CONLOQVIVM

12:12 AM

@JoonasIlmavirta I have at least one more that I can ask, which I'll do tomorrow.

I'm a bit nervous asking more now, though, since the top 4 are all my questions (and all unmarked, since 3/4 are too new to give the green checkmark to.

Everyone else needs to start asking more questions again!

Cerberus

1:48 AM

@C.M.Weimer Done!

C. M. Weimer

@Cerberus Saw and voted.

Cerberus

Bene.

C. M. Weimer

de nada

Cerberus

Quae lingua vulgaris est?

C. M. Weimer

Sorry, flocci

@Cerberus Before I found ictis, I was going to ask about vocalic I, but then I switched it to Q! Forgot that I in fact asked about Q.

Oops.

I will still ask about I tomorrow, since surely there must be another besides ictis, which is Greek.

But yeah, embarrassing lapsus mentis removed.

Cerberus

2:00 AM

@C.M.Weimer Ah, funny!

So vocalic i as in ibex?

As for borrowed words, ibis?

C. M. Weimer

I was hoping to get more familiar, countryside/barnyard animals, but yes, ibex or ibis would work.

Cerberus

Right.

C. M. Weimer

As opposed to iuvencus/a.

Cerberus

Uhuh.

C. M. Weimer

Ictis is good, since weasels were familiar animals, though the normal Latin word was mustela.

Cerberus

2:05 AM

Yeah, L&S says "a kind of weasel".

C. M. Weimer

I've found a good representative animal for each letter (minux KXYZ) except Q and J.

Cerberus

Ah, OK.

It's not easy to search for, I presume.

C. M. Weimer

Though D I have down draco, I can't remember if there's something else for that or not.

Not at all!

At least nothing exhaustive.

I might make that a future project.

Cerberus

The problem with reverse-searching is that dictionary entries won't contain the word "animal".

Or at least not many.

C. M. Weimer

Right. I just picked up the Chambers Murray and read each entry for I, Q, and D.

I'm hoping I missed some.

Cerberus

2:09 AM

That's quite a bit of work!

You could try the OLD...

Oops.

It's only a few thousand pages...

C. M. Weimer

I started to, but I only have it in PDF.

And that's quite an eye sore.

I never actually bought a proper Latin dictionary. I'm more a Hellenist than a Romanist.

Cerberus

I'm actually not sure whether I find reading on a screen any harder than on paper.

I only have the OLD.

I was going to buy a LSJ, but I never got to it.

C. M. Weimer

Chambers Murray is a great little dictionary, L&S has entries that OLD does not.

Cerberus

Hmm I don't know CM.

C. M. Weimer

Also, L&S entries are organized better, more naturally.

Cerberus

2:11 AM

Hmm.

I do like L&S's ordering.

C. M. Weimer

amazon.com/Chambers-Murray-Latin-English-Dictionary-Ed/dp/…

Cerberus

I don't think any of the smaller English dictionaries are well known globally.

C. M. Weimer

Even at the office, it's quicker to grab than the L&S or OLD, so it's my go-to if it's near me, though ever since Perseus fixed their speed issues, it's actually easier to look up words there instead.

Cerberus

OLD, L&S, LSJ are well known.

Ah, has Perseus really fixed its speed issues?

C. M. Weimer

Montanari will soon be on that map.

Compared to a decade ago, yes!

Cerberus

2:13 AM

Hmm it's still slow for me.

I use the LSJ/L&S from the Harvard site.

Much faster for me.

C. M. Weimer

I would get 100x as many time outs as I used to.

Cerberus

But poorly indented and numbered and such.

C. M. Weimer

Philolog.us is also good, but I like the morph function.

Cerberus

Hmm.

C. M. Weimer

let's me quickly see any other possible words.

Cerberus

2:14 AM

Is the morph function where you can look up an inflected form?

C. M. Weimer

Yep.

Cerberus

Yes, that one is handy for Greek.

C. M. Weimer

I mostly use it for headwords, but still

brill.com/products/book/brill-dictionary-ancient-greek

That's the new Greek dictionary that just came out.

Cerberus

Ah, that sounds good.

And it's affordable, too.

At least compared with the OLD...

C. M. Weimer

I only use it at work, I don't have a personal copy, but when I have, it seemed solid enough.

won't replace my LSJ any time soon at home, but still enough to recommend.

OLD is crazy expensive, and probably will be for a few decades more.

still $300 here.

Cerberus

2:18 AM

But an older edition is affordable.

C. M. Weimer

though you can get the old version for $100, so that's not bad.

yeah

Cerberus

And not that much changes.

Yes, mine cost about €90 or so.

It is from the year after I was born.

C. M. Weimer

82?

Cerberus

I was born in 83, the OLD is from 84.

C. M. Weimer

ah

Cerberus

2:22 AM

Why did you think 82?

C. M. Weimer

The first edition is from 1982.

Wild guess.

Cerberus

Ah, OK!

Very close.

Ben Kovitz

Say, is there a complete list of all Latin words that I could download?

Cerberus

Hello!

Ben Kovitz

Hi, all! :)

Cerberus

2:23 AM

Hmm I wouldn't know.

It may depend on how thorough you want this list to be...

What will you use it for?

Ben Kovitz

I figure there must be, but it's hard to google for: every book's and class's "word list" and "vocabulary" shows up first.

I would grep it, the way I grep /usr/share/dict/words on OSX (or similar English word lists on other Unices).

Cerberus

By that you mean apply regex on it or something?

Ben Kovitz

Yes.

C. M. Weimer

brianpck used Whitacker's words.

Which means it must exist.

Cerberus

Maybe if you can find a full-text, electronic edition of a dictionary, you could extract the head word.

Ben Kovitz

2:27 AM

Yeah, I figure scraping web pages might do it. I just figure that such a list is already out there. Whitaker's Words looks like it's worth a shot. Now looking…

Cerberus

I have full-text electronic version of the OED, but not of the OLD, alas.

C. M. Weimer

sourceforge.net/projects/scrabble/files/Dictionaries

Cerberus

mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=253728

C. M. Weimer

I have a PDF of OLD if you think you can run OCR on it.

Ben Kovitz

This might be it! archives.nd.edu/whitaker/dictpage.htm

Cerberus

2:29 AM

The above is the full L&S, electronic.

C. M. Weimer

ah, looks it

Cerberus

The head works have been marked as such.

Or they should be.

Since it's been prepped for a dictionary-reading programme like Golden Dictionary.

Ben Kovitz

Scrabble! That should be great!

L&S!! Mille gratiæ!

Now downloading them all…

C. M. Weimer

Curious, what do you plan on doing with them?

Ben Kovitz

It happens occasionally that I have some odd reason to grep /usr/share/dict/words. I figure I'll be ready to pounce on Latin, too.

C. M. Weimer

2:37 AM

Gotcha.

Cerberus

The headwords work in that L&S dictionary.

But it appears to be from the same source as Perseus and Harvard/Archimedes, and it's poorly indented, very long paragraphs.

But for parsing headwords it should work.

Incidentally, Golden Dictionary is great.

You can search in many dictionaries simultaneously, and instantly.

And you can even add online dictionaries.

So I can search it Latin and Greek at the same time, sort of.

Ben Kovitz

This is what prompted to want a Latin word list just now. :)

Cerberus

A-ha!

We had just been talking about that question.

Looking through all Q words must take quite a bit of time?

Ben Kovitz

Not once I had them in a text file. :) Inside a text editor (vim), I just scrolled through.

It only has 368 words starting with Q.

Cerberus

2:54 AM

Hmm.

Ben Kovitz

Sometime, a brute-force, "try them all" approach works pretty fast.

Cerberus

My Dutch electronic dictionary has 311 words with q.

Of which 59 are nouns.

You can filter for that.

But none of those are animals either.

You can filter for word(s) in title, in definition, author, part of speech.

C. M. Weimer

@BenKovitz Heh, as I mentioned to Cerberus earlier, I just pulled off the dictionary and read every Q headword.

Cerberus

It's Pinkster's dictionary.

It's easier if you can filter out all non-nouns!

C. M. Weimer

But while you're doing that, check for D (minus draco) and vocalic I (minus ibis and ictis).

Cerberus

2:57 AM

But, now that all three of us have gone through basic dinctionaries, I think it's safe to say that this is a dead end.

You'd need a bigger dictionary like L&S or the OLD.

C. M. Weimer

I'm probably going to have to go with something Medieval.

Cerberus

That's nice.

C. M. Weimer

Eh...

Ben Kovitz

Whitaker's Words seems to have some annotations to make it easy to filter stuff like non-nouns, but I don't understand the notation.

Cerberus

It's legal on this site!

C. M. Weimer

2:58 AM

@Cerberus Legal and ethical are two different things! :P

Cerberus

Quite so, quite so.

Ben Kovitz

I had a look at Mille Fabulae et Una, but it's not so easily searchable.

C. M. Weimer

I was hoping to keep it relevant to a family in Republican Rome, but maybe not.

Also, quaccula sounds super fake.

I definitely appreciate all the effort, you two!

Ben Kovitz

I even took a cursory look at Linnaeus's genera, and quercus was the only thing I saw.

When I saw your question, I thought "This ought to be easy to do with some brute force and a little cleverness about where to look."

C. M. Weimer

Can't brute force what doesn't exist.

Cerberus

3:04 AM

No effort on my part!

C. M. Weimer

Moral support.

Cerberus

Quagga

The quagga (/ˈkwɑːxɑː/ or /ˈkwæɡə/) (Equus quagga quagga) is an extinct subspecies of plains zebra that lived in South Africa until the 19th century. It was long thought to be a distinct species, but genetic studies have shown it to be the southernmost subspecies of plains zebra. It is considered particularly close to Burchell's zebra. Its name was derived from its call, which sounded like "kwa-ha-ha". The quagga is believed to have been around 257 cm (8 ft 5 in) long and 125–135 cm (4 ft 1 in–4 ft 5 in) tall at the shoulder. It was distinguished from other zebras by its limited pattern of primarily...

Ben Kovitz

SCORE!!

Cerberus

I doubt whether Republican Romans ever came across this one...

C. M. Weimer

Were the Dutch the first Europeans to come to know it?

Ben Kovitz

3:07 AM

I understand that they bought home a lot of weird animals. (Well, in the Empire, not the Republic, I think.)

C. M. Weimer

Also, aren't they rebreeding these?

Cerberus

Quite possibly!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

There are a lot of species like x. quadrimaculata.

And x. quadricornis: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

C. M. Weimer

Erebidae is a pretty cool name for moths.

Cerberus

Indeed.

Joonas Ilmavirta

@C.M.Weimer I look forward to it.

Cerberus

3:10 AM

Manes Erebi?

Joonas Ilmavirta

@C.M.Weimer I imagine you can imagine that I have thought that way a number of times...

C. M. Weimer

@Cerberus I was thinking filii Erebi, but that works too.

Cerberus

I imagine moths might resemble wisps of ghost.

C. M. Weimer

@JoonasIlmavirta What percentage of the site's questions are yours again?

lemures, fortasse

Joonas Ilmavirta

@C.M.Weimer The last time I checked it was between 24 and 25 percent.

Ben Kovitz

3:15 AM

@Cerberus I don't think the species part of the name is likely to fit (though it might): it's the differentia, not the word for the kind of animal.

Cerberus

@BenKovitz Yeah, it's no good.

Alas.

Joonas Ilmavirta

At times I've been really concerned about our question influx. And I certainly don't want it to depend on to that extent.

Most questions get good answers here. Getting the questions to answer seems to be the bottleneck.

Ben Kovitz

I didn't find a single mammal, fish, or bird in 12th-edition Linnaeus starting with Q. Now looking at insects, which are technically animals…

C. M. Weimer

Honestly, I think you're merely speeding things up. It's a good community, and maybe there wouldn't be so many questions if you suddenly disappeared, but I don't think the community would die for it.

Right now, besides you, I've answered the most questions, but you all did just fine without me May-Oct when I was gone.

/me shrugs

Argh, why isn't this IRC? :L

It does mean that we need to be more proactive in asking questions and urging people to ask questions - perhaps in the future we can resurrect brianpck's idea of the "reading of the month" or something.

That said, 291 questions, 201 answers...what a beast.

Ben Kovitz

No Q insects, either.

C. M. Weimer

3:21 AM

Clearly the Roman equivalent of Adam did not like that letter.

Cerberus

@BenKovitz Good work!

C. M. Weimer

@JoonasIlmavirta I hope that didn't come out sounding dismissive, just hopeful.

Cerberus

We are quite a beast indeed!

Oh, wait, was that Joonas?

Can we change his name into Quonas?

That would solve all our problems.

C. M. Weimer

Duae quonae, unus lapis.

Ben Kovitz

Heu! The last page in the book answers the question: archive.org/stream/carolilinniani00linn#page/n265/mode/2up

C. M. Weimer

3:25 AM

Ha, aawww

Nothing at all.

no Y either.

Ben Kovitz

Wait a minute, that should include plant genera, and Quercus is a plant genus.

Never mind, this is a book only of animal species. That's why I was clicking through it!

Hmm: theonlinezoo.com/pages/animals_scientific.html#Q

C. M. Weimer

I looked at those already, no dice.

e.g. querulus

Quelea or quiscalus isn't in L&S

Joonas Ilmavirta

@Cerberus I might consider that a new problem...

Wouldn't you, Querberus?

Ben Kovitz

Just found it: from Qualea, medieval Latin for quail.

C. M. Weimer

Then what's quaccula!?

Joonas Ilmavirta

3:30 AM

@C.M.Weimer No, I didn't take it as dismissive.

Cerberus

@JoonasIlmavirta Oh, that sounds nice enough?

@BenKovitz Oh!

Well done!

Ben Kovitz

Quaccula might be another spelling of coacula, yet another for quail. Qualea appears to be a shorter version.

Joonas Ilmavirta

It's true that the site can survive without if one or two users leave. But after a certain critical point too little activity can kill the whole thing. We've been above the critical mass all the time, but I have been occasionally concerned whether things stay that way.

C. M. Weimer

@JoonasIlmavirta Just don't leave then!

Joonas Ilmavirta

@C.M.Weimer I have no intention to!

Although it might do me good to take some time off at some point.

Cerberus

3:33 AM

Or it's no shame to be less active!

Ben Kovitz

Ahmo search for a proper citation from a computer with access to the Library of Latin Texts, then post it as an answer.

Joonas Ilmavirta

3:45 AM