Talk:Latin words and expressions

Proposal to remove or reduce this dictionary

Note: I will be using the term Nederlands to refer to the Dutch language.

The times when a genealogist had to open a book to look up Latin words, phrases and abbreviations is long gone. Nowadays anyone working on a computer can open up their favourite on-line source and find what they need in seconds.

My core point is that it is not the task of the Gramps wiki to provide and maintain a duplicate of sources that are easily available on-line.

This word list as it is now is also not very useful for English readers, because the source text was in Nederlands and the overwhelming majority of the lemmas do not have an English translation. Translating everything would be a huge task, for which there has hardly been any progress since the list's creation in 2007(!).

This is why I propose to remove this dictionary from this wiki in its entirety.

The current main problem (lots of Nederlands showing up in the English pages) is caused by the way this page was created: A digital version of an existing list of Latin words, phrases and some abbreviations was converted in bulk with some automated system into Template:Dict entries, with the Nederlands translation and explanatory text added as the default= text. Whenever no explicit English version was added (with an en= parameter), the Nederlands version would show.

Note: Template:Dict appears to have been specially created (at the same time, by the same author) for this list of Latin words and expressions.

Furthermore, the contents is heavily biased towards the situation in the Low Countries (e.g. '"laesus a gallis"': wounded by the French), and with many legal and governmental matters specific for that region.

Note: for a currently available source of the dictionary try this PDF document for 'A' terms. For the other letters, change the letter in the address bar of your browser and press enter. There does not appear to be an index accessible on that website.

As for the other language versions of this list:

• The French version is a completely independent list that does not use Template:Dict. It appears to be a copy/paste yank from an on-line set of tables (one table for each letter of the alphabet). The tables have four columns, the text of which has simply been pasted into the wiki, without formatting. They contain many pointless lemmas, such as the latinised versions of French given names, and cover hardly any of the lemmas from the Nederlands list.
• The Hebrew version simply incorporates the template of this page, but does not have any translations of the terms. All texts are in the default Nederlands. Also, there is currently no support for he= entries in Template:Dict.
• The Nederlands version comes off best, because the list was imported from a Nederlands source.

Alternative: leave as it is, but solve the nl/en mixture

This solution leaves all entries as they are, but changes default= to nl= everywhere. A big job, but can be done with effort in an external editor using automated find and replace. Nicer would be to do it with a wiki bot, but that is outside my field of knowledge and my paygrade :-).

This still leaves a lot of terms requiring translation, but this can be done by kind souls over the coming decades.

This has now been solved, and it shines a bright light on the lack of English content. The only effort at translation was by the original author, for about 70 days after its creation, and he gave up halfway the letter 'D'. --DomoViridi (talk) 17:32, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Other solution: reducing the list

It may be felt that the list has some use for abbreviations. In that case the default could be the Latin expansion of the abbreviation, and translations can be added for each supported language. The other ca. 90% of the list can be deleted. This also eliminates a lot of work on translations.

--DomoViridi (talk) 00:35, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Translation mangled bug solved

Bug 11608 has been solved by improving Template:Dict. The default parameter now no longer serves as a fallback if the desired language is missing, but now counts as an alternative for nl.

This means that on the English pages you will no longer see any Dutch text.

If there is no en parameter filled in for a lemma, then the Latin lemma will still be shown, but with an empty description. Similarly, in other languages, a description will only show if one is given in that language.

A provision has also been made for abbreviations. A full parameter can be added with the Latin expansion of the Latin abbreviation. Efforts are under way to update the pages that contain abbreviations.

--DomoViridi (talk) 16:08, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

All pages with abbreviations have been updated. The expansion of each abbreviation now show up in the lemma. --DomoViridi (talk) 19:10, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Another reason to delete this list

Now that the en/nl mangling bug has been solved, is clearly shows how little English translation has been done. It starts enthusiastically at 'A', but gives up halfway into 'D'.

The entries under 'F' haven't even been converted to calls to Template:Dict.

Any editing (apart from my recent work) has been done by the person who created this page (and its many, many dependent pages: 58 per language) in 2007. Ever since, nobody appears to have taken any notice of these pages, apart from the bug report and banner in March 2020.

This apparent complete lack of interest, combined with the huge amount of work needed to get these pages in some kind of decent shape (for in impression of the kind of work needed seen my analysis of the structure of these pages and the templates and sub-templates involved) moves me to state:

This dictionary should be removed completely.

--DomoViridi (talk) 17:53, 10 March 2026 (UTC)