Sunday, January 27, 2013

For the lack of space avenditio was born

In my previous post  I talked how Paras omitted the negative prefix causing me a lot of headache in the process. This time Paras deleted the space between two words giving birth to an unknown term.

From page 1 of the Civil Code of the Philippines Annotated, Vol. V, 2013 Edition:


After defining sale, he delved into the history of the term and wrote that sale came from the Latin word avenditio. In another post  I discussed the difficulties of the claim of  Paras about the French and Spanish usage of the words a venta. In this post let's see how avenditio came into being.

Google Translate says that sale in Latin is venditionem or venditio. Not avenditionem nor avenditio.

Duhaime's Legal Dictionary translates venditio as a sale. Notice the space between the article and the noun.
Here's how Duhaime defines venditio:
A term of ancient Roman law but still reflected in the civil law and French language for which the verb for sale is vendre and the noun venteEven in English, a seller is known alternatively as a vendor. In Latin, a male seller is a venditor and a female, venditrix.
So how did Paras come up with avenditio? This passage from the book A Text-Book of Roman Law: From Augustus to Justinian  By W. W. Buckland may explain:


Or this footnote from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 4,  By Edward Gibbon:


The old editions of Paras contain the same word. I'd like to believe that this is just proofreading oversight. But who knows?

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