Disputatio:Mahometus al-Barāda'ī

Vice president

Greetings. What is the Latin name for "vice president"? I could not find it, so I wrote alter a praeside. In nuntii in the main page it says praeses vicarius. What do you know or consider? -- Donatello (disputatio) 05:18, 15 Augusti 2013 (UTC).[reply]

I guess "Alter a praeside" would mean "the second of the two men from the president": I don't like that very much! Surely "praeses vicarius" is exactly right?

Our practice with surnames (and other words) in foreign scripts, e.g. Arabic, is to use the international transliteration. If there are accents/diacritics, we give the correct accents in the lemma, but we omit them from the pagename. So I've moved and edited accordingly: OK?

The international transliteration was already given in the text of our article, so I took it from there. When it isn't so easy, the German wikipedia will often be a good source for the correct transliteration. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:37, 15 Augusti 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I changed "abhinc" twice to "a/ab". Here's why -- if I got this wrong, someone else will surely comment :)

"a/ab" means, in writing history, "from" or "since" a certain moment in the past. As in the very famous title of Livy's history, Ab Urbe condita -- "from the foundation of the City". You use this when giving a specific date in the past. That's what we do on this page.
"abhinc" is nearly the same, but not quite: it corresponds with the English words "for ... now" or "ago": he has been vice president "for three months now", or he became vice president "three months ago". You don't use it (I think) when giving a specific date. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:50, 15 Augusti 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I see. Thanks. :) Then praeses vicarius sounds better to me to. :) In Swedish we use "since" (sedan) in a little different ways than English does. This is probably why I used abhinc. I'll remember the rule of international transliteration. -- Donatello (disputatio) 00:04, 16 Augusti 2013 (UTC).[reply]

My daughter, who lives in Greece, now also uses "since" in a different way (because, I guess, it's different in Greek too). So she said to me "since half an hour": the standard English would be "half an hour ago". Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:34, 16 Augusti 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I see. It can happen like that. -- Donatello (disputatio) 15:16, 16 Augusti 2013 (UTC).[reply]