translates it. —Mucius Tever 22:38, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Hear, hear. --Ioscius^∞ 23:20, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I'm with you 100% there. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 10:35, 11 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Pantocrator's point is valid. Yes, we must follow authorities when they exist, but in practice we are an authority (because we are probably the biggest online source of Latin dealing with modern concepts) and we know that people use us in this way. Hence, when looking for authority via Google, we find that we ourselves (and mirror sites) contaminate the results ... Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 13:08, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

All the more reason not to assume additional authority. The Latin should be made good; it shouldn't be made up. —Mucius Tever 22:38, 10 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Ephemeris is latin for any regularly kept "log of daily observations and measuremnts" and is commonly used in this sense in science (especially astronomy). Ephemeris interretialis would thus suitably translate blog; but it would also translate many other close concepts as well which would have to be distinguished by a disambig. Many newspapers are often also called ephemerides, etc.. Thus, having a page specifically about Blog (indecl) I think would still be required since the page would be not about a latin concept but about a concept framed in the english language. The "blogis" or whatever with its dubious source can still be mentioned as a suggested translation, but we should be clear that it is only SUGGESTED by a particular internet site.--Rafaelgarcia 00:09, 11 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Gentlemen, I give you Blog. Hash it out there if it still needs hashing. Should we copy this discussion to the disputatio there? --Ioscius^∞ 00:23, 11 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Good move! --Neander 00:59, 11 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

'Histologium'

With only one mention thus far, I'm surprised more consideration hasn't been put towards the Greek histologium. Seems to me it's the best option, by far. It's declinable, so much more useful than blog; it's not silly like blogis, blogum and the rest; it's not ambiguous like ephemeris, since histologium doesn't currently mean anything; and lastly, it doesn't involve diurnus, which would only apply to a very small amount of blogs. Nos habere victorem puto! Mattie 02:55, 26 Septembris 2010 (UTC)

Hello Mattie. That sounds good. My lexicon Lexicon Vilborgianum (as I call it in Latin), of the second edition of 2009, has one name in Latin for "blog": commentarii interretiales (-orum, mpl). I've added it here long time ago, but I didn't tell. I should have. But to Latinizise "blog" may also work.

Donatello (disputatio) 03:44, 7 Martii 2013 (UTC).