Disputatio:Summa facultatum diversarum plantarum

Bibliographical citation

The citation that was added, sourced to Google Books, is a duplicate of the one above, which came from a French academic source. I hadn't thought it necessary to cite the source, but I still could ... it was only yesterday ... Google Books is not a reliable source for bibliographic information, because, as with Wikipedia, anyone can add that information and no one checks it.

The name of the longer series, given by Google Books, might well have been omitted by my source. The name of the shorter series is not given by Google Books, possibly because there was no room for two series in the entry form. If the English title given by my source is really on the title page, it's odd that Google Books omits it, but it would be even odder for a French academic to give the English translated title if it's not really there! It's also odd that Google Books omits the editor's name. It would be unusual for a book's title page to give the transliteration as well as Arabic script. Unluckily, all these disagreements could have more than one explanation ... The best source would be a German library catalogue, if we can find one.

NB -- just to be clear -- Google Books when it gives you the whole text of a book in facsimile, including the title page and colophon, is a wonderful resource, a highly reliable snapshot of a real copy of a book. Wouldn't be without it.

And NB also -- thanks for the revision to the text, which is now more accurate, I agree. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:50, 12 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

OK, do with the bibliography whatever you think is best. I was just giving the source I was working with, but it may not be so useful. Please note that there is another oddity with this source: They have omitted the first word (كتاب - book) from the Arabic text, while it is there in translitteration (Kitāb). I added it in the lemma (after all, the aim was to make Arabic and translitteration fit), but I left it unchanged in the bibliographic reference. Sigur (disputatio) 11:50, 12 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

Now that I'm further diving into it, I also see that our friends at marefa.org have an even longer title in their page on al-Idrisi:

• كتاب "الجامع لصفات أشتات النبات وضروب أنواع المفردات من الأشجار والثمار والحشائش والأزهار والحيوانات والمعادن وتفسير أسمائها بالسريانية واليونانية واللطينية والبربرية
• (Google translation:) the book "The Collective of the Characteristics of the Plant Sundries and the Vocabulary Types of Trees, Fruits, Weeds, Flowers, Animals, and Minerals and Interpreting Their Names in Syriac, Greek, Latino and Berber"

The first part of that corresponds to our long title, but look at where the opening quotation mark is (there is a closing one at the end, but I couldn't put it, because it messed up the formatting). So, it may well be that كتاب=kitāb isn't part of the title after all... Sigur (disputatio) 12:34, 12 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

I face the question about kitab as first word of title almost every time I write about an Arabic book! And I don't have an answer. I tend to go with the best available source each time, and hope that, this being a wiki, someone who knows a general rule is sure to turn up one day. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:13, 12 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

De latina versione

Even if there is not a Latin version of this work, would it be easier (in terms of search and navigation, and reading) to move this to something on the lines of De pharmacologia et Botanica (Edrisius) (copying it from the German translations in the bibliography) with a {{convertimus}} caveat in the lemma?--Xaverius 09:17, 12 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

Well, we've been doing it for this way for quite a long time (in cases where there is no recorded Latin translation of the title). It started with some Slavic titles, and then some Chinese, a few others, and now this one. I agree that it looks odd, but it was originally by consensus, and it follows from the rule about reliable sources. The total of pagenames of this kind is not many -- maybe 40 or so -- so a change is not very difficult, but bear in mind (a) that redirects can pick up any number of alternative titles in Latin or other languages, (b) that one user's good Latin translation of a title is another user's inaccurate dog-Latin ...

In this case, Meyerhof's titles are not translations of the Arabic title of this book. (I don't mean that they are bad translations, they are just not translations at all!) I put in quotes what is intended to be a fairly close translation, "Summa facultatum ...". I'm not an Arabist, it's based on what French and English sources say that the title means. In this case, if we want to use a translated Latin title, this is the best we've currently got. But I'm not sure that there's really a need to change our rule.

You might wonder, since I can't read the book and no one has translated it, why I created the page! But I'm always looking for early texts about edible and medicinal plants, and when I found that there was some bibliography about this one, I didn't want to lose sight of it. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:13, 12 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

I've added some redirects meanwhile. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:23, 12 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

I can see the reasoning behind the policy, although I always thought the {{convertimus}} formula was perhaps ideal for these circumstances. In any case, I do not object for us to keep it in the Arabic, although perhaps we could have a categoria:Opera literaria sine titulo latine transliterato? (or some other indicator?). Or would that not be useful either?--Xaverius 13:37, 12 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

I think that's a great idea. It will help those in the wikifuture who decide on a different solution. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:13, 12 Augusti 2019 (UTC)

We soon afterwards decided not to use titles in non-Latin scripts any more. See later discussion at Disputatio Categoriae:Paginae scripturis non-Latinis intitulatae. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 17:45, 16 Aprilis 2024 (UTC)