Talk:-aticius

I appreciate what you mean, but Malkiel (cited) explicitly gives this as a productive ending in later Latin and into Romance. Note the definition, which is not a straightforward subset of what -icius means, and how it applies to immolaticius/damnaticius. Nicodene (talk) 12:22, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your patience with me! I just looked at the references that you included. From what I see, Malkiel says that -ātīcius is an expanded form created by combination of the suffix -īcius and the "interfixal element -āt-". I didn’t however see much discussion in this source of differing semantics to -ātīcius vs. -īcius or to the dating of their differentiation. Rohlfs mentions that the original formation was on participial stems, but that -īcius was extended in Roman times to other kinds of bases. I couldn’t find where Rohlfs specifically discusses the compound suffix -ātīcius; could you give me a pointer to the most relevant part of that source?
 * If I understand correctly, the distinction that you identified is that “-ātīcius” has an additional sense of potentiality or purpose: thus can mean “meant to be sacrificed” and  can mean “condemnable”. Another word that seems to have this kind of meaning is  "one who deserves the whip" (Lewis and Short).
 * Of course, all of these are formally ambiguous between the two analyses since they are all derived from first-conjugation verb bases. So the argument that a distinct suffix -ātīcius is present in these words must rely on semantics. I am not sure these examples by themselves demonstrate that “-ātīcius” had a distinct meaning from "-īcius”, as I think the semantics of a passive participle + stative adjective suffix, along with the meanings of these particular verbs, easily lend themselves to the development of a ‘purposive’ meaning (even if that is not, strictly speaking, a subset of the ordinary meaning of the suffix). That is, to explain why some adjectives derived from first-conjugation verbs that end in -ātīcius refer to a result, and others refer to a purpose, it might be better to consider each one by one, rather than considering the first group to be derived with a suffix -īcius, and the second group to be derived with a distinct suffix -ātīcius. E.g. for “damnaticius” compare English “damned”, often used pejoratively in a sense that could be more literally expressed as “worthy of damnation”. Or for a use of an English past participle in a prospective sense (where it could be reinterpreted as referring to purpose), consider “hired” in a frame like “it has proved impossible to obtain hired help”. The fact that both  and  have passive meanings also makes me think the participles   and  were still salient as bases in these words.
 * I think the key evidence would be examples of adjectives with purposive/potential meanings from non-first-conjugation verbs, and whether such adjectives would end in -īcĭus or -ātīcius.
 * Here is a list of words I identified that seem to me like they could fit one of these criteria, and the relevant senses:
 * DMLBS “operated by or used for pulling or drawing”
 * DMLBS “(of beasts) ready to be hired”
 * Lewis and Short “that can be inserted” (but Gaffiot “inséré”)
 * Do you think these would justify adding the sense that you identified for -ātīcius as a specialized development of -īcius itself, or would you still consider the meaning to be linked specifically to the attachment of -āt- before the suffix? Let me know also if there's any evidence that I've missed.--Urszag (talk) 23:07, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
 * @Urszag Those sources do not have much else to say about the matter.
 * I do understand your point about how a 'purposive/potential' meaning can easily arise from the components, however the fact remains that it does not appear to have done so for the clear majority of participle-based lemmas in Category:Latin terms suffixed with -icius (long) (unless nearly all of those entries, along with the sources that they cite, have incomplete definitions in this respect). The ones that do demonstrate such a meaning do so only in the Late Latin period, as I'd noted when doing the research for this, which corresponds well to the nuances of the Romance suffixes that descend from . Note that all three of your examples, per the sources that you have cited, date to the Late Latin period for the senses that you have provided here.
 * What examples like demonstrate is that -ātīcius was not alone, and that there were versions corresponding to other verb classes, as hinted by, for instance, the -edizo of Spanish  < . (I would have added the others, but at the time I was fed up from the work of fleshing out /// + the numerous Romance reflexes.)
 * It would be possible to regard all of these as fundamentally -tīcius, preceded by different thematic vowels or such, but this would complicate the Romance etymologies. For instance, Old French, a wildly productive suffix, is specifically from -ātīcius. That's not to say that I couldn't reorganize everything accordingly, but it'll be quite a pain.
 * Nicodene (talk) 00:20, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * What do you think about adding the definition about forming “adjectives meaning '-able', 'meant for', or similar” to -īcius with a label saying that this sense is specifically attested for the Late Latin period? I think this information about the timeframe of the semantic development is in principle distinct from the question of whether the endings -ātīcius and -īcius were ever distinct suffixes (as opposed to alternative forms or alternative bracketings of essentially the same suffix).
 * Even in modern Romance language forms, there seems to be variability in the amount to which the adjectives ending in the descendant of this suffix have a sense of ability/tendency/purpose: for example, looking through Category:Italian terms suffixed with -aticcio, I see masticaticcio “Material that is being (or has been) chewed”, (ab)bruciaticcio “slightly burnt”, and rovinaticcio “somewhat ruined” alongside levaticcio "detachable, movable, liftable" and mangiaticcio (both "somewhat eaten, consumed" and "eatable, edible").
 * This suggests to me that, even if we consider the rebracketing from -āt-īcius to -ātīcius to have occurred in Latin prior to the formation of the words immolātīcius and damnātīcius, we would still have to provide a definition for the resulting suffix -ātīcius that has some overlap with the definition of the older suffix -īcius. It seems tidier to me to cover all senses together at -īcius, and then define -ātīcius as a later variant form of this suffix. I do think it makes sense to use -ātīcius as the hub for Romance descendants of the ending; the thing that I find most questionable is the contrasting categorization of some Latin words as having the ending in -ātīcius and others having the ending -īcius, which I think is a dichotomy that is hard to establish with certainty for words derived from first-conjugation verbs.--Urszag (talk) 01:23, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * @Urszag In that case, we would have to specify not only 'in Late Latin' but also 'when combined with past participles', as the nuance of potential or purpose does not occur otherwise, nor would we expect it to. That's certainly doable.
 * In that case, one might naturally ask- why not the same for Romance? All instances of Catalan, Italian , Spanish , and Portuguese can fairly be analyzed as [form ending in a descendant of ] + [descendant of ].
 * Things get a bit more complicated for Old French, but it may just about be possible to analyze as, with a few caveats and at the risk of Malkiel groaning from his coffin. (Cases like  are difficult to explain as  + . On the other hand,  <  "power" +  isn't too bad.) Alternatively, we can treat Old French  as a special case and admit that it amounts to a rebracketed  which attaches freely to verbs of any class and even to nouns.
 * The other problem is cases such as the aforementioned Spanish, which in no way can be explained as + . It seems we have to begin with , subtract -(e)r, and add . Or we can jettison the surface analysis entirely and say 'from Vulgar Latin  <  + ; cf. Catalan , from the feminine' - which is most likely what actually happened. Fortunately there appear to be only about five such cases in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish combined - that I have found anyway. Nicodene (talk) 03:09, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * "In that case, we would have to specify not only 'in Late Latin' but also 'when combined with past participles'"--makes sense to me. I'm sure you have greater knowledge of the situation in Romance that I do; I'll have to think about if I have anything useful to say there. In terms of semantics, I find it interesting to see that it looks like many of the Spanish derivatives do have a passive sense, but there are also some with an active sense like olvidadizo (forgetful not forgettable). I would expect that the ending -ātīcius would become less segmentable the more it was eroded by phonetic changes, so French might be at the extreme end of of that process.--Urszag (talk) 05:17, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * @Urszag In that case, we would have to specify not only 'in Late Latin' but also 'when combined with past participles', as the nuance of potential or purpose does not occur otherwise, nor would we expect it to. That's certainly doable.
 * In that case, one might naturally ask- why not the same for Romance? All instances of Catalan, Italian , Spanish , and Portuguese can fairly be analyzed as [form ending in a descendant of ] + [descendant of ].
 * Things get a bit more complicated for Old French, but it may just about be possible to analyze as, with a few caveats and at the risk of Malkiel groaning from his coffin. (Cases like  are difficult to explain as  + . On the other hand,  <  "power" +  isn't too bad.) Alternatively, we can treat Old French  as a special case and admit that it amounts to a rebracketed  which attaches freely to verbs of any class and even to nouns.
 * The other problem is cases such as the aforementioned Spanish, which in no way can be explained as + . It seems we have to begin with , subtract -(e)r, and add . Or we can jettison the surface analysis entirely and say 'from Vulgar Latin  <  + ; cf. Catalan , from the feminine' - which is most likely what actually happened. Fortunately there appear to be only about five such cases in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish combined - that I have found anyway. Nicodene (talk) 03:09, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * "In that case, we would have to specify not only 'in Late Latin' but also 'when combined with past participles'"--makes sense to me. I'm sure you have greater knowledge of the situation in Romance that I do; I'll have to think about if I have anything useful to say there. In terms of semantics, I find it interesting to see that it looks like many of the Spanish derivatives do have a passive sense, but there are also some with an active sense like olvidadizo (forgetful not forgettable). I would expect that the ending -ātīcius would become less segmentable the more it was eroded by phonetic changes, so French might be at the extreme end of of that process.--Urszag (talk) 05:17, 27 November 2022 (UTC)