In Craft Humanitas, I have developed a rather curious penchant for coining terms in Interlingua, an artificial language created over a wide lexical basis of western European languages, although with a strong Latin influence. For me, as spaniard, it feels very familiar.
I only came to grasp a rudimentary notion of the basic grammar of Interlingua, but I try my best!
- Artisano (Interlingua), artesano (Spanish), artisan (English)
(That one was easy)
- The name humanitero is (as far as I know) totally a Spanish invention of mine, made by analogy to words like carpintero (English carpenter) or alfarero (English potter), and then rendered as a new Interlingua word just as in Spanish: humanitero (which transcribes equally for the singular and the plural in Interlingua). And, just like carpintero, it can also function as an adjective, meaning “pertaining to humaniters or to humanitery, their craft”.
So, you can see the idea behind: an humanitero is a practicioner of a craft (a creative skill), both the prime matter and end result of which are humanitas, which I, closely following Aristotle, define as the cultivation of human virtue.
And here you go: an artisano humanitero is an artisan who, whatever the media she/he chooses (wool, wood, stone, paper and ink…), in the end, woks shaping and expressing her/his own embodiment of human virtue, humanitas.
