Disputatio:Civitas Vaticana

E Vicipaedia

[recensere] "Status Civitatis Vaticanae"

The above is what the English-language Wikipedia says the country is called in Latin. Any expert or other informed opinion?

Why I am interested is that it is a country (probably the only one) where Latin is the official language. Supporters of Vicipaedia should therefore be looking to cooperate with its residents in building this site.

Robin Patterson 19:23 feb 2, 2005 (UTC)

Interesting. Google turns up a lot of hits for that phrase I have not comved through them, but it looks like a lot of them are getting their info from the Wikipedia. Especially suspicious is that that phrasing does not appear at Vatican.va. I will be happy to be proven wrong, but my initial suspicion is that some speaker of English (or another European language) backformed that from "state."
It would certainly be interesting to get writers from the Vatican, but the fact is that even there few people really know Latin. It is the official language, but not the actual spoken language (jokes by Henry Beard notwithstanding). In my experience, the daily language in use there is Italian (but there are a lot of languages spoken there in general). However, they do have Latinists working on papal bulls, Latinitas, the websites, and so on, so it might be possible to find someone who would be willing to contribute. --Iustinus 19:58 feb 2, 2005 (UTC)
Actually, looking more carefully at Vatican.va, I see a few references to a "Commissio Pontificia pro Statu Civitatis Vaticana" and one reference that is not to a committee. The fact that "Statu" is capitalized in that example is especially telling. --Iustinus 20:04 feb 2, 2005 (UTC)

Statu is Ablative of Status. This has certaintly little to with State. Civitas (-> people) generally does not sound wrong. Others that come to mind are Urbs ( -> City)

This is esp. true since Augustinus talks about de Civitate Dei (capitalisation is arbitrary). -- Eptalon 05:38, 19 Februarii 2006 (UTC) (if you answer,please do so on my simple user account)

The Latin appears grammatically correct but culturally and historically poor, more or less like a Martian who picks up Latin but has no idea what historical weight was given to this or that technical term. We can't reinvent everything with the help of a modern dictionary. If we do, we might as well use something like interlingua.