Disputatio:Sigarellum

Have to run, will come back and add sources tomorrow morning.--Ioshus ^(disp) 23:38, 8 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Oh yeah, I completely changed things to tidy up the latin, and add some facts, and it isn't exactly eloquent yet.--Ioshus ^(disp) 23:41, 8 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

I've helped too. ;) IacobusAmor 00:12, 9 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Gratias, Iacobe!--Ioshus ^(disp) 16:42, 9 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

doctus/doctores

Doctor means something specific in this day and age. Not all people who are doctus are doctors. I vote rv back to doctos, beause, though rare, surely not everyone who studies the effects of smoking cigarettes on humans is a doctor. But anyone who knows their craft is doctus.--Ioshus ^(disp) 21:56, 9 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. I'm a doctor, but would you take my medical advice? >:o IacobusAmor 22:13, 9 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

As long as your medical advice includes women, wine, and as much food as I want. ;] --Ioshus ^(disp) 22:36, 9 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

I don't have a strong opinion on this point, but note that doctor = basically 'teacher', which implies (one would hope) a certain level of learnedness. Maybe the best plan would be to get rid of the medical doctors altogether and call the pertinent people investigatores (researchers), or whatever. IacobusAmor 22:13, 9 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you that doctor connotes a level of learnedness, but doctus denotes it. He who has learned about the effects of medicine may not teach anyone, but is certainly doctus in medicine. Times like this when I wish someone here were la-N =P! Let's see what Iustinus thinks.--Ioshus ^(disp) 22:36, 9 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Estne melius dicere "medicus" in loco "doctus"? Sinister Petrus 04:25, 17 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Oh, so am I an honorary la-N or something? Well, I hate to disappoint, but let me just belabor the obvious a bit here:

1. Doctor = instructor; also (since the middle ages) someone with a degree.
2. Medicus = medical doctor.
3. Doctus = learned, scholar, wise man.

What would I choose? In fact, to my mind, doctus sounds perfectly good here, even though I can't think of a good English word I would translate it with in this context. Doctor does not really work here, unless you want to say "Accoding to MD's...." Likewise, medicus is not really the mot juste, and if you add it, you have to take out the rerum medicarum, because what other kind of medicus is there? Docti are refered to VERY frequently in Renaissance Latin, to say nothing of its use in the Classical language.
Also, I need to stop working so hard on Wikipedia, or I'm never going to be a doctor myself ;) --Iustinus 18:42, 17 Ianuarii 2007 (UTC)

Fontes

At the conventiculum a number of years ago, someone gave a full presentation on the history of Latin sources on smoking tobacco. We really shoudl get him to contribute. Unfortunately, I'm totally blanking on his last name, so this may be difficult ;) --Iustinus 18:50, 17 Ianuarii 2007 (UTC)

OK, I got in touch with him. It looks like he'll be helping us! It sounds like he might even show up himself and do some editing, but if not, he'll at least mail me a copy of his presentation. --Iustinus 17:08, 19 Ianuarii 2007 (UTC)

Nice, Iustine. Macte!--Ioshus ^(disp) 17:33, 19 Ianuarii 2007 (UTC)

Cigars & Pipes?

I curious--if we're calling cigarettes fistulae nicotianae, what are we calling cigars & tobacco pipes? I'll say this much off hand--it seems to me that the word for cigarette ought to be a diminutive of the word for cigar (as it is in every other language I can find). I don't have a dictionary on me right now, but perseus doesn't give any indication that fistula is a diminutive (though it sure looks like one to me). If fistula is not a diminutive, what would the diminutive for fistula be? Fistulula? Valete--Bassus 23:21, 8 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Fistulella. Cigar, as we have it, is bacillum nicotianum or cylindrum ~ or sigarum. There's a cite, for the name, if I'm not mistaken. PONS, no? Fistula actually means, btw, "pipe". For pipe proper, PONS gives infundibulum ~ or fumisugium.--Ioshus ^(disp) 23:33, 8 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Fistulella? I hope not! I understand the diminutive of an -ul- to be -ell- itself: fistella —Mucius Tever 02:16, 9 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Ioshus. Actually, I was asking because I wasn't certain how a cigarette deserves to be called a fistula more than a pipe, or for that matter, a cigar—and, again, I don't understand why the pattern of calling a cigarette by the diminutive of a cigar ought not to be repeated in Latin. If we are Latinizing cigar, why not Latinize cigarette? (Would that be Sigarulum or Sigarolum?) It seems counter intuitive for the Latin to differ in this from so many other languages (esp so many other Romance languages). What exactly is PONS?Bassus 01:45, 9 Martii 2007 (UTC)

PONS. It might seem counterintuitive, but such is life. We go for sourced material, not coining. It's a pain in the culus going by the books, sometimes. For instance, having learnt Spanish first, I always want nunc to mean "never". This is clearly a huge difference from nunc proper = "now". So I guess, unless you can find some source for Sigariolum or whatever, I'm afraid counterintuitive we must be.--Ioshus ^(disp) 01:58, 9 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Respectfully, I don't understand the logic. Just because someone, somewhere, at some random time decided to call cigarettes "fistulae nicotianae," we must as well? Its not as though the Romans called them that--there were, after all, no cigarettes then to name. I think we ought to consider that we are (such as we are) part of the community that is trying to breathe some life back into the Lingua Latina, and that we owe it to the language, and to ourselves, to grow the language in a way that makes sense to living people. Who in his right mind would think that "tobacco pipes" makes sense, and why should we enshrine such a patently foolish term simply because it may be found in the sourced material of such a person? If a community of Latin speakers had survived unharmed up to our modern age, it would likely have named cigarettes by the same logic that other languages have. In fact, in a sense, such communities have survived: Cigarrillo (Español), Cigarette (Cigar=Cigare, Français), Sigaretta (Cigar=Sigaro, Italiano), Cigarro (Cigar=Charuto, Português). Latin, fistula nicotiana? It seems to me that we are seriously short changing this project if we strangle the language with such nonsense as "fistula nicotiana."--Bassus 05:07, 9 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Inventing words is against the principle of "no original research" and in general not a good idea for a secondary source like Wikipedia. Now if we're going to do it right and refer to sources for forms based on the same root, David Morgan cites:

• sigarellum, cigarette, from Vox Latina
• sigaretta, cigarette, from Levine's Latin Dictionary of 1967
• sigarum, cigar, from Perugini's Dizionario italiano-latino of 1976
• cigarrus, cigar (without a named source, just marked as "eccl.")

Iohannes Traupman also has sigărum and sigarellum in his Conversational Latin.

Against "fistula nicotiana" Morgan notes s.v. cigarette that "The defining quality of a fistula ("tube, pipe") is its hollowness; the word is thus appropriate rather for a smoking pipe (in which sense fistula is found in 18th-century texts)." —Mucius Tever 17:53, 9 Martii 2007 (UTC)

This certainly makes more sense to me, as well, Muke and Bassus. Iustinus promised me a source packet on tobacco and paraphernalia, but I haven't got it yet. For my part, I like sigarellum more than sigaretta, the latter looking too Italianish.--Ioshus ^(disp) 18:28, 9 Martii 2007 (UTC)

You mean fistula nicotiana is supposed to mean 'cigarette' ?! When I first saw the term, I assumed it meant '(tobacco) pipe' ! (A revived Roman from 2,000 years ago might well think it meant 'Nicot's pipe [the pipe having something to do with Jean Nicot]'.) In any case, quasi-native speakers—as of any language—would immediately shorten that to just plain fistula (or invent some slangy term for it). IacobusAmor 20:26, 9 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Muci, amice mi, the basis for the name of that slender cylinder of paper-wrapped tobacco that people light and smoke is in nearly every Wikipedian language to be found in a living population of speakers who understand something to serve as the formal name for that object. I may be able to cite Webster's dictionary when naming my English Wikipedia article about this object "cigarette," but Webster's is in turn basing its use of that name according to its usage in the Anglosphere. With Latin no such basis exists. Imagine that the only source we'd been able to find uses the term "fistula nicotiana." According to your principle, we'd be forced to call cigarettes thus, simply because someone, somewhere, at sometime, according to some reasoning which may or may not make sense to most other users of the Lain language, had published that a cigarette is in Latin a "fistula nicotiana". Now you've brought forth other sources that would name it differently. The sources disagree. Which has greater authority? None have based their terms on real usage of the Latin language. Who is left to decide which to use? We are--those of us who are trying to bring the Latin language back as something descriptive of the living, rather than something merely descriptive of the living two millennia ago. Imagine there had been no source whatsoever. Who would decide what to term the object? We would. Now imagine that there had been a sole source--otherwise reputable--which had published that a cigarette is to be called a "Marcus". Who would decide that this term is ludicrous and should be replaced by something based on sounder reasoning? We would. We are the equivalent for Latin of those living populations that serve as the anchor for the linguistic form in other languages. Collectively it is ours to decide whether these Neo-Latin sources got it right or not—and the Wikipedian system is the next best thing to a real, non-digital community of language users for serving in this function.

Ioshe, I agree with you, especially since -etta isn't any Latin diminutive that I've ever seen before, and I think that certainly should be the basis for the Latin term.

Muci, Ioshe, & Iacobe, I move that, if no one objects, we move this article under the heading "sigarellum" in by the end of Sunday, GMT.--Bassus 02:26, 10 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Basse. This group of people you are describing who is trying to be an authority on the language is not Wikipedia. An encyclopedia is a collection of knowledge about the world, not a language academy. Whatever our language is, if people have written about our topic in it, our encyclopedia will describe it in what our language calls it. (If altogether unknown to our language, the responsible route is to use foreign words that are understood, rather than to invent a term nobody will recognize or look for.) If there are many options, whether variant spellings (Iohannes, Ioannes) or variant roots altogether (computatrum, ordinatrum) we can exercise an editorial decision to favor one or the other, but we don't have the authority to create or suppress anything. And yes, our knowledge may be imperfect. But—and especially since Latin has only fallen out of use within the past couple centuries (not millennia; you may be thinking of the Romans?) and so much has been simply forgotten—to rush into the business of inventing words because we, personally, don't know the one that was commonly used is faithless and irresponsible; it does not promote knowledge of actual Latin if we go around counterfeiting coinages to suit us. If you would like to be a source for Latin usage you may publish elsewhere, and we can cite you; the encyclopedia is for those describing things established elsewhere in Latin established elsewhere. —Mucius Tever 23:40, 10 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Comments on the possibilities raised by Mucius, and two more :

sigarellum, cigarette, from Vox Latina <—OK; possible

sigaretta, cigarette, from Levine's Latin Dictionary of 1967 <—Bizarre suffix; I'd vote against it.

sigarum, cigar, from Perugini's Dizionario italiano-latino of 1976 <—OK (and isn't the A long?).

cigarrus, cigar (without a named source, just marked as "eccl.") <—The doubled R comes from the Spanish, and it may reflect [d] (see below).

sigărum (Traupman) <—OK, but what's with the short A and the stress on the antepenult ?

sigārum <—My recommendation for 'cigar' (note the long A).

sigarellum (Traupman) <— another vote for this one (but note that the A is short).

sigārulum <—Phonetically, this relates better to sigārum than sigărellum does.

Alternatively, if the etymology cited in the OED is correct, Spanish cigarro is a new use of a word that's already Latin : cicada (because a cigar reminded somebody of the body of a cicada), and that could then be our term, confusing millions (as vocabulary often does). IacobusAmor 03:06, 10 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, my dictionaries (RAE, AHD) give the ultimate source as Maya (apparently sik = ‘tobacco’). As for the length of the A, Italian at least suggests a short (sigaro is also stressed on the antepenult). —Mucius Tever

But in general the Maya dealt with Spaniards, not Italians, and Spanish cigarro is most definitely stressed on the penult. IacobusAmor 05:04, 11 Martii 2007 (UTC)

So it is now—but was it always? Pianigiani gives Spanish CÎGARRO [sic] as source for Italian sìgaro, and 'cigar' with initial stress is not unknown in Southern/Southwestern dialects of American English either. Clearly a change occurred, but do we know whether it was in Spanish to the penult, or in the other languages from it? —Mucius Tever 23:47, 11 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Gentlemen, it would be foolish of me to fail to concede that you are far more experienced students of language that I am—so I'll defer to your judgement in this—but does this discussion concerning long and short syllables and their placement relate at this point to the question of whether or not we should change "fistula nicotiana" to "sigarellum"? It seems to me as though "cicada" is off the table, and everyone has voted (some a couple of times over) for sigarellum. Is there anything holding us back at this point?-Bassus 04:21, 14 Martii 2007 (UTC)

At best, fistula nicotiana should mean 'Nicot pipe' or 'Nicot's pipe' or 'nicotine pipe', so it's not quite right ; but who's "everyone," Kemo Sabe ? My vote was for sigārum 'cigar' and sigārulum 'cigarette'. And how are you going to translate 'cheroot' ? IacobusAmor 13:41, 14 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Clearly a cheroot would have to be buncus ;) —Mucius Tever 01:17, 19 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Well, Tonto, I suppose I meant "everyone" to mean "everyone who has weighed in on the issue and voted thus far." I certainly didn't mean "everyone who could possibly have something to contribute to the discussion." I think its better that we're now discussing the issue on the disputatio section for some variation of sigarellum or sigarulum than on the disputatio for fistula nicotiana. How many more people needed to weigh in on the inappropriateness of Nicot's pipe before users of the Vicipaedia could find the cigarette article under a more useful heading? That said, I've done some sampling in Perseus and I happen to agree with you. The diminutive -ellum suffix is almost always applied to a noun ending in a consonant followed by -rum (castrum>castellum, cerebrum>cerebellum, clostrum>clostellum, cribrum>cribellum, labrum>labellum, lucrum>lucellum, plaustrum>plostellum, rostrum>rostellum, sacrum>sacellum). For the -ulum ending, however, I can find "crustum>crustulum" and "fanum>fanulum"—since we're dealing with sigarum and not sigarrum, sigarulum makes more sense to me.-Bassus 08:51, 19 Martii 2007 (UTC)

Besides being applied to words in -[C]rum, -ellum is also the diminutive of a diminutive (capitulum -> capitellum, iusculum -> iuscellum, vasculum -> vascellum, etc.; cf. also fistula -> fistella above) which survives into common Romance; sigarellum is certainly intended to be a direct translation of cigar[r]illo. 'Sigarulum' would be an orphan form with no precedent, albeit suitable if you're discarding the good of recognizability in favor of a perceived good Latin style—though the people who in general do this are the people who invented terms like fistula Nicotiana. —Mucius Tever 01:32, 20 Martii 2007 (UTC)