Vitanuova for 2007 November

Vicimedium

This is tangentially related to my previous post, but perhaps in the other direction.

The Wikimedia Foundation is having a fundraiser and asking users of Wikipedia and other projects to donate money. I was just looking at the Latin Wikipedia and noticing that the fundraising appeal has been translated into Latin there: "TU Vicimedia in mundum ameliorando adiuvare potes! 14 589 [homines] donaverunt. Dona nunc!" "YOU can help Wikimedia make the world better! 14 589 [people] have donated. Donate now!"

I was wondering about why "Vicimedia" has the form it does -- it seemed difficult to interpret "Vicimedia" as the benificiary of help. After a while I realized that the translator interpreted "Vicimedia" as the plural of a hypothetical "Vicimedium" ("Wikimedium") -- one Wikimedium, many Wikimedia -- on the basis that the English "media" is historically the plural of "medium", like "communications medium"/"communications media".

If "Vicimedium" is a second-declension neuter noun, like "medium", then the plural "Vicimedia" can be either nominative or accusative, and hence it can be the accusative object of "adiuvare", to help. But something seems odd to me about taking the English word "Wikimedia" to be plural, maybe especially because we don't ever use the singular "Wikimedium". In a sense, the translator has noticed that the collective Latin plural "media" is being reinterpreted in English as a singular noun (U.S. English often has "the media is"), and decided to halt and reverse the process when writing in Latin, explicitly making "media" plural again (with slightly more obvious grammatical consequences). Or maybe the translator speaks an English dialect in which "media" is still always plural -- "the [wiki]media are" correspondingly cleanly and unremarkably to Latin "[vici]media sunt".

Books from back home

My dad and his neighbors are in the New York Times today. See also the story about the Pioneer Valley area and the piece about rare book dealers. I've met about half of the dealers mentioned in these articles and heard the names of practically all of them regularly when I was growing up.

Arbitrariness of the sign

There is something oddly hilarious about looking over these linguistic coincidences, like learning that there's a language where "beter" means "worse" or "bhlak" means "white". Maybe it's a kind of nervous laughter in the face of the unfathomable prospect that "they are merely conventional signs!".

By the way, arigato/obrigado has turned out to be another of these coincidences, despite the real influence of Portuguese on Japanese.

Fan fiction

I wonder how Southwest's Spirit Magazine managed to produce an entire magazine article about fan fiction without ever mentioning sex or copyright.

Packet injection article and other materials

My article about detecting packet injection by ISPs is now on the EFF web site, along with Peter's article about what Comcast has done and an initial release of pcapdiff, largely written by Steven Lucy with some help from me.