I was reading a Russian post on Facebook when the Latin-alphabet phrase ad acta jumped out at me. Not being familiar with it, I looked for it in my fairly comprehensive Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases (hey, I’m a book guy, what can I say), but it wasn’t there, so I went to the internet like a good 21st-century denizen and found it in Wiktionary:
ad acta
German
Alternative forms
● ad Acta
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin ad ācta.
[…]Adverb
1. (higher register) to the files
etwas ad acta legen ― to be done with something (literally, “to file”)
Usage notes
In modern times this almost only occurs in the phrase “etwas ad acta legen”, which means to put something to the files or, figuratively, to close the matter on a topic.
So it’s used primarily in German, which explains why it’s not in my English-language reference book… but it’s also used in Russian, doubtless due to the deep immersion in German culture it got before WWI. The Russian national corpus turns up two examples, both using the phrase without explanation:
1. С. Н. Булгаков. Дневник (1924)
Но, конечно, он — гений и свои творения складывает ad acta…
2. В. Н. Ламсдорф. Дневник (1896)
На этих бумагах, хранимых в Азиатском департаменте, имеется помета «ad acta», сделанная рукой благородного Капниста.
Is anyone out there familiar with this simple-looking but obscure phrase? (For another Latin tag used by Russians, see Feci quod potui, and for a fake-Italian phrase, see Финита ля комедия.)
ad acta legen was used in texts about administrative matters. Possibly still is. I rarely have occasion to read such things now. The expression is old and grey, like “part and parcel” and the undersigned.
Thanks, that’s what I ignorantly guessed.
Nothing “old and grey” about it for me — at least not more old and grey than I am. Sometimes the German translation “zu den Akten” is used (Akte being a bureaucratic/judicial file; computer files are Dateien). Of course actual paper Akten are becoming rare now.
mettere agli atti, with the same meanings, both proper (administrative/bureaucratic) and figurative
Interesting!
Still occurs in Austrian radio news. Of course without the fascinating long vowel.*
* ācta is due to Lachmann’s mad-cackling law. (Book chapter available without missing pages here if you have access. Features Warren Cowgill.)
The paper, on Jasanoff’s site. It’s a weird law and I have a hard time believing it.
I can. Here’s a scenario:
1) (Pre-)Italic arrives in Italy as an unremarkable IE (branch) with an unremarkable voice-based plosive system that has unremarkable voice assimilation in clusters.
2) There it, or at least Pre-Latin, encounters a language (family) that either lacks voiced plosives entirely (having for instance an aspiration contrast instead) or voices its lenes only allophonically (like Ukrainian, it seems). Etruscan would do; so would Crotonian, a recently reconstructed IE branch that seems to have left a bunch of words in Latin, Greek and likely Slavic (paywall, free pdf).
3) Consequently, lenis + fortis clusters like /gt/ and /ds/ become possible, and are analogically introduced wherever they seem logical.
4) Then comes an encounter with a language that has a voice-based plosive system. Contact with Greek wasn’t intense enough; I would suggest Latin encountering a part of Italic that did not participate in 2) and 3) – I’m not aware of evidence for or against Lachmann’s law outside of Latin, but there are a few inscriptions that indicate vowel length, so this could be testable. Some pretty basic Latin vocabulary is from Other Italic, e.g. bos “cattle”, scrofa “wild boar”.
5) Consequently, the allophonically stretched vowels that precede lenes in such clusters (think of pre-fortis clipping in English or of Winter’s law in Balto-Slavic) are interpreted as phonemically long vowels, and the clusters can assimilate.
Bit complicated, but considerably less weird than all other explanations of Lachmann’s law that I’ve yet seen (directly or cited in e.g. Jasanoff’s paper).
Interesting incidental observation in the Jasanoff paper: “in keeping with the cross-linguistic tendency of high front vowels to remain short.”
Kusaal has a number of cases where /i/ (and also /u/) remain short where other vowels lengthen as a result of internal sandhi, and some cases in loanwords of short /i/ for /i:/ in the source, like tilas “necessity” from Hausa tilas /ti:las/.
But is this really a “cross-linguistic tendency”? I can’t offhand come up with any other examples.
I am guessing he means a phonetic length difference, not a phonological one, say because of the shorter time it would take for the tongue to move upwards to articulate a following consonant. This can phonologize later.
Still used in FYLOSC.
Still used in Croatian –
pronounced with a short falling accent on the initial vowel: [ad ȁkta]
and abbreviated a. a.
Still used in Slovak and Czech.
I am reminded of the wacky fact that German uses “Akt” from the same Latin etymon to mean “nude” (as a noun for a sort of artwork).
That’s bizarre. Contamination from nackt?
No, an Akt (āctus) is, most generally, an act or action. “A nude” is a (according to wiki, originally graphic) rendering of a nude person, not the nude person theyself. Akt (Kunst)
FYLOSC borrowed that from German!
Ad acta legen sees some in use in German bureaucracy. (Source: I work there.) But the schriftliche Verfügung is z. d. A. (more often than not pronounced in this abbreviated form, ‘zett-de-a’).
By the way: in die Rundablage, zur Ablage P (slang) – to be put into the wastebasket (Papierkorb starts with a P, and they are often of a round shape).
5) Consequently, the allophonically stretched vowels that precede lenes in such clusters (think of pre-fortis clipping in English or of Winter’s law in Balto-Slavic) are interpreted as phonemically long vowels, and the clusters can assimilate.
Why wouldn’t this lengthen vowels before all lenes, not just those which are a part of cluster?
Looks like “Akt” for “nude” has also infiltrated (sometimes with some change of spelling) other South Slavic, West Slavic, and Baltic languages, plus Hungarian.
By the way: in die Rundablage, zur Ablage P (slang) – to be put into the wastebasket
English, at least American: “the circular file” or “the round file”.
ETA: I’m not sure I’ve heard that in this century.
Pfeifer has the following explanation for Akt “nude”::
Which doesn’t really explain why this is called Akt. (And for some reason, Pfeifer misses out on Geschlechtsakt “sexual intercourse”).
The dating is interesting, because the Paul Wörterbuch (9th edition) has only citations from the second half of the 19th century.; plus the remark “ist wohl dt. Eigenentwicklung”.
Sihler calls it Lachmann’s Rule, “an antique rule of thumb, […] latterly […] promoted to a phonological principle”.
It would probably lengthen vowels before all lenes that are in a syllable coda – in a stressed syllable at least. If the stress had already moved to the first syllable throughout, the outcome is as expected, isn’t it?
I see circular-filed and that goes in the circular file written in online comments every once in a while.
That must be in Sihler’s work from last century that’s cited in Jasanoff’s paper.
I sometimes see ad acta in Swedish. Not sure if I’ve seen it in anything published this millennium, but I wouldn’t bat an eye if I saw it in something written in an elevated style.
Acc’d Wiktionary, akt meaning a nude exists in Swedish too, but I’m not sure if I’ve encountered before. I was familiar with aktstudie in the same sense.
Det runda arkivet “the round archive” = “the trashcan” is alive and well, I hear it tolerably frequently at work.
I use “the circular file” myself, but of course I’m not of this century.
Akt: the unspeakable deed that you’re allowed to commit if you can show us your Artistic License.
(The “deed, act” meaning very much survives: ein Akt der Verzweiflung “an act of desperation” for example.)
Danish has the verb agere /a’ge:re/ in much the same senses as English act, among them acting like an actor does. The nude picture sense also exists in photo magazines from the 60s, but the need for that euphemism vanished when porn was legalized in ’68. The ODS sv Akt (1919) says it’s a recent loan from HG, with staa Akt having the active* verbal sense of ‘modelling in the nude’ which can be squeezed into the realm of acting. Now a days, en akt is a document (in a court case [en sagsakt or collectively sagens akter] or from the slow grind of public administration [et aktstykke]).
As far as I can make out, G Akt was also used for the pose of the nude model, i.e. the role the model was acting in.
___________________
(*) See what I did there?
Interesting. In German as I know it, Akt as “file in a court case” very much exists, so does Akt as “subdivision of a play” (y’know, “act”), and so does the verb agieren – but that does not cover “as an actor”.
In the legal-jargon variety of AmEng, “action” remains a normal synonym for lawsuit. Although you can see some recognition that normal people may not understand that usage, as witness the fact that the standard form for a “SUMMONS IN A CIVIL ACTION” recommended for the federal court in Manhattan says underneath that label “A lawsuit has been filed against you,” presumably because that is thought easier for a recipient who has not yet retained a lawyer to understand than, e.g. “a civil action has been commenced against you” would be, athough not as confusing as it would be if “action” was a standard synonym for “nude.”
Akte, not Akt … unless I misunderstand what you mean?
I perhaps should have added above the language of the now-mysterious-sounding Fed. R. Civ. P. 2, which reads in its entirety “There is one form of action—the civil action.” It is mysterious-sounding because virtually all living lawyers except for a few weird history buffs know very little of the pre-1937* status quo (where multiple forms of action existed and you needed to choose the one that fit your grievance) that was being abolished and replaced by the adoption of that rule. So thoroughgoing has been the triumph of Rule 2 that as best as I can recall I have never had occasion to cite it in a court filing and I imagine the same is true for most other U.S. lawyers even with three or four decades or practice.
*That’s the end of that particular ancien regime in U.S. federal court – dates varied widely in our various state court systems, and over in England they’d already suppressed that particular ancien regime during the reign of Victoria.
I perhaps should have added above the language of the now-mysterious-sounding Fed. R. Civ. P. 2, which reads in its entirety “There is one form of action—the civil action.”
I like it very much, simply as a literary fragment. You can see it explicated here (“The language of Rule 2 has been amended as part of the general restyling of the Civil Rules to make them more easily understood and to make style and terminology consistent throughout the rules”).
Very much Akt – but quite possibly only in Austria. (I googled es wird ein Akt angelegt, and the three results are all Austrian.)
de.wiktionary doesn’t know this meaning of Akt, but under Akte it cites the Österreichisches Wörterbuch of 1997 as claiming Akte is not, or only recently, commonly used in Austria, without saying what is/was used instead. Most of the 12 examples sound perfectly fine to me, though – possibly due to German TV.
I had forgotten that they had tweaked the wording of Rule 2 in a stylistic way in the comparatively recent past (2007). The original 1937 text was “There shall be one form of action to be known as ‘civil action.'” Tastes may vary as to whether that’s more or less poetic-sounding than the current wording I quoted above.
I prefer the current wording as shorter and to the point.
Paul labels this as “besonders südd.”; I have never encountered this usage, while Akte is an everyday word.
Yes, but an Akte may document what is known (or at least used to be known) as a Verwaltungsakt.
“no action but civil action” fits on a placard better, but i suppose official documents do like there to be a verb.
Re why Akt in Aktstudie, Aktfoto etc., in a corpus search I found this (sorry about long extract, the text is tendentious, and sorry about how ä,ö,ü are presented, I am too lazy to correct them):
“Nachdem Hr. Hofrath Hirt durch seinen Versuch uͤber das Kunstschoͤne (Horen 97. St. VII.) die Welt aus der Verworrenheit der bisherigen Theorien gerettet, indem man nun klar einsieht, wie schoͤn von scheinen herkoͤmmt, und daß “alle unsre angenehmen Empfindungen entweder das Wahre, das Gute oder das Schoͤne zum Grunde haben:” (wenn man bei einer Vorlesung des Hrn Hirt einschlaͤft, aus welcher der drey Quellen mag diese angenehme Empfindung wohl herfließen?): so wird er eine vollstaͤndige Geschichte der bildenden Kuͤnste bey den Alten geben, worin er zeigen wird, daß die Charakteristik der Hauptgrundsatz derselben gewesen sey. Dieses merkwuͤrdige Prinzip, welches er waͤhrend seines vieljaͤhrigen Aufenthalts in Italien entdeckt, und bis jetzt nur noch in drey Abhandlungen eingeschaͤrft hat, besteht darin, daß in der alten Kunst ein Pferd voͤllig wie ein Pferd, ein Centaur wie ein Centaur abgebildet wurde; dazu kam noch “die Individuellheit der Attituͤde:” (Archiv 98. St. XI. S. 439.) eine Venus nahm “den gewoͤhnlichen Akt der jungfraͤulichen Schamhaftigkeit” vor, (Horen 97. St.X.S. 19.) u. s. w.”
https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/schlegel_athenaeum_1799?p=341
https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/schlegel_athenaeum_1799?p=342
I am charmed by the wacky umlaut-alternatives in the text PP has cut-and-pasted.
@rozele: well, you can also have a “criminal action” but that’s outside the scope of the Rules of Civil Procedure and has a whole different set of rules to govern it. It’s not used as much, perhaps not least because “criminal action” is also a common way of referring to the underlying behavior that a defendant might be convicted for having done.
…so, a Venus performed “the ordinary act of virginal bashfulness”, i.e. being naked and pretending to try to cover it up…
1799 is a bit late for those, but in earlier centuries they were normal. In fact, the current dots come from reducing the superscript e to “, which is due to the Kurrent/Sütterlin shape of e – identical to n, only narrower.
I was still taught to use vertical strokes instead of dots in handwriting. There’s also a printed font or two (used by the magazine GEO) that uses strokes.
In my German-of-Germany experience, einen Akt anlegen and the sense of ’file’ are unheard of (that would be Akte; eine Akte anlegen is indeed an expression that I use regularly). Interesting!
Verwaltungsakt meanwhile is a (precisely defined) thing and absolutely common in administration.
About 30 years later: take a look at how Goethe’s Werke are printed in the final edition begun in his lifetime: all umlauts are formed with a superposed e. That’s of course purely graphical (Goethe’s manuscripts* have all manner of different forms for the diacritic, but it only very rarely looks like an e.).
*judging by the facsimile edition of the manuscripts of the Venezianische Epigramme
Maybe precisely because those in a cluster get devoiced. I once read that, as of the 1950s or so, Alsatians spoke French with final devoicing and lengthened the vowels that preceded the devoiced lenes. Also, Middle Low German had final devoicing, but then a bunch of word-final vowels fell; from what very little I read long ago, some dialects have kept the resulting word-final voiced lenes as such (like English or French), but others devoiced them and instead introduced a third, suprasegmental syllable length, while yet others went tonal.
ad acta in this interesting book chapter in English by an author with a very Hungarian name.
(As often with book chapters on academia.edu, you have to scroll pretty far down till the text actually begins. And then the text is much shorter than it looks, because most of the chapter is occupied by the extremely long list of references.)
I did a search on “ad acta” and got nothing; which page is it on?
Ah yes, Academia is horrible for that; it only lets you search the part that’s currently in your RAM, and then only if the PDF isn’t in a particularly bizarre font (which many are, though this one isn’t).
P. 209, the very end of the paper:
(As an example of “very limited material”, Lemnian is known from two gravestones and nothing else. Fortunately the texts on them are quite long… but…)
Thanks!
Vowel lengthening to mark consonants in danger of being devoiced as voiced: I had managed to forget about the American preacher accent and the parody thereof.