like, literally none of these words mean even relatively close to the same thing as “quorum” and none of them are viable substitutes as none of them mean the same thing
assembly? no.
convention? no.
meeting? no.
caucus? no.
congregation? no.
committee? no.
conclave? no.
conference? no.
congress? no.
council? no.
forum? no.
panel? no.
plenum? no. in fact, this means the opposite of the minimum - it’s an assembly of all members of a body.
session? no.
symposium? no.
attendance? are you kidding me?
board? this is stupid.
complement? come on.
concourse? wtf
conventicle? not even close wtf
So is there one? If not, does anyone know a word or words in another language that posses the same precise meaning?
Your stated question is answerable. I’m sure that every language that deals with formal procedures regarding number of members has an equivalent.
What do that has to do with your list of “synonyms”? First, synonyms are often used when a thesaurus is implied; that is, a broad group of terms having some relationship of meaning rather than exact substitutions. Second, why would you need a substitute for quorum? Quorum is a technical term. It suits its technical needs quite precisely. Many technical words do not have exact synonyms, and in fact shouldn’t have any for fear of confusion.
Many technical words do not have exact substitutions, but some do, and I wondered if quorum did in the English language. Even an old one, centuries old and now defunct would be sufficient. Johns words come close and are perfectly usable but not exact. Failing an English word, I was hoping someone may be able to supply a word from another language with precisely the same meaning.
The why behind it likely isn’t a great reason. I was talking with someone and they stated they didn’t like the word “quorum” for whatever reason, so I searched for an exact alternative and couldn’t find one and was a bit surprised at that, and I figured if anyone would know one it’d be you guys.
I would venture to say that most words don’t have exact synonyms, meaning a word you can substitute with absolutely no change in the sentence’s meaning. For example, just naming a few nouns at random, I don’t see that any have synonyms: “cat”, “man”, “fireplace”, “electricity”, “window”, “spoon”, “foot”, “mirror”.
I was afraid someone would say something like that. Look, those terms are clearly not synonyms. Even empirically some of them fail; e.g. Websters defines “hearth” as “the floor of a fireplace”. Or consider “There is a tabby and a lion in this room. There is one cat in this room. There are two felines in this room.” Quibbling that lions are really cats ignores the common usage of the terms.
But more interesting to me are cases where the connotations and proper usage of the terms are clearly different. If you said, “My feline is sitting on my computer,” people would wonder why you phrased it that way. If you said “He left fireplace and home to be with me,” people would think you were not a native English speaker.
The fact that you think a machine translation service could even remotely answer the question shows you do not know what you are talking about. Google does not in any way know what the words mean, and thus has no way of giving you an exact corresponding word. Only someone who speaks English and another language could answer that question.
And seeing as this apparently does not include you, I’m not sure why you are responding at all, let alone getting all snarky about it.
Actually, individual word lookup is something for which google translate can work pretty well. Distinguishing between the possibles proposed works better if you use two monolingual dictionaries than with any bilingual ones.
And I know several languages whose word for quorum is quorum. The pronunciation varies.
Yes, but there’s a danger there. If Google’s translation dictionary doesn’t have an entry for the desired word, it just leaves the word unchanged in the translation. And it doesn’t tell you that it did so.
French, for one. And this is where the above “feature” is dangerous. Is the word the same in the translation because it’s spelled the same in both languages or because it wasn’t in Google’s dictionary? There’s a number of words that are spelled the same in many, but not all languages. Examples are radio, taxi, polo, opera, modem, and virus.
Sigh. You guys made me look up the etymology of quorum, to see if that would give a clue to possible synonyms. It’s apparently the beginning of a Latin phrase formerly used in commissioning justices of the peace in England. It translates roughly to “. . . of whom we wish some one of you to be one.” How’s that for confusing?
So the synonym of the original Latin word would be ‘whom’ or ‘of whom’. There are many explanations on the internet of what the phrase meant, but while most are somewhat similar, none are substantially the same (except where they are exactly the same and therefore probably cut and pasted from the same place).
I’ve started wondering why the OP’s friend dislikes the word. Was she bitten by an off-leash quorum when she was young. Did a quorum kill her Pa? Is it too foreign? Too bureaurocratic? Sounds too much like Whore 'Em? Before we put in much work, I’d want to know why it was necessary.