| URL | la.wikipedia.org |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Internet encyclopedia project |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | Latin |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Created by | Jimmy Wales |
The Latin Wikipedia (Latin: Vicipaedia Latina) is the Latin language edition of Wikipedia. As of February 2012, it has about 63,000 articles. While all primary content is in Latin, in discussions modern languages such as English, French, German or Spanish are allowed and often used, since many users (usores) find this easier.
Professional latinists have observed a gradual improvement in the encyclopedia: according to Robert Gurval, chairman of the UCLA classics department,[1] "the articles that are good are in fact very good," even though some articles by beginning students contain grammatical errors.
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The Latin Wikipedia began dominated by topics from classical history, but beginning in 2006 a group of new contributors greatly expanded the coverage of 20th century topics, such as pop culture and technology.[1]
The official policy of Vicipaedia is that neologisms and user coinings aren't allowed ("Noli fingere!" Latin for "Don't coin/make up things").[2] In order to deal with concepts that did not exist in Classical or Mediaeval Latin, terms from modern Latin sources are used, such as botanical Latin, scientific Latin, 18th and 19th century Latin language encyclopedias and books, the official Vatican dictionary of modern Latin,[3] as well as current Latin newspapers and radio shows, such as Ephemeris[4] and Radio Bremen.[5]
As in any language with a broad international character, often more than one correct term exists for a given concept (just as in English a certain car part is called a "bonnet" by British speakers but a "hood" by Americans). In Latin the existence of multiple synonyms for the same thing is even more prevalent since the language has been in continuous use over a wide geographical area for over 2000 years. Sometimes the same concept is represented by different terms in classical, medieval, scientific and modern Latin. Where possible Vicipaedia adopts the oldest or classical term for the page name, with redirects from any others; major alternatives are listed in the article with footnote references. There is often lively debate among editors about shades of meaning. The practice of avoiding invented words and giving references for alternative terms agrees well with the general Wikipedia insistence on verifiability and the rule against original research.
When occasionally a term for a modern concept cannot be found, the customary practice is to do exactly what most other languages do: to borrow an international word (often from a Romance language or English). Such direct borrowing was done for the particle names photon and gluon and for the unit of temperature Kelvin. The word is given a Latin morphology if this can be done easily, or, if not, used unchanged in its foreign form; but many international words already have a Latin or Graeco-Latin appearance, because Greek and Latin have always served as sources of new scientific terminology.
Vicipaedia has complied to the contemporary late 20th century orthographical habit of distinguishing u from v (both pronounced as u/w in classical Latin) but not i and i-consonant. This orthographical practice is not without passionate detractors, who point out that it is a mere calque of the Italian spelling reform in which the i/j distinction is lost, but the u/v distinction is maintained.[6]
The rationale behind this policy is that there are two primary linguistic communities in which Latin is spoken today: secular academics and the Roman Catholic Church. Academics generally seek to emulate classical pronunciations used by the Romans themselves which do not strongly distinguish the u-vowel from the u-consonant/v. However, in the pronunciation system used by the Catholic Church, the v is pronounced as an English v.
The logo on the Vicipaedia main page reads "VICIPÆDIA", displaying a ligature "æ". However, in accordance with contemporary practice, Vicipaedia does not use ligatures in its articles for the diphthongs written ae ("Æ", "æ") and oe ("Œ", "œ"). In Latin, such ligatures are not pronounced any differently from the unligatured diphthongs and they were only adopted by the Romans, as medieval and late Latin typographers for decorative purposes and to save space. If users prefer, however, they can activate a gadget under user preferences that automatically displays the diphthongs as ligatures on the pages.
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