Antiquus and Vetus: A Study in Latin Synonymy
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
CLASSICAL LATIN IS RICH IN ADJECTIVES signifying prior or long existence, be it in a neutral sense (old, ancient, former), in a good sense of having the qualities of early or durable life (ancestral, deep-rooted, pristine), or in a bad sense of showing wear from the passage of time (archaic, obsolete, primitive). The impressive range includes antiquus, priscus, pristinus, obsoletus, exoletus, senex, senilis, anus, anilis, diutinus, diuturnus, longinquus, grandis, prior, superior, maior, antecedens, praecedens, praeteritus, and vetus.1 They vary from the simple, onedimensional, monosemic (e.g., senex = of a living creature, usually a man, advanced in years); through those imbued with a value-added overtone for better or worse (e.g., exoletus = outdated); to the ones that are complex, multi-functional, pliable between neutrality and positive or negative connotation (e.g., priscus = of people and things pertaining to earlier times; venerable by reason of age; oldfashioned or overstrict in the manner of primitive generations). At the extreme of polysemy in this vocabulary are antiquus and vetus, a prominent pair possessing the widest diversity of meanings and multiplicity of coincidences, prolific in derivatives,2 occupants of larger spaces in lexical compilations. Comprehensive dictionaries and author-oriented concordances provide valid definitions under separate entries, synopses in isolation, that are compact in nature and necessarily reticent on details. A systematic comparison can measure their synonymy, elucidating shades of convergence and divergence barely perceptible, if at all, between two discrete and condensed panoramas. What follows is a comparative study3 based on all occurrences of this couple in ten classical authors encompassing a chronological span from ca 80 B.C. to ca A.D. 140: Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Livy,
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it