User talk:JanNerd

Claudius
I have reverted your change, because in mine opinion a pronunciation guide is useful. As this is the second time you have been reverted ~ by two different editors ~ i suggest that you make the suggestion on the talk page if you still think your edit is better. I also note that no one has yet offered you a welcome, and i hate for your first interactions to be poor, so please let me emphasise that you really are welcome here ~ i'll put a message to that effect below, in a moment ~ and urge you to stick around and learn to edit. Happy days ~ LindsayHello 11:13, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Sallustia Orbiana
(Doing this on a phone, so not sure this is going to work as intended) After reverting your last edit, I reviewed your edit summary again, and began to see where we may have crossed signals. Your edit summary seems to focus on the use of the word "body" instead of "corpus", although the main reason why I reverted you was because you were adding descriptive text to the translation of the title.

To the first point: "corpus" is indeed used in English, but the word may not be as familiar to readers as its translation, "body". The edit summary suggests that "body" is incorrect; I assume you mean in the anatomical sense. But "body" also refers to a collection of things, e.g. a "body of work", or in this case inscriptions. A translation of the title that leaves a Latin word untranslated simply because it can also be used in English seems less helpful than to translate it into its direct, and more common equivalent, when both words possess the same pair of meanings in bot Latin and English. And this translation is used across hundreds of Roman history and culture articles; consistency is not always essential, but I'm not sure what the benefit of altering this particular instance is.

To the second point: the parenthetical words following a number of non-English titles in the bibliography are translations of the titles, and are not meant to describe the works or their importance, beyond what the titles themselves have to say. The words "Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum" mean "the body of Latin inscriptions", not "the principal corpus of…" or "the most important corpus of…". So even if we agreed on *not* translating "corpus", the additional words would be incorrect. Many of the other works cited are also important, but none are described beyond a more-or-less direct translation of the title, without commentary. This is the main reason why I reverted your edits, although I also think that substituting "corpus" for "body" in a *translation* of "corpus" is unnecessary and potentially confusing, since the other words are translated, and "body" carries the same meaning of a collection of things as "corpus" does, in addition to being the literal translation. P Aculeius (talk) 06:46, 5 May 2024 (UTC) P Aculeius


 * That was a wordy reply ...
 * I do know how the word body is used in English.
 * Corpus is the terminus technicus for any scholarly edited collection of a certain category of material. There are many corpora of ancient inscriptions, like Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum and Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum. Also other kinds of material have been edited in corpora, like pottery: Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Scholars referring to these collections talk of corpora. I am myself a widely published classical scholar.
 * The words "Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum" do indeed mean "Body of Latin inscriptions" (delete the article), but if we want to indicate that this is a translation italics should be used here. Why cannot a description of the collection be given? Like "the principal corpus/collection of" or "the most important corpus/collection". The "additional words" are not incorrect, just part of the description. JanNerd (talk) 10:54, 5 May 2024 (UTC)


 * In your edit summary, you wrote:"Why was my correction of an incorrect translation reverted? By whom? Can he/she explain why? In this case corpus has nothing to do with bodies, we are dealing with a scholarly edited COLLECTION of inscriptions." which implies that you did not understand that "body" was the correct translation of "corpus", or that it could refer to a collection of things. And although Wikipedia may be consulted by scholars with a high degree of technical knowledge, we can't expect most of our readers to have that degree of knowledge.  The examples of other publications that you cited are, I note, all Latin titles that would also require translation in order to tell a general audience precisely what they mean.  The fact that the word "corpus" is used in English doesn't mean that its meaning is the most transparent in English, particularly when it's part of a Latin phrase; thus, in "the body of Latin inscriptions" it's translated along with the other words, instead of left untranslated.


 * The fact that it's a translation seems fairly obvious, but I don't see that it needs to be treated as a restatement of the title and italicized; that might be confusing in itself, particularly when it's not the "official" title of the work, but simply an explanation of what the title means. I'm sure you could do so and be technically correct, but then you would make this entry inconsistent with others, to no particular advantage.  Either way, it is a faithful translation, not a description of the work's importance or significance.  The additional words are incorrect because they do not tell the reader what the title means: nothing in the words Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum means "principal" or "most important".


 * They are also extraneous material for a bibliographic entry. None of the other works cited has commentary indicating how important it is.  The bibliography would become quite bloated if each item included an explanation of its significance.  Instead, items may include links to articles about them or their authors, which do explain their significance, when such articles exist (or were known to exist at the time the entries were formulated).  So in the bibliography, you can see that Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum is a link to an article that tells you about that source.  This makes further commentary about it in the bibliography redundant, as well as unnecessary.  The place to comment on a source would be in the body of the article; but here that would also be misplaced, as the source is not mentioned or discussed at any point; it is merely cited for the contents of some inscriptions: another reason why commentary about the source doesn't really belong here.  P Aculeius (talk) 11:51, 5 May 2024 (UTC)