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In French, especially in philosophy and mathematics, it is quite common [1] to use two nouns with a hyphen for certain concepts in order to distinguish between several definitions of the same word.

For example:

  • droit-liberté (right-freedom, a specific definition of right),
  • vérité-correspondance (truth-correspondence, a specific definition of truth),
  • etc

Is there something similar in Latin?

1 Answer 1

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Since none have done so far, I will offer up my thoughts. Hopefully, someone with more knowledge can correct or supplement what I say.

I don't think Latin can use this type of word formation and would use a different means. I would expect an entire phrase or at least an adjective with an appropriate ending.

I speak and read decent French, but could not make heads or tails of either droit-liberté or vérité-correspondance upon first reading them in your post. They strike me as word creations coming out of a specific French philosophical and literary tradition about how to name and discuss such things.

After reading your link on droit-liberté and looking up Théorie de la vérité-correspondance on Wikipedia, I briefly examined the words used in Wikipedia articles written in other languages to describe the theory of vérité-correspondance. Of the 15 languages listed, none seemed to use the French method of word formation even among the romance languages that theoretically might be able to reproduce the structure. The vast majority seemed also to require a reference to "theory" in how they named the concept, such as the English article entitled: "Correspondence theory of truth." An interesting exception was the Italian article entitled Corrispondentismo.

I did see several references to Aristotle's Adaequatio rei et intellectus, which has a title that corresponds to the word structure I would expect in a title from an author writing in Latin. I am not sure how Aristotle's work or title relates specifically to vérité-correspondance, but they sound like they are discussing similar topics.

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  • Thank you very much for your time
    – user10176
    Dec 19, 2021 at 10:04

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