Disputatio:Iohannes Boccacius

Latin Name

Looks like it was Bocca(t/c)ius. I don't have time to research this thoroughly at the moment, but here are two attestations:

• 1472, Genealogie deorum gentilium ad Vgonem inclytum Hierusalẽ & Cypri regem secundum Iohannem Boccatiũ de certaldo liber primus
• 1473, Liber Johãnis Boccacij de Certaldo De de montibus: syluis: fontibus: lacubus: fluminibus: stagnis: seu paludibus: de nominibus maris:

--Iustinus 18:08, 11 Iunii 2007 (UTC)

Good enough to be getting on with. Medieval texts often vary between -ti- and -ci-: we choose the one that makes more sense, I think. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 20:08, 11 Iunii 2007 (UTC)

Pursuant to the conversation below, I have added several more attestations and moved them up to the lemma where they belong. To no one's surprise, a lot more variation... so fell free to discuss. --Iustinus (disputatio) 00:40, 25 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Iohannes vs. Ioannes

Cf. Vicipaedia:Taberna#Categoria:Iohannes Sebastianus_Bach

Iacobe, is there a reason you are changing Iohannes to Ioannes? As you can see in the attestations, he seems to have spelled it with an h himself. Has there been some sort of agreement to have a single standard spelling for this name? I've always considered this a matter of attestation, not standardization. --Iustinus (disputatio) 23:21, 23 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Yes, for lemmata in reference works, standardization ordinarily prevails (variants can be added). We have Beniaminus Franklinius and Georgius Washingtonius under spellings that they themselves may never have used. We have Christophorus Columbus, with the first name Christophorus, not, as his signature plainly attests, XpoFERENS, with a macron over the pee (or, rather, the Greek ar) and curious capitalization. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 00:44, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but Franklinius, Washingtonius, and Christophorus are all well attested, just as Iohannes is. I don't think Columbus intended for Chistoferens to be his real Latin name, it's usually interpreted as a jocular form... still, it could reasonably be argued that it's a legitimate form. Even then, I would say this falls under the same category as Amadeus vs. Theophilus: usus saeculorum sometimes takes priority. As for Χρ̅ο- let's not reduce to the absurd here.

Granted, I have been out of the loop for several years here, but the treatment of proper names has been done this way since not long after I arrived. I do recall arguing with you about standardization before (Nichelle Nichols, Gulielmus...) but if someone has an attested name, and it's good Latin (and Iohannes is indisputably good Latin, as opposed to, say, Katherina ETA: or for that matter Χρ̅οferens...) I really don't think we should be trying to improve it. And unless you've managed to shift the consensus in my absence, you should not be shifting articles around, especially not ones with good attestations.

--Iustinus (disputatio) 01:15, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

My route to the article was via Andrew's "Categoria:Ioannes Boccacius," and the purpose of the change in the lemma was to make it agree with the category. (The converse takes more effort, requiring the creation of a new category and the deletion of the old.) The internal inconsistency was glaring, and the last thing readers want in a reference work is inconsistency. ¶ The name Ioannes Boccatius de Cetaldo is attested here and probably elsewhere. ¶ The man's own spelling, compared with standard spelling, is atrocious. The Genealogy, as given in the I Tatti Renaissance Library, starts with a prohemium (prooemium), and its fifth paragraph attests the forms Cicladas (Cyclades), Egei (Aegaei), Ylliricum (Illyricum), Traciam (Thraciam), Grecorum (Graecorum), Meonii (Maeonii), Ycarei (Icarei? Icarii? [people of Icaria]), Phenicis (Phoenicis). These medievalisms, or perhaps rather, evidences of a Latin dialect that Renaissance & modern scholarship has made nonstandard, may be fun for specialists (and most definitely important to preserve, somewhere, not least because they give clues to pronunciation in his dialect), but confusing & offputting for nonspecialists, and we don't feature them as lemmata. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 11:59, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Iacobe, I can't get that link you gave to work. Is it the same portrait as this one? --Iustinus (disputatio) 00:13, 25 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

So a writer who preferred prohemium to prooemium preferred Iohannes to Ioannes. An idiosyncrasy of his dialect seems to have been to insert aitches between vowels. One wonders how he pronounced them. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 13:35, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Obviously the category and the article should match, and I am glad that is what you are doing. But my initial interpretation was that you were going to insist on one standard form for Io(h)annes across the whole wiki, which, to be honest, strikes me as sheer madness as both forms are perfectly good Latin.

Prooemium is of course from προοίμιον, and Ioannes from Ἰωάννης. And there is of course a long tradition of using medial h to represent a diaeresis (Israhel, ahenum etc.). And we do normally standardize those atiches away (which arguably might apply here, because the L&S mentions that Ioannes sometimes scans as two syllables, pointing to the use of h to break the diphthong). But I don't think the phenomenon is exactly the same here:

1. The name is not originally Ἰωάννης but יוֹחָנָן (Yōḥånnån). Hebrew ḥ is at least sometimes represented in Latin as h (translitteratio linguae Hebraicae)
2. Greek has no good way to represent medial h, though transliterations do show that it existed in some cases (e.g. Euhēmerus < Εὐήμερος < ἡμέρα (to which contrast Ēvander < Εὔανδρος < ἀνήρ with spiritus lenis), סַנְהֶדְרִין sanhɛdhrīn < συνέδριον < ἕδρα), so it is not surprising, or terribly diagnostic, that the Greek form is always Ἰωάννης.
3. In later Latin Iohannes with an aitch is extremely common, and leaves its mark on English John and German Johann, as opposed to, say, Israhel > Eng. Israel, Germ. Israel. Google books does not allow Latin as a language filter, but if we search in the accusative case, which is unlikely to be any language but Latin, Google lists about 2,481,000 hits for Ioannem and Joannem, versus about 1,556,000 for Iohannem and Johannem—the forms with aitch are less common than those without, but they're still nearly 40% of the total!) Many of these sources have quite standardized orthography as well, so they can't be attributed to simple medievalism.

--Iustinus (disputatio) 19:49, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

You may have noticed that in my above comment I orriginally included a note: <!--I could swear I'd seen a coptic example of this phenomenon as well, but I can't remember what it was-->. Well, I just remembered what it was, or at least one example, and ... well the fact that I would forget this here is quite ironic: in Coptic Ἰωάννης is written Ⲓⲱϩⲁⲛⲛⲏⲥ Iōhannēs, which shows pretty conclusively that at least some people were actually pronouncing that [h] in antiquity. --Iustinus (disputatio) 22:24, 25 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

OK, and likewise Gothic writes 𐌹̈𐍉𐌷𐌰𐌽𐌽𐌴𐍃 Ïōhannēs. --Iustinus (disputatio) 18:28, 27 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

I've reverted the change: it was clearly precipitate since the only attestations on the page are for "Iohannes". Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:54, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Not, however, attached to the lemma. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 13:35, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

I suggest, on the issue of standardization of Io(h)annes, that we discuss it at the Taberna. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:54, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

In view of the vehemence of Justin's objection ("you should," the most aggressive rhetoric in the language, is often best reserved for later stages of polite argument, not brought out at the start), I'd have reverted myself, but you beat me to it! ¶ Someone had placed the attestations way down in the article and had forgotten to attach them to the lemma. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 11:59, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

I apologize for my vehemence. In my defence, I intended "you should not" to be read in the context of "I really don't think we should" in the previous sentence, but I realize that my final phrasing made that unclear. Still, even if you grant me this, I probably did come accross as brusque in general, so again, I am sorry. I was, frankly, worried that you would make a project of this without consensus, and I was anxious to nip it in the bud if possible.

As for the attestations, mea culpa, let's fix that, and add in yours.

--Iustinus (disputatio) 19:49, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Linguists usually give alternatives parenthetically, in a manner that would yield a composite lemma, thus:

Io(h)annes Bocca(c,t)ius.

What's the story on the cee versus the tee? Is the cee to be preferred, as it is in modern languages? If so, perhaps an apt initium would accommodate what we know thus, spelling everything out, rather than compressing in the linguistic style above:

Ioannes Boccacius, vel Iohannes Boccacius (nomen saepe a se ipso Iohannes Boccatius, Johãnes Boccacius, etc. significatum), fuit. . . .

And appropriate attestations should be attached to the variants. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 14:00, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

I don't much like the look of that composite lemma! I remain very mildly in favour of Iohannes Boccacius for the article, since this spelling seems to result from early attestations, and very mildly in favour of Categoria:Ioannes Boccacius, since this is closer to an ideal Vicipaedia form and consistency in detail is desirable in category names. If a consensus is against me, the consensus has it, as far as I'm concerned :) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:04, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

I too would rather avoid a parenthetically composite lemma. That may be appropriate in some circumstances, but I don't think it fits in the context of Wikipedia, at least not in the prose of an opening sentence. As for the c vs t, that is a bit thorny... as you know, in medieval Latin -ci- and -ti- are freely interchangeable before a vowel. I guess ideally we'd want to go with the etymology, but I have no idea what that is in this case. As you can see above, Andrew originally gave his seal of approval to the -ci- form as making the most sense... I assume his reasoning was that it's spelled with a -ci- in modern Italian, and that was my thinking too. --Iustinus (disputatio) 19:49, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)