Habitat.

I recently heard the word habitat and thought “That sounds like a Latin verb, but that can’t be right, can it?” After all, debit and credit look like Latin verbs too, but it’s just appearance: they’re both French forms of Latin nouns with the ending chopped off, as is normal for French. But I looked up habitat and found that it is indeed what it looks like; OED:

Etymology: < Latin habitat, 3rd person singular present tense of habitāre, literally ‘it inhabits’, in Floras or Faunas, written in Latin, introducing the natural place of growth or occurrence of a species. Hence, taken as the technical term for this.

As you can probably tell from the style of that etymology, it hasn’t been updated since 1898, but other sources tell the same story, e.g. AHD: “Latin, it dwells, third person sing. present of habitāre, to dwell.” Here are the first two OED citations:

[1762 W. Hudson Flora Anglica 70 Common Primrose—Habitat in sylvis sepibus et ericetis ubique.]
1796 W. Withering Arrangem. Brit. Plants (ed. 3) Dict. Terms 62 Habitatio, the natural place of growth of a plant in its wild state. This is now generally expressed by the word Habitat.

I get that they were used to seeing it in such Latin contexts as the 1762 citation, but I would have thought Latinity was ubiquitous enough in the 18th century (among the educated word-coining classes, obviously) that it wouldn’t have occurred to them to treat it as a noun. Why not habitation?

Comments

  1. Wiktionary:

    In Linnaeus and similar authors, the geographical ranges of species were customarily denoted in Latin by a sentence beginning with “Habitat”, e.g. “Habitat in Europa” (“It lives in Europe”), and it thus became the convention to refer to the geographical range as the “habitat”. Compare the English derivations of exit and ignoramus from Latin finite verbs reanalyzed as English nouns.

  2. Floruit seems like a comparable case, though I don’t know the history of its usage.

  3. David Eddyshaw says

    There are also aegrotats and imprimaturs, to say nothing of nihil obstats and non sequiturs.

  4. Floruit seems like a comparable case

    Yes, but there it seems more understandable, to me at any rate — it means more or less “the statement introduced by floruit,” as in the first OED citation: “The date of each Author’s ‘floruit’ is added in the margin.” Same goes for imprimatur: “The formula (= ‘let it be printed’), signed by an official licenser of the press, authorizing the printing of a book; hence as n. an official license to print.” But a habitat is not a statement about the whereabouts of a creature, it’s the whereabouts themselves. I may be overthinking this, of course.

  5. J.W. Brewer says

    Agree with hat’s statement of the difference. If one used “X’s floruit” to mean “the time period in which X lived (and/or had his creative/professional peak)” that would be parallel to the modern English sense of “habitat,” but AFAIK no one does that.

  6. David L. Gold says

    Latin verb sumpsimus mispronounced mumpsimus (an apocryphal story) > English noun mumpsimus.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumpsimus

  7. I may be unusually dull today because of the record-breaking heat, but I don’t understand Hat and JWB’s comments — doesn’t floruit (n.) mean exactly “the time period in which X lived (and/or had his creative/professional peak)”?

  8. “Agree with hat’s statement of the difference. If one used…”

    Credo. (more common in Russian: English has “creed”)

  9. David Eddyshaw says

    @JWB:

    Lots of examples of “X’s floruit” turn up on Google (and I use it myself.)

  10. But, of course habitat is a fairly colloquial word (a schoolboy/girl’s language at least).

    Incipit still implies imaginary quotemarks for many users. And I do not know about credo in English (in Russian most users are not aware of what it means [literally]).

  11. @drasvi, credo in English — more usually ‘the credo’ — means specifically the Latin words beginning “credo in unum Deum …”. And you call it ‘the credo’ even if you’re reciting it in English.

    ‘Creed’ in English (with capital) might mean the Nicene Creed specifically, or some other form of words. ‘creed’ (lower case) means set of beliefs/accepted doctrine, which might or might not align with the credo.

  12. J.W. Brewer says

    My comment is best explained by the working assumption that a usage with which I am not personally familiar is not actually an extant English usage. Like many useful heuristics, this one may be imperfect, but having found a few published examples of the alleged sense I was suggesting didn’t exist, I am not convinced that the world is improved or the tongue of Shakespeare adorned thereby. But perhaps David. E. manages to make is sound like something other than academic-journal jargon?

  13. David Eddyshaw says

    Credo is pretty much an ordinary noun in English. It’s vaguer and less religious-y than “creed.”

    You might, for example, express the possibly unchristian sentiment:
    “My own credo has always been les aristocrates à la lanterne!

    This is different from the Credo, that AntC referred to.

    But perhaps David. E. manages to make is sound like something other than academic-journal jargon?

    Hey, no dissing my idiolect! My family all speak academic-journal jargon as their L1. What else is there to speak?

  14. The TLFi has what seems to be an incorrect etymology, rationalizing the formation:

    https://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/habitat

    Note the italics in this use from 1799:

    https://books.google.com/books?id=hl60axDLB9sC&dq=%22indiqu%C3%A9%20l'habitat%22&hl=fr&pg=PR5#v=onepage&q=%22indiqu%C3%A9%20l'habitat%22&f=false

  15. AntC, I am familiar with this usage from Russian mostly. Russian must have borrowed it from … French? For a language religious complement is Latin rather than Slavonic or Greek. English must have done the same and I think I have encountered the word. WIktionary:

    1.A belief system.
    “You’re either with me or you’re against me” became Dany’s credo, and those against her were an ever-changing multitude to be determined solely by her whims.
    2. The liturgical creed (usually the Nicene Creed), or a musical arrangement of it for use in church services.
    Credo III is so beautiful!
    Until the mid-1970s, however, most Catholic hymnals contained at least one musical setting of the creed […] By the 1980s hymnals having sung credos were mainly those devoted to “traditional” styles of church music […]

  16. Wiktionary also says credo is 3 sg. subjunctive of a verb in Welsh (<Proto-Brythonic *krėdid.)

  17. the possibly unchristian sentiment:
    “My own credo …”

    Isn’t that a tongue-in-cheek/ironic usage? The sort of usage you’d restrict to an in-group/academic-journal jargon speaking family or otherwise godless lot.

    I’d be quite cautious to use ‘credo’ like that until I was sure of my audience.

  18. The TLFi has what seems to be an incorrect etymology, rationalizing the formation

    Damn, isn’t there anybody you can trust?

    Isn’t that a tongue-in-cheek/ironic usage? The sort of usage you’d restrict to an in-group/academic-journal jargon speaking family or otherwise godless lot.

    I’d be quite cautious to use ‘credo’ like that until I was sure of my audience.

    Not for me; I use it quite freely, without regard to the religious sensibilities of my audience. I guess I’ve never known anybody to whom it was restricted to sacred usage, and frankly I’m not sure how many such people there are in America.

  19. godless
    Welsh substrat.

  20. David Eddyshaw says

    credo is 3 sg. subjunctive of a verb in Welsh

    In theory. In actual spoken Welsh the subjunctive is in much the same state as in modern English, i.e. confined to a few set expressions inherited from a previous stage of the language.

    In (much) older Welsh the correct form would actually have been creto, from the effect of the -h- which originally formed the subjunctive stem; there are survivals of this pattern among the formulaic expressions where you still hear the subjunctive, like Duw cato ni “God preserve us!”, where the verb is the ever-popular cadw that we discussed elsewhere …

  21. January First-of-May says

    Incipit still implies imaginary quotemarks for many users.

    I thought it was one of those nouns that were only uncommon because the referent itself was not particularly often relevant; in this case, “first line of a textual work, esp. when used as the work’s title”.

  22. I thought it was one of those nouns that were only uncommon because the referent itself was not particularly often relevant

    Yes, I do not use it.

    I see in medieval codices in literal sense:
    “[в лесу родилась ёлочка] incipit bellum et pax [War and Peace by Tolstoy]”
    ..and not tempted to call the incipit so.

  23. “Incipit” is also used to mean the first few bars of a musical work, as might appear in some sort of index, or as an example in a textbook, or similar uses.

    Many books of poetry contain an Index of First Lines. I don’t remember seeing such a thing being labelled Incipit, but perhaps it might have been done at one time. (My oldest books of poetry only go back to the 1890s.)

  24. Bathrobe says

    A bit late, but Etymology Online has this to say about “habitat”:

    habitat (n.)
    “area or region where a plant or animal naturally grows or lives,” 1762, originally a technical term in Latin texts on English flora and fauna, literally “it inhabits,” third person singular present indicative of habitare “to live, inhabit, dwell,” frequentative of habere “to have, to hold, possess” (from PIE root *ghabh- “to give or receive”). This was the Modern Latin word that began the part of the scientific description of a plant or animal species that told its locality. General sense of “dwelling place” is first attested 1854.

    Main additions are: “frequentative of havere”, Indo-European root, and first attested use in general sense of “dwelling place”.

  25. Another one, from the OED: requiescat, n., A wish or prayer for the repose of the soul of a dead person. e.g. “Nor be thy requiescat dumb, Lest it be said o’er Fox’s tomb” (Walter Scott, Marmion); “A thousand such hillocks lay round about..each bearing its cross and requiescat” (Thackeray, Henry Esmond).

  26. affidavit

  27. I was thinking about “ambit”, but not so, according to M-W:

    ambit
    borrowed from Latin ambitus “circuit, circumference, strip of ground around the outside of a building,” from ambīre “to visit in rotation, surround, encircle” + -tus, suffix of action nouns

  28. David Marjanović says

    I had taken for granted that the Latin -ātus noun cited by the TLFi must have existed. In German, Habitat is even pronounced accordingly – stressed on the last syllable, which (therefore) gets a long vowel.

    (It’s neuter in German, but that has actually happened to most -ātus nouns, possibly through equations like magistrātus = Amt n. – Magistrat is usually neuter as well.)

  29. Magistrat is usually neuter as well
    Not to my knowledge, and Duden also lists it as male – it doesn’t even mention neuter as a regional variant.

  30. David L. Gold says

    habeas corpus

  31. PlasticPaddy says

    @dm
    Could Habitat be from a nonexistent 3 decl. noun habitas? Compare Moritat perhaps from moritas, -tatis. I agree that the usual noun is habitatio, but that might have received a more specific meaning related to an individual or actual dwelling place, rather than generic or potential habitat.

  32. Graham Asher says

    “If one used “X’s floruit” to mean “the time period in which X lived (and/or had his creative/professional peak)” that would be parallel to the modern English sense of “habitat,” but AFAIK no one does that.”

    On the contrary, in my experience as a speaker of British English, “X’s floruit” is quite common in educated and academic speech. It’s very handy when you have no idea of birth or death dates, so you can’t say “his dates are … ” which is another common usage.

    So when I think of “X’s habitat” it seems just a more frequently encountered instance of the same construction.

    “Exit” (“he/she/it goes out”) is an even commoner example.

  33. Yeah, exit is a great example.

  34. Lars Mathiesen says

    Well, if Linnaeus and his cohorts had “habitat in Germania” vel sim 5 times per page, I don’t think we need to look further. Unless it’s for fun, I’m all for fun.

    Danish has (moralsk) habitus which is a cultismo whence also E habit. FWIW, and if you’d really like a t-stem noun, there is one.

  35. Lars Mathiesen says

    There is also debit and credit. “He/she owes” and “he/she trusts.” If exit is a verb form, so are those. Wiktionary has all three of them through -tus-derived 4th declension nouns and French.

  36. If exit is a verb form, so are those. Wiktionary has all three of them through -tus-derived 4th declension nouns and French.
    That seems to be right, the more so, as the correct Latin 3rd Sg. forms for two of them are debet and exiit.

  37. Oh, then I withdraw my “exit is a great example.” I just assumed it was the verb — I should have checked.

  38. David L. Gold says

    Hans and LH: Both exiit and exit occur in Classical Latin (the latter spelling, for example, in Plautus’s Pseudolus and Seneca’s de Beneficiis), so that exit is a valid example. Hans is right about debit, however, which would indeed be *debet had it come from a Latin verb form by zero alteration.

    English exit comes from exit as found in the directions of English-writing playwrights. Exit X (= X leaves the stage).

    We know it’s a verb form in such directions because the corresponding plural is Exeunt (Exeunt X and Y = X and Y leave the stage), which can come only from a Latin verb form.

  39. Lars Mathiesen says

    Cf Es éxito, ejido, It esito — French does not seem to have a form †exite but Wiktionary does try to keep this noun separate from the stage direction which is undisputedly from the verb form.

  40. It is unclear if its semantic development was the same as for habitat:

    1. exit (stage directions) => 2. “exit” (a name, means: “what is called ‘exit’ in plays”) => “exit”.

    What is unclear is whether it passed the stage (2) or it was just stage (1) that familiarized everyone with the root and then interaction with exitus and stage (3) or even derived from exitus without (1)

  41. “Credo is pretty much an ordinary noun in English. It’s vaguer and less religious-y than ‘creed.'”

    Yes and no.

    As a Catholic, I would argue that there are effectively two distinct “credo” words in English: there’s “cree-doe” for the simple secular idea of any given set of ideological beliefs. Then there’s “cray-doe” specifically as a reference to the Nicene Creed.

  42. Interesting. I’m not sure if I actually differentiate them that way in speech (I have few occasions to refer to the Nicene Creed), but it makes sense.

  43. January First-of-May says

    exeat

    Completely forgot about that one! Probably because I didn’t think of it as an English word, and/or a generic word, as opposed to “what they call permissions for temporary leave over at Letovo“.

    But in the Letovo context, at least, it’s definitely a noun.

  44. Lars Mathiesen says

    @drasvi, exactly, it is unclear, and absent a proper philological treatise on the development in English I don’t think we can decide either way.

    So, Danish: Lykke (which it seems people are trying to monetize as the next hygge) = ‘happiness’ was originally ‘conclusion’ (more or less same root as E lock). And Es éxito means ‘success’ now, same idea.

    Also, a thing about Spanish I’ve been looking for a place to bung it in: Subir = ‘ascend’ is more or less transparently sub- + –ir, but it has ditched all the morphological baggage and behaves like a regular -ir verb where the i was a stem vowel in Latin. Subo, subía, subí and so on. Something like baseballs being flied.

  45. David L. Gold says

    @drasvi ” It is unclear if its semantic development was the same as for habitat:
    1. exit (stage directions) => 2. “exit” (a name, means: “what is called ‘exit’ in plays”) => “exit”.
    What is unclear is whether it passed the stage (2) or it was just stage (1) that familiarized everyone with the root and then interaction with exitus and stage (3) or even derived from exitus without (1)

    Comment:

    As is often the case in etymological research, one must work with the information on hand and, if more is discovered, revise etymologies as needed.

    At the moment, the earliest-known evidence for exit the script annotation in an English text is from circa 1548 and the earliest-known evidence for the English noun exit in the sense of ‘way out’ is dated 1596, so that at least for the time being the noun is believed to come from the stage direction.

  46. Lars Mathiesen says

    Somebody should fix wiktionary, then. Etymonline has the untidy but safe “also from” solution.

  47. January First-of-May says

    Hans is right about debit, however, which would indeed be *debet had it come from a Latin verb form by zero alteration.

    …come to think of it, it’s дебет in Russian. (Wiktionary – both English and Russian – does indeed say that the Russian word is a direct borrowing from Latin, though apparently some other European languages also have debet.)

    Incidentally, TIL that issue comes from the same Latin verb as exit.

  48. It just occurred to me to look up “hobbitat” and of course it’s a thing.

  49. In some langauges there is a specialized suffix for places. I was thinking what Russian has for “habitat” (sreda obitaniya, “dwelling environment”) and realized that Russian is one of such langauges.

    One could say obitalishche. It sounds ugly and something bothered me: I felt there can be a better option. I just remembered. Obitel’. ~”abode”.

    A religious word, applied to a rather humble residence of monks – or, conversely to heavenly abode, or sometimes metaphorically.

    The Resident Evil was translated to Russian as “abode of evil” for some reason, and currently Google books offers for “обитель” : “abode of darkness”, “bloody abobe” “abode of Jack the Ripper”, “abode of vice”, “abode of dreams”, “abode of darkness” (a synonym).

  50. January First-of-May says

    I was thinking what Russian has for “habitat”

    The usual [EDIT: usual technical, at least] term in the “region where a species lives” sense is ареал (apparently from Latin via German). Can’t think of a more generic term.

    The similarity between обитать and habitat is apparently entirely coincidental; the only cognate segment is the verbal ending (and possibly not even that).

  51. But it was used in the habitat sense in Як-истребитель, a famous song by Vysotsky (sung by a fighter airplaine).
    It is peculiar in that its text is absolute crap: it looks like writen by a (native) speaker who does not know how to speak or write. Yet when he performs it everything sounds absolutely natural. I was quite surprised when I saw the text.

    Я — «Як»,
    Истребитель,
    Мотор мой звенит.
    Небо — моя обитель.
    Но тот, который во мне сидит,
    Считает, что он — истребитель.

    В прошлом бою мною «Юнкерс» сбит, —
    Я сделал с ним, что хотел.
    Но тот, который во мне сидит,
    Изрядно мне надоел.

    Я в прошлом бою навылет прошит,
    Меня механик заштопал,
    Но тот, который во мне сидит,
    Опять заставляет: в штопор.

    Из бомбардировщика бомба несет
    Смерть аэродрому,
    А кажется, стабилизатор поет:
    «Ми-и-и-р вашему дому!»

    Literally (except where Russian sounds natural to me):

    I am Yak, a fighter. My engine rings. Sky (/heaven) is my abode.
    But the one who’s sitting in me believes (lit.: considers) that he is [a/the] fighter.

    In this fight by my a Junkers [is] shot down. I did to him what I wanted.
    But I am seriously tired/bored of the one who’s sitting in me.

    In the previous fight I [am] sewn/stitched through, a mechanic has darned me.
    But the one who is sitting in me is forcing me into a corkscrew again.

    From a bomber a bomb brings
    death the [the/an] airfield
    Yet it seems the stabilizer sings:
    “peeeaaace
    to your house”

    sewn through – literally it is “on fly-out sewn through”, where “sewn through” is ~riddled (a sewing word, applied to bullets) and “on fly-out” is a bullet adverb, means the bullets passed through the plane and flew out.

    The odd parts:

    In the previous fight “a Junkers is shot down”, “I am stitched through”:
    In Russian it is understood as is, not “was” or “have been” and is ugly after “in the fight”.
    No one would use passives in narrative in Russian: we have free word order for fronting, and you do not need to make things impersonal when speaking. And “by me” is not impersonal.

    Fronting of “from the bomber” (to lesser extent “in this fight”, “in the previous fight”) is weird.

    Why the bomb is singular?

    Abode is strange too. It can mean both “sky/heaven is my abode” and “my abode is sky” and I think he meant “my abode is sky” (intonation). This is why habitat works here: I think it is not as much “my home is sky” ask “sky is where you can find me”, but why a religious word?


    Only much later – I think when I was telling about the song to someone who does not speak Russian – it occured to me that it is natural that a fighter does not speak normal Russian. Why should he?

    Maybe it is also not coincidence that military (and other) reports can have both passives [have been done X] and “classificatory” fronting of adverbials: “in [place X] was done [Y]”. Does not explain “abode”.

  52. The usual term in the “region where a species lives” sense is ареал
    Wiktionary:

    1. (uncountable, biology) Conditions suitable for an organism or population of organisms to live.
    This park offers important amphibian habitat and breeding area.
    2. (countable, biology) A place or type of site where an organism or population naturally occurs.
    3. (countable, biology) A terrestrial or aquatic area distinguished by geographic, abiotic and biotic features, whether entirely natural or semi-natural.
    4. A place in which a person lives.

    But the Latin examples are about regions.
    Anyway, my goal was finding a formation with a suffix like -ishche (ристалище, капише, позорище, жилище) .
    And then remembering that word that bothered me.

  53. @drasvi: A lot of Yak-3’s were built in Tblisi. Maybe the plane was a native Georgian speaker.

  54. I have nothing to add to the discussion of habitat, but the topic reminds of an unexpected etymology I came across quite a few years ago. The word binnacle, meaning a box on a ship where the compass is kept, is an 18th century corruption of bittacle, which came via Spanish or Portuguese from Latin habitaculum.

    So the binnacle is the compass’s dwelling place, or habitat in a narrow sense.

  55. Kate Bunting says

    @AntC ” And you call it ‘the credo’ even if you’re reciting it in English.”

    Not in the Church of England, where it’s the [Apostles’ or Nicene] Creed. ‘Credo’ is that section of a musical setting of the Latin Mass.

  56. @DavidL, and in Spanish the compass’s habitacle went on to mean “blog”.

    bitácora
    From earlier bitácula, from French habitacle (“binnacle”), l’habitacle m being mistaken for *la bitacle f. Compare Catalan bitàcola and Portuguese bitácula. –[Wiktionary]

  57. Veto.

  58. @Lars Mathiesen: Still worse than subir is comer ‘eat’ < com-edere.

  59. Placebo

  60. Lars Mathiesen says

    Still worse — I suppose you could claim that there is a bit of the stemforming e left in comer — I assume there is some thematic suffix in forms like edit and so on, or that at least they are formed in analogy to verbs that have such suffixes. The i in subir is the root of eo — and ir still exists, of course, †er does not.

    But both are prize specimens!

  61. Bathrobe says

    Another example is “caveat”.

  62. John Cowan says

    Omnibus.

    I remember seeing somewhere (not the First Folio, but from the same period) the use of exit as a 3sg preterite, something like Bows and exit instead of exits. Corresponding to exit is manet [Petruchio] ‘everyone leaves except [Petruchio]’. Oddly, if more than one character remains, the form is still manet rather than the expected manent.

  63. Lars Mathiesen says

    If I remember my Allen it was /eksijit/ in the perfect, but how that would fare in British ecclesiastical pronunciation and spelling I don’t know. (The intervocalic glide was probably not preserved for long, in which case blame can be evenly apportioned over later latinity).

    Talking of well-hidden roots (we were innit) — I recently learned that ponere is from po- + sino/sivi/situs with posin- > pozn- > pon- during the fall of unstressed vowels — but only in the infixed present stem, of course. Which is why it has its very own pattern pono/posui/positus. I always wondered where that /s/ came from. (And Latin teachers everywhere rejoice that it didn’t rotacize to porno, or the giggles would never stop).

  64. J.W. Brewer says

    “Recipe” is maybe an interesting one because so much more thoroughly “domesticated” (and thus not feeling like part of a fancy/technical Latinate register) than affadavit or placebo or even veto.

  65. True; I theoretically knew that, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me if you hadn’t pointed it out. And I will forget it again.

  66. recipe – I always want to write it as “reciepe” (sic) because of this crazy -ei- in “receipt”.

    (In Russian “recipe” is рецепт <recept. “recipe” and “peceipt” merge in my mind)

  67. Bathrobe says

    “Recipe” is maybe an interesting one because so much more thoroughly “domesticated”

    Etymology online:

    1580s, “medical prescription, a formula for the composing of a remedy written by a physician,” from French récipé (15c.), from Latin recipe “take!” (this or that ingredient), second person imperative singular of recipere “to hold, contain” (see receive). It was the word written by physicians at the head of prescriptions. Figurative meaning “a prescribed formula” is from 1640s. Meaning “instructions for preparing a particular food” is recorded by 1716.

    Perhaps “domesticated”; perhaps also a case where the transition took place in another language (French) before being transferred to English. But perhaps this is splitting hairs, given that both French and English had the practice of drawing directly on Latin.

  68. David Eddyshaw says

    In Russian “recipe” is рецепт

    “Receipt” is also older English for “recipe”: hence Welsh rysáit “recipe” (and “receipt.”)

  69. Lars Mathiesen says

    Danish too (recept), from German Rezept I would guess. Specifically for doctors’ prescriptions, but also as a fancier word for recipe. (Non-fancy opskrift).

    ‘Receipt’ is kvittering, though. Swedish kvittens. Or bon.

  70. Culprit kind of sounds like a Latin 3s verb, but not really. It has an odd etymology (per the OED):

    Known (as a word) only from 1678. According to the legal tradition, found in print shortly after 1700, culprit was not originally a word, but a fortuitous or ignorant running together of two words (the fusion being made possible by the abbreviated writing of legal records), viz. Anglo-Norman culpable or Latin culpabilis ‘guilty’, abbreviated cul., and prit or prist = Old French prest ‘ready’. It is supposed that when the prisoner had pleaded ‘Not guilty’, the Clerk of the Crown replied with ‘Culpable: prest d’averrer nostre bille,’, i.e. ‘Guilty: [and I am] ready to aver our indictment’; that this reply was noted on the roll in the form cul. prist, etc.; and that, at a later time, after the disuse of Law French, this formula was mistaken for an appellation addressed to the accused.

    It’s weird, but I’ve seen no other etymology.

  71. Ah, thanks!

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