Disputatio:absum

Um, how does this second definition differ from the first? —Mucius Tever 00:21, 21 Maii 2007 (UTC)

1) This person is not at the conference.

2) This place is 30 miles from London.

--Alex1011 11:19, 21 Maii 2007 (UTC)

1. Hic homo a conventu abest.
2. Hic locus 30 mill. pass. a Londinio abest.

The sense, abstracted from the modifiers, still seems the same to me: X is away from Y, X is not in Y, X has some distance from Y. —Mucius Tever 00:36, 24 Maii 2007 (UTC)

I would say, you can say, York is 100 miles form London, but you cannot say "York does not participate at London", or "York is not present in London". So there are two meanings. --Alex1011 13:57, 25 Maii 2007 (UTC)

Huh? Are "does not participate at" and "is not present in" the definitions being discussed here? The definitions written on the page have "to not be in a place" and "to have distance from a place". Doesn't having distance from a place already mean to not be in it? (The person has a distance from the conference—though pragmatically it isn't worth enumerating; York is not in London—even if I might have thought it was a district of it before.) Actually... wouldn't reading the second definition as a standard genus-differentia type indicate that abesse is a kind of habere? To me that doesn't seem accurate, because too specific. Can't things abesse that can't habere distantiam? E.g. laus afuit homini — can laus have a distance if it doesn't exist? —Mucius Tever 12:55, 26 Maii 2007 (UTC)