Can someone change my username?

Ariga

Sephiroth's Best Friend
Can I change my name to Ariga, please? That was my username on another account I used a few months back, but I lost the password and email due to... things happening. I know the name of the email, I just don't have it any more. I'm still Ariga on discord, and I'd really like my old name back.

@The Twilight Mexican @Cthulhu @X-SOLDIER @Lex

I was told to tag you to get a response
 
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youffie

Pro Adventurer
Could I have my username changed to just youffie? I think I used to have an account here with that name, but then I forgot the password and couldn’t get it back because I also forgot which email address I used… So I just created this one. I didn’t make any posts with that account, so it should be fine.
 

Ⓐaron

Factiō Rēpūblicāna dēlenda est.
AKA
The Man, V
Please change my name to Ⓐaron.

(I felt more comfortable using “The Man” when I felt like I was posting often enough for most people to get the tongue-in-cheek nature of the screen name. I don’t post that often these days, so I’d rather just use [a slight variant of] my real name.)

Also, is it still possible to have line breaks in custom titles if an admin sets them? If so, I’d like to add a translation of my pretentious Latin custom title, along with a slightly modified version of it:

Partēs Rēpublicānae dēlendae sunt.
(The Republican Party is to be destroyed.)

If not, I guess I’ll leave it as it is.

(The current form
“Factiō Rēpublicāna dēlenda est.” And it is important to include the full stop; Google Translate gets a different reading without it.
is technically less accurate, as the Romans would’ve been likelier to use partēs rather than factiō to describe a political party, but Google Translate at least gets a coherent sentence out of the factiō version that resembles what the Latin version actually means.)

The participle dēlendus is the gerundive, or future passive participle (a tense we don’t have in English), of the verb dēleo, meaning I destroy (note that it is customary to express the root forms of Latin verbs in the first-person singular active indicative translation, rather than the present infinitive as it is in nearly every other language. Incidentally, dēleo is the linguistic ancestor of the English word delete). Thus, dēlendus means “something that is to be destroyed”, so a completely literal translation of the famous sentence “Carthāgō dēlenda est” would be “Carthage is something that is to be destroyed.” But that’s an awkward, wordy rendering of a phrase that takes three words to say in Latin, and we wouldn’t actually be changing the literal meaning of the phrase in any appreciable sense by simplifying this to “Carthage is to be destroyed.”

However, Cato the Censor’s famous statement is most commonly seen in English as “Carthage must be destroyed,” which is literally somewhat less accurate and doesn’t even actually fully convey the metaphorical urgency seen in the Latin phrase. If we were to translate this statement figuratively, we would be better off writing something along the lines of, “There is no option other than to destroy Carthage.”

In any case, Google Translate gets my current custom title, “Factiō Rēpublicāna dēlenda est.” – with the full stop included – as meaning “Republican Party must be destroyed.” Not exactly accurate, as I’ve explained, but close enough; I’ll give them a grade of 90%. Without the full stop, it gets: “Republican Party destroyed”. Grade of 75%; Google Translate’s primitive algorithm for Latin probably doesn’t understand that it’s a complete sentence without the full stop, even though “est” is very definitely a verb (it is the third-person singular active indicative case of sum, meaning I am).

The word factiō is, clearly, the root of the English word faction, which is roughly what it meant in Latin as well. Metaphorically, it can mean a political party; in fact, the Latin-language Wikipedia actually has an article on the Republican Party under the name “Factio republicana (Civitates Foederatae)”. However, this is a bit of a stretch; the Romans probably would have used partēs, which is in fact related to our word party. (More specifically, party descends from the related word partīta, which is the feminine past participle of partior, meaning “I share” or “I distribute”; or partiēns, the past participle of partiō, an alternate form of partior.)

The issue here is that partēs is also the plural of the word pars, meaning… part, most memorably. (Also about a dozen other things, like every other Latin word. I’m barely even exaggerating; anyone who has studied the language for more than five minutes will notice that almost every word has about a dozen different translations. And yes, part is also etymologically related to pars – in this case, it is a descendant of partem, the accusative case [used for the direct object of a sentence] of pars.) The plural, partēs, can (and, in this context, does) mean a political party, but Google Translate seems to have no knowledge of this meaning or usage, or else no rule to handle plural words that are represented as singular nouns in English usage, or else simply not enough context to determine that this is a reference to a political party, so it gets confused.

(To be fair regarding the context, few people are probably perverse enough to write references to modern American politics in Latin. The word Rēpublicānus technically doesn’t even exist in Latin, so it’s slightly surprising that Google even manages to figure out that. It is a back-formation from pūblicānus, a relational adjective meaning public revenue [also a noun meaning tax collector or publican], and rēspūblica or rēs pūblica, literally meaning public affair or public thing, and the origin of our word republic. It might actually be more properly written as Rēpūblicānus, but there’s no standardised placement for the apices in a word that is, after all, made up.)

In any case, Google Translate returns “The Republicans deleted” for my version with partēs, with or without a full stop. Since I value at least slightly comprehensible communication, this is not acceptable to me, even though the partēs version is both technically and etymologically more correct. The “dēlenda est” formation is much more familiar to modern audiences than “dēlendae sunt” in any case, so I’ll only use the latter if it’s practical to have an English translation of the phrase accompanying the Latin version. (Because partēs is plural, every other word in the sentence also has to be pluralised, due to the rules of Latin grammar; dēlenda is the feminine singular of dēlendus, and it just so happens that Carthāgō and factiō share a gender.) It’s stretching the bounds of clear communication badly enough to use the “dēlenda est” version as it is, but Cato’s quote is familiar enough that I find it more powerful to riff on it in Latin than to do the same in English.

For the record, I am not fluent in Latin. To be clear, I am not certain anyone qualifies as being fluent in what is, after all, a dead language, but I am still far from being an expert, in any case. I know just enough Latin to be dangerous, but there are still quite a number of grammar rules I haven’t got the hang of, and I almost always have to look up words, or at least cases and declensions, before I can write a sentence in Latin.

Lastly, if I could have “The Man, V” placed in my AKA field, that would be nice, too. It seems the field is strictly limited to like 20 characters or something, which seems awfully small, so I can’t just put all three names in right now, and I’d rather not switch out “Aaron” until my screen name is actually a variant of it.

…actually, is there a reason my AKA field is limited to such a small number of characters? Other users seem to have pretty massive lists of names in theirs.
 
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X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Updated your name & AKA stuff. Not sure what the character limit whatnot, but possible one of the other admins who's more familiar with the existing limitations'd be able to answer that.

Nice ta see ya around.




X :neo:
 

Ⓐaron

Factiō Rēpūblicāna dēlenda est.
AKA
The Man, V
Thanks!

I assume we can’t have line breaks in custom titles on XenForo? I guess I’ll just have to add that to the list of things about vBulletin that I still kind of miss. :sadpanda: Maybe I should just move the Cato paraphrase to my signature and find something else to use as a custom title… but then I might have to move Le Guin inside my spoiler tag, and I don’t want to do that. Decisions, decisions…
 

Glaurung

Forgot the cutesy in my other pants. Sorry.
AKA
Mama Dragon
Could I get back to being Glaurung, please? I think the Skyrim joke is a bit outdated already :P


EDIT: Btw, I can't edit my profile preferences, nor change my AKA field (neither write more nor erase what's already there). Also, it tells me that I have to enter a value of 15 characters or less, even when I leave all the fields that I can edit empty.
 
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