Disputatio Categoriae:Homines qui sibi mortem consciverunt

Latest comment: abhinc 15 annos by Andrew Dalby

Categoria: Homines qui sibi mortem consciverunt

recensere

Two questions here. (1) Is homines qui good Latin? As I recall, this qui all by itself means 'people who'. (2) What's wrong with suicida for 'a suicide, a person who commits suicide'? Classical Latin already had homicida for 'murderer', matricida for 'matricide, a mother-murderer', and parricida for 'parricide, a father-murderer'; suicida would approximate the pattern. Also, if we can infer from the etymology in the OED, the New Latin word suicida came into existence in or before the seventeenth century, and we already use plenty of words coined much more recently than that. IacobusAmor 21:09, 21 Februarii 2009 (UTC)Reply

This doesn't seem to be a question for me (or for the taberna, really) so I'll copy it to Disputatio Categoriae:Homines qui sibi mortem consciverunt. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 10:17, 22 Februarii 2009 (UTC)Reply
The category was created anonymously (by Massimo, possibly?) It's very useful, but personally I agree with Iacobus that the name isn't perfect. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 10:27, 22 Februarii 2009 (UTC)Reply
To commit suicide can be said in a few dozen ways in good Latin, but none of them involves suicida. It is not even mentioned in Du Cange (see [1] ). The category as it stands is a bit unwieldy, but grammatically unobjectionable. Of course, homines qui could be (but does not have to be) replaced by a simple qui. Shorter, but not really more attractive alternatives might be Morte voluntaria mortui or Manu propria mortui?--Ceylon 11:37, 22 Februarii 2009 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I guess my only reason for saying the name wasn't perfect was that I have a fetish for brevity, and the Homines is redundant. But no reason to rename the category on those grounds alone. And, as I said, it's a useful category. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:40, 23 Februarii 2009 (UTC)Reply
Revertere ad "Homines qui sibi mortem consciverunt".