Disputatio:Mechanema velocitatis mutatorium

de titulo

Ubi fontem huius nominis invenisti, o Fulmen? Non in te dubium habeo, at curiosus sum.--Ioscius 22:47, 19 Iulii 2006 (UTC)

This has to change. Mechanema is not a word, and there had to be a better way to say 'gear(s)' if that's what's meant. Pantocrator 05:53, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

What do you mean mechanema is not a word? [1]? --Ioscius^∞ 06:43, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Furthermore this is exactly what Morgan suggests (albeit for gear shift). What you want is probably rota dentata but please wait for other people to have a word on the subject before moving it and changing all the links everywhere on the website. --Ioscius^∞ 07:01, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

I always do wait a few days on anything controversial. Pantocrator 07:52, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

That's hardly the case, or I wouldn't have mentioned it. --Ioscius^∞ 08:22, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

The title is perfectly ok; rota dentata is the gear wheel itself. this page is about the transmission.--24.107.235.195 10:50, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

That was my suspicion too. --Ioscius^∞ 12:09, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

OK, I see that mechanema does exist, though it can't be common (mechanismus is also found). And gears need a different article than transmission, and this article seems to need rewriting, though I won't be the one to do it given my Latin.

As for 'gear', I looked in the first Latin source I could think of: Huygens's Horologium Oscillatorium; he uses just 'rota', with the exact meaning inferrable from context.

Finally I find this name objectionable. It's not only long, it's totally non-specific. It looks like one of those awful circumlocutions that Latinists come up with to avoid anything vaguely non-classical. I looked in Morgan's dictionary, and I for 'transmission' he does have mechanema velocitatis (two words) but also transmissio (implied in transmissio automata) and mechanismus transmissionis. For 'gear shift' (which I assume is the same thing here) it does have your phrase, among others; but a couple might mean the stick, also called 'gear shift' in English. Remember that David Morgan lists all forms he has in his sources, and the fact that there are several seems to suggest that there is none fully agreed upon.

So of those terms, I'd strongly recommend transmissio. It is an international word (used in Interlingua), short, unambiguous, and already exists in Latin with the same meaning as it has in English outside of machinery. Pantocrator 13:16, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Does anyone here besides P-crat give a flying flip about interlingua and/or its relevance to the Latin language. --Ioscius^∞ 15:39, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Its relevance is to confirm that the word is sufficiently international. Pantocrator 16:57, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Who cares that it is sufficiently international? We only care if it's sufficiently Latin. I really don't understand your fascination with internationality here. Go work at interlingua or esperanto if you want anyone with high school Spanish to understand you.--Ioscius^∞ 17:06, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

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Maybe, but internationality is not one of our criteria for word choice. The usual Latin for 'ski', for example, is 'narta', which I don't think any modern languages other than Polish have. (Of course, it depends on which Interlingua you mean. If it was in Peano's Interlingua (Latino sine flexione) you might have had a case.) —Mucius Tever 17:47, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

I can't speak for interlingua, but in latin the meaning of the present title is totally transparent and accurate.--24.107.235.195 13:35, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

It means literally 'mechanism for changing velocity'. That's incomplete as a description, and could also refer to an arbitrary number of things. Pantocrator 13:42, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

For example, such as? Is it possibly any more ambiguous than the english word transmission?!--24.107.235.195 13:45, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

You know that a transmission is not the only 'mechanism for changing velocity' in the world; it isn't even the only one in a car. The English word 'transmission', excluding the general meaning and the gerundive use, is not ambiguous; it refers only to a particular kind of mechanical device. In other words, it is a name for a kind of machine whereas mechanema velocitatis mutatorium is a description that could be applied to many kinds of machines. Pantocrator 14:06, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Such as?--24.107.235.195 14:23, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

STOP PLAYING STUPID. By the way, your edits have made it fairly clear that you're not a new user, and have an especial interest in attacking me. Pantocrator 14:29, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Stay to the point (is there possibly an attack here or is someone paranoid??):lets not avoid the question: such as?--24.107.235.195 14:51, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Seriously, the anon has a point. "Transmission" is a word with many meanings but it's not ambiguous mechanically because it generally only refers to one type of machine. Do you actually have an example of this term being ambiguous due to referring to multiple types of machines? Or is this just the Germanic/English bias that all fixed terms should be single, compound words? Because we know Latin (being resistant to compounding and, at least by Vicipaedia's norms, to borrowing and other innovations) doesn't and can't really work that way. To give an example, what you're suggesting is comparable to throwing out "terrae motus" because there are other ways that earth moves than by earthquakes. Especially for the purpose of building an encyclopedia, it's better not to make statements without reference to facts. —Mucius Tever 15:18, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand. Transmissio is not a compound. Further terrae motus is not really comparable. It is much shorter; it is less ambiguous in practice (due to word order and the fact that other types of earth motion are not talked of in the same context); and it has a history of being used since classical times. Pantocrator 16:57, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Strictly it is a compound (preposition+verb compounding is one of the sorts of compounds Latin doesn't seem to have much problem with), though point taken. (I meant something more along the lines of "single and/or compound words" but phrased it very poorly; what I was really thinking of was your pronouncement at talk:momentum virium "est melior habere unum verbum pro concepto" and in most cases the objectionable sort of compounding would be necessary to achieve that goal.) Yes, "terrae motus" is not exactly the same situation, but the point is to illustrate 1) that phrases can be set terms and 2) there is no principle in Latin that forces them to become single words. Even when these terms do become orthographically united, they're frequently still grammatically individual words, as in the case of respublica, rosmarinus, iusiurandum, in which both portions decline and are often separated when the grammar would insert something in second position (e.g. "resque publica"). —Mucius Tever 17:48, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

For the record.—The only sense of transmissio in Cassell's is 'a passage'. The definitions in White are: 'a sending across or over' and 'a going across or over; a passage, etc.'. The definitions in Ainsworth (18th century) are: 'a passing, or sending, over; a passage'. So it's pretty clear that a transmissio is fundamentally & unambiguously a passage. IacobusAmor 15:32, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Right I was just going to mention this.--Ioscius^∞ 15:39, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

That's right, that was the only meaning in classical Latin. But that was once the only meaning in English as well! Language changes, especially due to new things like machines. The sense developement was something like 'a passage, sending across' -> (more generally) 'a communication' -> (a specific use of the praec.) 'communication of mechanical power' -> 'a type of machine for such'. There's no reason the same could not have happened in Latin had it been used by mechanics; and indeed if any mechanics today used Latin they'd much more likely use transmissio than this monstrosity; the sense has been taken into all the Romance languages and should be into Latin, as well. Pantocrator 16:57, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

That's a hypothesis based on English & Romance usage. We don't know that Ciceronian mechanics, living a Latin tradition, would have looked at a gearbox and even thought of the idea of transmitting. Maybe they'd have called the thing a cistella, or a compactura, or a coniunctor, or a motus iaculator, or a torquetrum, or who knows what. IacobusAmor 17:54, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Well, the first stage (the generalisation) definitely did happen in New Latin. You're right, we can't divine what would have happened, but it is extremely likely they would use _some_ conceptual developement for naming it rather than an awkward vague description like this. As it happens, the one we do have is transmissio. Pantocrator 19:27, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Again, who cares about the Romance languages? --Ioscius^∞ 17:08, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

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If you can cite a source for the word's use in Latin as a general term, then do so by all means (and indeed you have already cited Morgan who gives sources for 'transmissio'). But saying what people would "more likely use" only indicates you're making up something for people who don't currently use it, and encyclopedias shouldn't make things up. So. There are dictionary sources for both various kinds of transmissio (in Levine et alibi, according to Morgan): and mechanema velocitatis mutatorium (in LRL, according to Morgan); the questions to ask are: is one or the other in more common use among Latin users? Is one or the other more correct? But these are questions that are not being asked (though several people have answered that the object in question is more correctly a sort of mechanema than a sort of transmissio). The questions not to ask are whether one or the other is more like languages X Y and/or Z, whether the word can theoretically mean other things when in practice it never does, or whether it's aesthetically displeasing ("too long") — but these are the questions that are being asked, so this discussion will inevitably generate more heat than light. —Mucius Tever 17:49, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

I did a Google search and there are no uses of this phrase not copied from us. I searched various ways for transmissio (obviously under the inflected forms) and did not see any mechanical uses, but there are many in legal, scientific, and other neo-Latin showing that it had extended its sense just like the English 'transmission'.

I agree that that question is important, if it can be answered. It does not seem that the dictionaries will definitely settle this, either. Honestly, if there is nothing else to decide between the forms, why not prefer the shorter and more familiar? Pantocrator 19:27, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Maybe because it's not conceptually all that Latinesque? We're working from not one, but two English forms: transmission and gearbox. The latter is conceptually (though not structurally) more like Latin nouns, in that it's a "concrete" descriptor (a box involving things called gears), rather than the nominalization of a process (a sending across). ¶ One way to get Vicipaedia to accept transmissio would be to set up a website and use it to disseminate pages & pages of authoritative & respectable Latin using that word. Then you can be cited as a source! IacobusAmor 19:46, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

The main reason 'gearbox' is used, however, is because it is short, just 2 syllables. This one has 14 in the nominative and more in the oblique cases! It can hardly be considered an equivalent of 'gearbox'. Pantocrator 05:33, 28 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

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"why not prefer the shorter and more familiar?" — You might just as easily ask (as people have elsewhere on this page) why not prefer the apter and more conservative? Yes, "transmissio" has positive qualities. It also, however, has the negative ones mentioned. And in the absence of a fixed Vicipaedian value system that would let us decide by rule which qualities are more important in a lemma, you haven't offered any particular reason why brevity and familiarity must be the items that tip the scales in favor of transmissio—just your opinion. While the fact that "transmissio" exists, in dictionaries at least, for this concept is enough to merit it being mentioned in the page, your opinion alone isn't reason enough to rename it away from a name that has comparable authority. —Mucius Tever 01:14, 28 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

The problem, PC, is what I've mentioned before. You like transmissio because you don't have to do any work. It's nice and familiar and cozy. For the rest of us, who actually know Latin this "monstrosity" actually describes the thing quite nicely, while transmissio means something entirely else to us. You who really don't know Latin think it's nice and understandable to the majority of the people. --Ioscius^∞ 17:11, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

A transmission gearbox( as we may unambiguously call the subject of this page--transmission in english even being highly ambiguous in its own right) does transmit something, namely it transmits torque from the engine to the wheels. Thus the term transmissio is technically apt, but extremely ambiguous even in a technical mechanical context, where many things besides torque are transmitted in a car, and there is more than one gearbox transmitting torque to the wheels.

Again PC argues for a term, despite it being less accurate and less technically precise (compare the argument for fluxus electricus). And here he does so merely because transmissio looks like the english term transmission. In both cases, only superficial reasons are given which fly in the face of the latin meanings.

Mechanema in latin does not simply mean mechanism, but mechanical mechanism and suitably translates the word gearbox. And gearbox for changings of velocity is incredibly unambiguous for what a so-called "transmission" in effect is. That anyone can overlook this fact is astounding.--24.107.235.195 00:24, 28 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Nothing else in a car is called 'transmission' in English. It is not ambiguous in the context of machinery.

Transmissio doesn't just 'look like' the English 'transmission', it is the same word. Until the 19c. they had exactly the same meanings; only diverging when English 'transmission' acquired mechanical meanings and the Latin word didn't - but one wouldn't expect it to because machinery wasn't talked about in Latin.

Finally 'mechanical mechanism' is redundant, 'gearbox' is an English word, not a Latin one (unless you propose gearboxus or something!), and there is no way this term can be considered 'incredibly unambiguous'. Pantocrator 05:33, 28 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Having read this, I feel the lack of a la-sister of en:WP:AT. I think that not just "a list of terms" but also "a list of principles" might be of use. I believe that most WP:AT-sisters implicitly or explicitly refer to the principle of least astonishment; lawiki doesn't have to, but if not, should motivate why.

In other words: Pantocrator does have a point, in bringing in what people would "expect" to find into the discussion. IMHO, the counterarguments from most others here to a high extent depend on the fact that people which don't know Latin, or (like me) have rather limited knowledge, should not count in this context. I think there are some good arguments for this; but it should be made explicit, and stated as a policy.

I think that the fundamental reason for the trouble is that there are an unproportionate large group of non-native speakers on this wikipedia:-). Ordinarily, the principle of least astonishment should apply in the first place to people of native or as-good-as-native knowledge of the language. I believe there are none of the first and a few of the second category here, but that most of us have much less habit of using Latin in our daily lives. This indeed is an argument for putting less weight than usual on the least astonishment in namesgiving in the lawiki than in most other wikis.

As for the item itself: Note that the enwiki sister is not named Transmission, but en:Transmission (mechanics). Actually, the enwiki disambiguation side on "transmission" enumerates over twenty articles. Thus, "transmission" is fairly ambiguous also in English usage. On the other hand, I agree with Pantocrator that Mechanema velocitatis mutatorium also could be interpreted in other ways; e.g. (just keeping to cars), as a device for changing speed by regulating the amount of fuel (per unit of time) reaching the engine. Et hoc modo velocitas mutator, right? Actually, I'm a bit surprised at the stress on the velocity in this title; the involved principles have more to do with torque and with power and energy, as far as I understand them.

Moreover, the fundamental underlying physical principles were well-known (and to a large extent discovered) by the master from Syracuse. Now, he was Greek-speaking (and an enemy of Rome), but it is not impossible that also this part of his work was described in Latin texts which are preserved. The theory of interacting forces was later developed and largely perfected by Isaac Newton, whose principle work was in Latin. Hence, actually there might exist a reasonably well-established Latin terminology for related subjects, although the car gear in itself cannot be older than the car. Georgius B 17:31, 1 Martii 2010 (UTC)

I think a mechanema is more than just a mechanism; from what I recall it specifically stands for a kind of assembly of machines or mechanisms or gears. You could always try "mechanema transmissivum" to emphasize the mechanical aspect, or if the article is to be written as an engineering article transmissio (autocinetum) to place it under a jargon word as title (ugly). The present article's title, by contrast, takes as its context the driver.--Rafaelgarcia 18:12, 1 Martii 2010 (UTC)

clutch

Well I read Quomodo Diploma Gubernandi Autocinetum Adeptus Sum by Vido Angelino 2006 hoping to find transmission. I didn't but I found clutch pedalis copulationis and stick shift frenum manuale.--Ioscius^∞ 23:55, 27 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Whoa, are you sure about that last one? "frenum manuale" literally means "handbrake"! —Mucius Tever 01:18, 28 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

In most languages, the name for the stick shift is the same as for lever; in latin therefore, vectis.--24.107.235.195 01:35, 28 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Very sorry, yes vectis is stick, frenum is handbrake of course. --Ioscius^∞ 09:02, 28 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

I'm making a list of terms so we can start pages for everything, to avoid people presenting imaginary problems later on. --Ioscius^∞ 09:05, 28 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

What, everything? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:18, 1 Martii 2010 (UTC)

Yes, Andrew, a list for absolutely positively everything. See you in 20 years ;] --Ioscius^∞ 18:26, 1 Martii 2010 (UTC)

Ecce: Disputatio:Autocinetum#vocabula. --Ioscius^∞ 00:04, 3 Martii 2010 (UTC)