Template talk:User la

Usor

Although usor seems correctly formed from the supine stem with the agent suffix, the nonexistence of the word raised a question. Since usus is such a basic concept in Roman law, it seemed as if there ought to be a noun for someone who possessed usus and was thus a "user". Usor must've struck native Latin speakers as an undesirable formation, because they used usuarius as a substantive for someone with the legal right of usus, even though as an adjective usuarius also could describe a thing used, or a slave used.

Anyway, I'm boldly replacing usor (which seems to be a neologism) with usuarius as an actual Latin word that meant "user," as noted here: "Because the term usuarius is derived from usus, which … refers to a use of right or of fact, one can be a 'user' in two different ways" (as a matter of law). Berger's definition of the usuarius in law (Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law, pp. 752 and 755) as someone who could reside in a house or on property, but had no rights of ownership, seems apt for a Wikipedia user. And the usuarius could, for instance, benefit from the "fruits" of the property, though without ownership, he had no right to sell it or lease rights to others: usus was attached to the individual "user." Also amusing is the observation here that the usuarius … could stay on the property only as long as he didn't become molestus, or what we might call disruptive. Later, usuarius seems to have acquired negative connotations of "one who lived off the increments of intellectual capital belonging to others," though given our policies against original research, that too seems apt.

While I'm quite active on Wikipedia, I've contributed to Wiktionary only a very few times, so pardon me if I've committed a faux pas. Cynwolfe (talk) 14:56, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

The problem is that usuarius refers to a person with legal rights to property owned by someone else. It's not the meaning intended here. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:17, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but it's a real word that in later usage comes to have a broader meaning, as its use as an epithet for Ramus suggests, and usor as far as I can determine is not a real Latin word. If we're looking for modern Latin, usuarius in our sense here is a plausible development, especially since our "user" is based on the contemporary concept of "user rights": I don't own Wikipedia; it's property owned by someone else (the foundation), and I enjoy its benefits. Unless the Vatican has invented usor for this sense, it seems better to use an actual Latin word with a plausible development along the lines of user rights. If you check my contributions at Wikipedia-en, you'll see that my proposal isn't meant to be frivolous. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:17, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll want to run a check on my Late and medieval Latin sources, and I have a few the date from around as late as 1600 that I can check. I don't know yet when usor may have entered the language, or whether it is completely unattested. Either way, usuarius just doesn't have the right meaning.

And by the way, Wiktionary does not have a policy against original research; that is a purely Wikipedia policy. On Wiktionary, we do a great deal of original research; it simply must be supported by citations/quotations data. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:17, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

OK, I'll beware of that with Wiktionary. I still think our word "user" means "someone who signs up to have user rights", not just "somebody who uses something," and that therefore usuarius is the right word. Let me try to document this better, based on the links above (though there's a lot more):

• in Roman law, usuarius was someone who had user rights (usus), as distinguished from property rights of ownership. A usuarius was someone entitled to use something, and to get benefits from it that included intangibles such as services (as in the distasteful case of "using" somebody else's servus).
• Usuarius means "user."
• By the 17th century, those fluent enough in Latin to employ it for jokes and invective could use usuarius in a metaphorical or non-technical sense of "someone who makes use of". Not only that, but in the case of Petrus Ramus, the "something" the usuarius made use of was specifically what we would call intellectual property, again indicating that "user rights" had a broader meaning applicable here.
• The word usor doesn't appear in either the OLD or L&S, and since there's no reason to think that Classical Latin had no need for a word to mean "one who uses", it seems that they avoided forming it. They were more likely to use the participle utens, the prevalence of which is indicated by the Italian utente (it:Utente:Cynwolfe).
• But perhaps the best evidence that usuarius is the correct Latin word for our "user" is usuario in some Romance languages, which preserves the outcome of the semantic development I sketch above. See ca:Usuari:Cynwolfe, es:Usuario:Cynwolfe, pt:Usuário(a):Cynwolfe. It seems to me that in creating New Latin, comparing current usage in Romance languages is better than translating literally from English. At Latin Wikipedia, I regret to say, they seem to have adopted usor, wherever it comes from, when either usuarius or utens (in the sense of 'one who uses') would've reflected better Latinitas. Cynwolfe (talk) 20:51, 10 December 2012 (UTC)