Talk:seponate

RFV discussion
Not seeing it durably archived. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 16:00, 31 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Well.
 * gets three hits: two scannos for "separate", and one irrelevant adjective use that I think is a typo/error for ("The district magistrate and the superintendent of police should think of each other as two seponate wheels of a bullock cart, each substantially import for the other.").
 * gets one hit, a scanno for "separates".
 * gets no hits at all.
 * gets six hits: three relevant; one that seems relevant from the quoted snippet on the search page, but that Snippet View won't actually show me; one typo/error for ; and one irrelevant use where it seems to mean something like (" Athias defended himself before the Sheriff and the case was seponated.").
 * I've added the three relevant, visible cites to the entry, but something is wrong here. I really don't think this is some real-but-extremely-rare word that has somehow made it into b.g.c.-indexed sources just three or four times in the past hundred years — and seemingly always by Northern European writers (though I'm not certain about that part). Rather, I think it must be some sort of rare error. Unfortunately, I just don't know what the correct word is (if it's an error for an English word that the Northern Europeans are accidentally Swedishizing or something), or what the source word is (if there's a Swedish word that writers are mistakenly assuming has an English cognate), or what.
 * —Ruakh TALK 23:08, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * There's apparently more at Scholar. But see . It seems like some barbarous Medical Latin malformation, based on that word. The past participle of sepono: being sepostus: or sepositus:. DCDuring TALK 00:08, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. My first thought, given the -ate, was Latin/French, but I couldn't find any French, and the Northern European connection, albeit tenuous, was too tempting. (Of course, it could be an Englishing of a barbarous Northern European Medical Latin malformation, but I still haven't found any evidence of that.) —Ruakh TALK 01:21, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The Google Scholar hits have a similar bias toward Scandavian authors. DCDuring TALK 02:04, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Removing a medication or treatment from a patient is in modern Swedish. There is a less common synonym and the verb suffix  normally corresponds to French verb suffix, German  and English. Seponera is listed in NE.se and in SAOB, but not in SAOL 6, 8 or 13. The SAOB ("the Swedish OED") entry was edited in 1967 and presents this etymology (my translation): compare German, also English ; from Latin , from (see also ), and  (compare ). End quote. Considering that German was the primary foreign language taught in Swedish schools until 1946, it seems likely to me that when these early 20th century English texts by Scandinavian authors use "seponate", it is a home-made translation of the Swedish/German seponera/seponieren. Maybe you should look up English, as suggested by SAOB. It sounds a lot like postpone:. --LA2 06:46, 3 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks a bunch! What's weird is, all of those various verbs also seem to be pretty rare. was actually my first guess for Swedish, but when I saw how rare it was (just a few hundred Ghits, and only five non-Italian b.g.c. hits), I decided that it couldn't be the source of this. German  seems to be more common, though. Oh, and the Dutch cognate  explains the "case was seponated" cite above (see, which also mentions a French etymon * that I can't attest). —Ruakh TALK 12:18, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
 * One can also find a few instances in English of forms of among the much larger number of scannos of forms of deposit:. To me this exemplifies the risk of including very rare terms in a dictionary without conspicuous use-only-at-the-risk-of-not-being-understood warnings on every appearance of the word. We have no means of doing so except at the entry. Search engines and reusers of our material may not prominently display such warnings. Consequently I am not sure that such words should be in principal namespace. Perhaps they need to be seponed in some kind of less prominent namespace. DCDuring TALK  12:43, 3 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep in mind that Google has not yet scanned any library in Sweden, only the occasional Swedish books that made their way to libraries abroad. This means Google will digitize the works of Linnaeus, but not for example the Swedish Bible translations. (At Oxford, you would study Vulgata, KJV and Luther's German Bible, but probably not the Swedish or Danish translations.) Medical literature in the Swedish language would only rarely make it to libraries abroad, I guess. But German was "the language of science" in the 19th century. --LA2 14:05, 3 December 2010 (UTC)


 * RFV passed. Note: Some context tags have been added, but a full-on usage note may be warranted. —Ruakh TALK 20:16, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Norwegian "seponere"
I'm an English doctor working in Norway. I have never heard of or used the word "Seponate" in English medical practice. However, in Norway Doctors use the word "Seponere" all the time to indicate the cessation of specific medication. This is not a word that is in common use amongst members of the public, only amongst health care professionals. My Norwegian colleagues do not know the origin of the word. It is, however, a very useful word as it is highly specific, short, easy to use and flows well in Norwegian language. Norwegian medical practice was heavily influenced by the Germans before WWII. Chrinc (talk) 11:32, 31 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks! —Ruakh TALK 12:43, 31 May 2012 (UTC)