Disputatio:Malum

Ok...you mean washington state? Not a whole lot of apples in DC...what's vendabentur?--Usor:Ioscius 03:04, 1 Martii 2006 (UTC)

I didn't think I had to put washington state because the Vashingtonia article lists both washington state and washington DC. Vendebantur is the 3rd person passive imperfect plural of vendo. Alexanderr 05:19, 1 Martii 2006 (UTC)

In my most recent edit I removed "arboribus" after conjoining it with a sentence that already addresses the subject. I hope the "it" can be invisible in this case, and that I haven't screwed anything up. Alexanderr 05:45, 1 Martii 2006 (UTC)

Is this reference to the USofA usefull here? Does it add anything to the contents of the article? I wonder. --Agricola 18:39, 21 Augusti 2006 (UTC)

Disambiguation

There are some problems with disambiguation here.

1. Mălum, of course, means "evil", the noun. Since we don't allow accents in article titles, there's no way to distinguish them, and conceptually it seems that "evil" might supercede "apple." This might be fixed by moving this article to malus: it seems to me that while in English, words like "apple," "banana," "pear" and so on, default to meaning a fruit, and secondarily mean a tree, the botany is much more important in the Latin language. In other words, one might expect fruits to be covered in articles on trees, rather than vice versa. Conversely, as far as evil is concerned, it makes more sense to have an article on malum "the concept of evil" than on malus "evil man."
2. While "apple" is the basic meaning of mālum (when it is used without a qualifier it pretty much always means "apple"), it is also used for other fruits:
   • Malum Cydoneum = quince
   • Malum Punicum, malum granatum = pomegranate
   • Malum Persicum = peach
   • Malum Medicum = citron (citrum)
   • [Malum] Armeniacum = aprecot (praecoquus)

And this pattern can be easily extended: I'm quite sure that I've encountered malum Sinense vel sim. for "orange" somewhere, and both David Morgan and I have independantly proposed malum Tingitanum for "tangerine" (seems like a no-brainer to me).

I'm not certain what the best solution is, but it is clear that we should have these issues in mind, and put otheruses text at the top of the articles, whatever we end up deciding. --Iustinus 14:55, 21 Augusti 2006 (UTC)