Latin/Places and Geography 2

Salvēte omnēs! Welcome back to Latin for Wikiversity. Here you can peruse a new lesson in Latin, in a simple format. If you would like to catch up, you can find a directory of lessons, a classified vocabulary list, and Memrise courses at the links on the right.

In the last lesson we looked at the locative case, a relatively uncommon case used primarily for cities, towns, and small islands. Today we’ll continue an informal study of geography and place-names.

New grammar
Place-names are nouns, but often we use an adjectival form to describe people or things from that place. For example,
 * Rōma = Rome.
 * Rōmānus, a, um is the adjectival form, and can be used substantively (as a noun) in masc. or fem. to describe a person from Rome:
 * Rōmānus is a Roman man. Rōmāna is a Roman woman.

But you can also have populus Rōmānus (the Roman people), virtūtēs Rōmānae (Roman virtues), etc., as an adjective. Germānicus, Italicus, Britannicus would usually be used to describe things, not people, although Germānicus and Britannicus were names of famous Romans, as was Tiberius (named after the Tiber river). A German might be Germānus, a UK citizen might be Britannus or Britō.

Some adjectival forms are created by adding –(i)ēnsis to the noun describing a city or country, e.g. Branta Canadēnsis (Canadian goose), Gallia Narbōnēnsis (the Roman province in Gaul around the city Narbō, now Narbonne), philosophia Athēniēnsis (Athenian philosophy).

This is all made more complicated by the fact that Latin has been changing and adapting for thousands of years and there is no one definitive stylebook of modern usage. We therefore include some basic vocabulary and sentences, some of them taken from Vicipaedia.

Also, we’ll look at some of the Latin terms from higher education, which would not exist if not for Latin. It’s a bit of a digression, but not if we see the development of the human intellect as the most important journey of all. And we wish hearty congratulations to all of you reading this who are celebrating a completion of one part of your intellectual journey!

Practice
Valēte et bonam fortūnam!