Misiones se prepara para una semana de Fitomejoramiento Evolutivo con apoyo internacional

Del 1 al 5 de junio, la provincia será escenario de talleres que buscan potenciar la agricultura local a través de la ciencia participativa y el financiamiento europeo.

#Noticias #Misiones #Locales #Capioví #Corpus #Dosdemayo #Gobernadorroca

https://misionesconecta.net/noticia/talleres-fitomejoramiento-evolutivo-misiones-ue-fida-iica-embrapa-inta-argeninta

El newcom une a Misiones: Noche de fiesta deportiva y confraternidad en Santo Pipó

El polideportivo municipal se vistió de fiesta para recibir a equipos de Jardín América, Corpus Christi y anfitriones de Santo Pipó, demostrando el auge de la disciplina y el espíritu de unión entre los participantes.

#Noticias #Misiones #Deportes #Corpus #Jardínamérica #Santopipó #Noche

https://misionesconecta.net/noticia/newcom-santo-pipo-region-integracion-amistad

Rovira pone freno a Corpus: "Existen alternativas energéticas más allá de las grandes represas"

El líder del oficialismo misionero, Carlos Rovira, desestimó las pujas por la construcción de la represa de Corpus Christi, argumentando la existencia de tecnologías energéticas más eficientes y sostenibles. Subrayó la importancia de la consulta popular y la distribución equitativa de beneficios.

#Noticias #Misiones #Actualidad #Corpus #Existen

https://misionesconecta.net/noticia/rovira-anti-represas-alternativas-energeticas-corpus

Ecología responde a Orembaé: "Estamos trabajando para brindar información completa sobre el proyecto Corpus"

El Ministerio de Ecología de Misiones desmiente acusaciones de falta de transparencia y asegura que se está elaborando una respuesta exhaustiva al pedido de información de la Asociación Civil Orembaé sobre el proyecto hidroeléctrico Corpus. El organismo aclara que no ha recibido aún estudios de impact...

#Noticias #Misiones #Actualidad #Corpus #Orembaé #Estamos

https://misionesconecta.net/noticia/ecologia-responde-orembae-corpus

The strange absence of ‘ambiguate’

If I asked you to name or invent a word that means ‘make ambiguous’, what would it be – ambiguify? ambiguate? I’ve felt an occasional need for such a term, to say that a word or piece of syntax ambiguates the meaning in text or speech.

I mean, sure, I can say ‘makes the sense ambiguous’. But there’s no reason not to have a one-word verb. After all, we have its antonym, disambiguate: to make something unambiguous. More on that later.

Take this use of since: Since I’ve been injured, I haven’t gone running. Does it mean ‘because’ or ‘since the time that’? Is its meaning causal or temporal? Without further information, there’s no way to be sure. The choice of conjunction ambiguates the sense.

The same issue arises with other common words, like as and while. She made the sauce, while he chopped the vegetables. Does while have a temporal sense, indicating concurrent activities, or a contrastive or additive sense, like whereas or and? The comma and other factors might guide our interpretation, but ultimately we can’t be certain.

Usages like this are ambiguating. As a copy-editor I come across them fairly often, and I’ve begun using ambiguate judiciously in referring to them. Disambiguate is also useful, being more specific than synonyms like clarify and resolve. Disambiguate is a relatively new and specialized term, but it’s established enough to appear in major dictionaries:

to make (an ambiguous expression) unambiguous [Collins]

remove uncertainty of meaning from (an ambiguous sentence, phrase, or other linguistic unit) [Oxford]

to establish a single grammatical or semantic interpretation for [American Heritage]

to establish a single semantic or grammatical interpretation for [Merriam-Webster]

to make a sentence or phrase perfectly clear by removing all uncertainty [Vocabulary.com]

to make clear the meaning of a word, phrase, etc. that has more than one meaning [Macmillan]

(Note the tantalisingly near-identical definitions from AHD and M-W.) The OED has citations for disambiguate from 1960, generally in linguistic and philosophical contexts, and the word’s usage has risen steadily since then:

The noun disambiguation has been in use since at least 1827; it has become more familiar this century from its common appearance at the top of Wikipedia pages:

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As it turns out, ambiguate exists in the lexicon, but only barely – not enough for lexicographers to include it. Dictionary aggregator OneLook shows it only in the crowd-sourced Wiktionary, whose entry defines it as ‘to make more ambiguous’ (which implies, oddly, that the thing was already ambiguous).

A sense of the two verbs’ relative frequency may be seen in this corpus comparison:

Ambiguate is not even in the OED, that great historical cabinet whose vast shelves swell with obscure Latinate vocabulary. Instead of the verb you’d expect – even if labelled archaic or obsolete ­– nestled in among ambigual, ambigue (n.), ambigue (adj.), ambiguity, ambiguous, ambiguously, and ambiguousness, there is a lacuna where ambiguate might go.

Its rival, ambiguify, appears in none of the corpora above but shows up a couple of times in Google Books (e.g., ‘Her words seemed to ambiguify their meanings’ —Norman Spinrad, The Void Captain’s Tale). Its chances of happening, fetch-style, are even smaller than those of ambiguate, yet it has its champions.

I’m not the first to point out the utility or validity of ambiguate, and a search on Twitter Bluesky shows it in casual use. But even here its appearances are sporadic, and in printed or edited texts it remains marginal.

My recommendation is that if you ever need to use the word, do. Its meaning should be transparent enough in context, and with more usage it will gain in familiarity and acceptability. Whether it will gain enough to ever show up in major dictionaries, or even in language corpora, is an open question.

Updates:

Languagehat joins me in ‘urging the use of this occasionally useful word’.

In episode 211 of the Weird Studies podcast, about 11 minutes in, J.F. Martel says of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that it “just ambiguates everything”. Great to hear it in the wild!

Peter Gilliver at the OED tells me they have evidence for ambiguate back to 1969. Watch this space.

Update to this update: After I posted about ambiguate on Bluesky, Peter Gilliver antedated the now-familiar transitive use significantly, to 1909, in the Caruthersville, Missouri, Twice-a-Week Democrat:

Ah, how you would like to ambiguate your phraseology to make an evil showing against me, but “technical” and “legal” truth is mighty and will prevail.

He also discovered a much older example of the word’s intransitive use, in the Melbourne Leader in 1868. He thinks it may be older still.

A Cabinet Minister with a larger share of natural ability than educational acquirement once said of a wavering supporter that he thought he (the supporter) was “ambiguating.” I have an immense respect for the man who can invent a new word and is bold enough to use it.

Note, too, the pleasingly disambiguating parenthetical.

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[You’ll find more neologisms in the Sentence first archives.]

Numéro 12 - focus 🔎

Yadira Carranza Marino :

Cartographier le réseau d’un médiateur transatlantique : la correspondance de Fernando Aínsa
https://doi.org/10.4000/15ico

Dans la perspective des études transatlantiques, Fernando Aínsa, critique littéraire et fonctionnaire de l’UNESCO, se positionne comme un acteur majeur de la diffusion de la littérature latino-américaine en Europe, notamment dans le milieu intellectuel français. La cartographie de sa correspondance révèle qu’au fil de trois décennies un véritable réseau d’intellectuels s’est structuré autour de sa figure. Les échanges documentés se concentrent sur quatre principaux domaines : la presse, les universités, les maisons d’édition et les organisations culturelles. Son corpus épistolaire témoigne d’une circulation dynamique d’idées et de textes. À travers ces lettres, nous sommes les témoins directs de projets littéraires et, plus encore, nous observons comment Fernando Aínsa a construit un capital culturel significatif. Ce capital, forgé dans son double rôle d’universitaire et de diplomate, a été mis au service de la promotion des lettres latino-américaines.

#HumanitésNumériques #UNESCO #cartographie #corpus #lAmérique_Latine