Reconstruction talk:Latin/-izo

The 12th century date for "latinizare" is given in Niermeyer's Medieval Latin Dictionary and is echoed in other sources. I can see it does appear in Aurelianus as "latinizanda", though it seems (afaict) to be a hapax—he himself uses latinavimus later on without the iz—so I guess it was re-derived in Medieval Latin. I'm not sure why it would need to have anything to do with Greek: medieval Europeans were translating plenty of things into Latin and izare was long established as a productive suffix by then! —Nizolan (talk)

Oh, it also can't be a direct borrowing from Greek because the Koine Greek word for Latin is ῥωμαῖος/ῥωμαϊκός not the modern λατινικός. Johannes Schneider, "Graecizare, Latinizare und verwandte verben in mittelalterlichen Latein" discusses the instance and views it as either formed from Latinus by analogy with graecizare or an early instance of productive -izo derived from specialist terms like pulverizare—either way, not a direct loanword. I've moved it to a separate point. —Nizolan (talk) 01:42, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
 * So, Niermeyer's or any other dating becomes irrelevant to us as soon as we've established that the word has been attested earlier. Any number of Latin words, even those that have no gaps in attestation, might have been "re-derived" any number of times. The word appears around the same period as all the other words in the list, and given lack of evidence to the contrary we can only treat it the same. Otherwise one can muse about the possibility of internal Latin coining about most if not all of these words - certainly their morphology looked identically analysable to a Latin speaker. Finally there's the obvious possibility that *latīnizāre* had been back-ported into Latin from some Romance language, which I see no way to evaluate.
 * I find your remark about Koine Greek very odd. By the 5th century there were first two socio-political entities calling themselves the Roman Empire, and later technically one. The inhabitants of both called themselves ῥωμαϊκός in contemorary Koine Greek, but the official language of the eastern part was Greek by the 5th century, and this must mean that the whole derivation-net of this word also referred to speakers of Greek in the Easterm Roman Empire. Not just that, but the Latin word must have originated in circa-breakup Italian Greek (which saw its last flowering in Europe that side of the Renaissance with the influx of refugess from the East), and your suggestion amounts to saying that Roman-speaking (=Greek) Romans referred to Roman-speaking (=Latin) Romans as speaking "Roman". Even if one assumes they still referred to speaking Greek as ἑλληνίζω, surely you see the reason they migh have wanted to avoid ῥωμαΐζω in favour of a less ambiguous term. Latin abounds with of Greek words either entirely unattested in Greek itself, or not in the same meanings. Lack of attestation in extant Greek is no reason to deny the word's Greek origins.
 * Edit: γραικίζω, γραικιστί are themselves perfect examples of words current only in Italian varieties Greek.
 * Frankly I think you've been mislead by Niermeyer's dating and are trying to salvage the situation by grasping at any and all reasons to do something different to this particular word. I see no benefit to the reader in whether the words are grouped together or separately on this page, less so if the grouping is based on mere speculation. One can take the discussion to the individual word's etymology section, but spreading it around the website will only make it difficult to correct it once the conclusions in the etymology section change. By the way, if you can provide sources on the productivity of the suffix in Medieval Latin, I'm interested. Brutal Russian (talk) 00:34, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

RFM discussion: June 2022–February 2023
To be merged with. Very much an attested suffix. This, that and the other (talk) 07:43, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
 * It appears these have been merged. (The reconstruction page now redirects to the mainspace one, where the Latin suffix is defined.) &mdash; excarnateSojourner (talk &middot; contrib) 21:43, 25 February 2023 (UTC)