Talk:per vagina
@TheDaveRoss: Sorry, I didn't mean to ping you for this closure as well. I'll have to watch out for overzealous autofills. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 03:49, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
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SOP. 2600:1000:B110:F974:ED06:A5F9:540:ECF6 18:07, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
- The etymology section of per vaginam (with an m) explains per vagina as English per + English vagina. Another explanation is that the medical-Latin collocations per os and per rectum are parsed as Latin per + Latin os or rectum, in which the classically unschooled parser does not realize that the words for the orifices are in the accusative case, here indistinguishable from the nominative form in which they are lemmatized in dictionaries. So another explanation is that the collocation per vagina is an ungrammatical misconstruct in medical Latin formed by Latin per + Latin vagina. The same theory explains per nasus as seen here. There is also the fact that many studies compare administration “per os” and “per vagina”, as seen e.g. here. It seems unlikely that the authors thought that the specification of the first administration was (medical) Latin and the second plain English. (BTW, per os is presented as translingual while the others are English only.) --Lambiam 18:07, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
- That suggests this could be kept as a
{{misconstruction of|per vaginam}}. (What language to label all these "per"s is another matter...) - -sche (discuss) 19:42, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
- That suggests this could be kept as a
- RFD kept, and templated as suggested by -sche. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 03:49, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
Surface analysis logic, descriptively morphologically valid, in parallel with the misconstruction, thus not always a misconstruction[edit]
As I write this, the entire entry has only one sense, which is marked as a misconstruction, but the epistemology of language on that point is flawed because incomplete. There is a phenomenon in natural language whereby this collocation exists independently of per vaginam as a descriptively morphologically valid form, not a misconstruction, but synonymous with it and in fact arguably viewable as homonymous with it (but cognate, so that description might be qualified). This natural phenomenon is via surface analysis as a natural force in natural language. In short, native English speakers often treat per vagina as a morphologically valid form that is synonymous with, in fact perhaps strictly speaking homonymous with, Latin loanword per vaginam but constructed on the same general English pattern of per + [English noun], as for example per mouth, per statute, per ordinance, per Jerry, per tradition, and others. To understand this point, notice that just because the (cognate) English word vagina is almost identical with the (both Latin-native and loanword-to-medical-English) Latin inflection vaginam doesn't mean that one of English's several morphologically valid uses of it is a misconstruction of the Latin collocation per vaginam. It is only because the (cognate) words look almost identical that that misapprehension can be made. To understand further, compare per os with per mouth, both of which synonyms are valid medical English lexemes (the former having a naturalized loanword sense): the mouth in per mouth is "not even trying to be a Latin word", and that fact is valid in English morphology according to the normal uses of the word per in English. By the selfsame pathway, the vagina in per vagina can validly be viewed via surface analysis by speakers as "not even trying to be the Latin word" but rather rightfully being the English word that looks identical to one of its inflections (and/because the Latin word is also the etymon of the English word; but the English word is not not a "real" English word just because of that fact). No—in contrast, in this analysis it is treated by the speaker as, and *therefore* is (in this instance), the English word vagina in that speaker's thought and parsing. Again, this makes per vagina in English a lexeme that exists via two etymologic pathways, or a set of homonyms that exists via two etymologic pathways: the historical/chronological one (that is, a misconstruction of per vaginam) and the surface analysis one (that is, English per + English vagina), and neither one is descriptively "wrong". But they are homonymous, which is why someone might misapprehend that they are only one form, not two homonymous forms by different morphological pathways. This is a fact, not an opinion, as demonstrable by the fact that without this same set of conditions/circumstances, the form per mouth "wouldn't be able to exist" or "wouldn't be allowed to exist", but those notions are hokum, of course, and per mouth is of course a ubiquitous term in pharmacy and medicine, being one of several synonyms (namely, PO, p.o., per os, per mouth, by mouth, and orally). I intend to revise this entry accordingly, and it is therefore going to show Etymology 1 and Etymology 2 headings. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:58, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
- I just needed to update this comment also to address the issue (broached also in the preceding Talk thread) of the epistemology behind whether a term such as per os should be viewed/understood/defined as Latin, translingual, or English (which is to say, a naturalized loanword in medical English, and therefore an English word as such). The fact with many New Latin terms, which constitute a large subset of international scientific vocabulary (ISV), is that they are terms that exist in all three languages or language groups: Latin (either classical Latin or New Latin, depending on the term), interlingually/translingually (as ISV), and English (as naturalized loanwords in medical English). Thus the truly accurate handling of their Wiktionary entries is to have H2 heads for Latin, Translingual, and English, with each of those H2 sections having an H3 head Etymology, where the Latin one's shows those antecedents (which are classical Latin roots plus or minus any ancient Greek roots via New Latin), the translingual one's says "From [anchor link to aforementioned Latin one]", and the English one's says "From [anchor link to aforementioned translingual ISV one]". That, in fact, is the true full descriptive reality of the epistemology behind the lexicography of hundreds of modern medical English terms. Quercus solaris (talk) 18:41, 10 April 2021 (UTC)