Talk:possibilis

Old Italian, and another thing
Hi !

I see recently you've made considerable use of the Old Italian language code. Should we though? IMO, it just overlaps with CAT:Italian obsolete terms, and misleads people into thinking that "Old Italian" is actually a language, while it arguably isn't. As you know, Italian fossilized rather early, and before that, literature was mainly just a small number of random people writing in their own vernacular in adhoc orthographies. I sometimes even see Old Italian being used in etymologies, just because it's in a chain of borrowings next to Old French, Old Spanish or Old High German. Italian is Italian.

Anyways, I'd say that possevole is  o ld Italian, and not  O ld Italian. By this I mean: there's no Old Italian language, just old terms in the Italian language, as also shown by the quotation I found for the page, which features 13th century perfect Standard Modern Italian, with the possevole being the only term that isn't still in use.

Old Italian should probably be removed, but I'm too lazy to start a BP discussion about it.

Another note: the term in question is attested (as far as I have found) only by two authors, one is Bonaventure, and the other one is a monk who translated Origen into Italian, both being undeniably very accustomed with Latin, and being some of the earliest Romance writers after a millennia of litterature being only in Latin, they knew very well how to adapt from Latin into the Romance form. In this case, can we really call this "inherited"? I'd say it's still a borrowing, but adapted with the -evole, which was inherited through other words. There are likely more attestations which I have yet to find, but I'm pretty sure they will also be from the same kind of people.

Catonif (talk) 19:45, 19 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi @Catonif. I've no strong opinion in favour of keeping the Old Italian language code, so if you would like to remove any of my usages of it, I won't oppose it, so long you leave a tag saying 'obsolete' or similar. I agree that literary Italian hasn't really changed enough since the thirteenth century for it to require a separate language code.
 * As for whether possevole was inherited- it might as well have been, phonologically speaking, and the Romansch term provides moral support. The FEW gives it as a popular term, as does Grandgent. It's certainly still possible for it to represent a nativized and rather early borrowing. Nicodene (talk) 20:10, 19 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Glad you agree, I've made the needed changes. Catonif (talk) 20:19, 20 October 2022 (UTC)