Talk:Latin names of cities

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What is the point of this? New London, Connecticut does not have a Latin name. If this ever includes non-European cities that were actually around under the Romans, then it might be fine, but translating modern names of cities into Latin is pretty useless. Adam Bishop 23:45, 5 Oct 2003 (UTC)

You missed the History Channel show about the Roman conquest of Connecticut, I see. Actually, most of these names have been used somewhere or another by Neo-Latinists. Most of them come from internal Roman Catholic documents prior to Vatican II. I have a small handbook in Latin concerning church discipline dated 1942 issued by the "Archiepiscopus Ludovicopolitanus" (the Archbishop of Louisville, KY). The ones I added are ones I have seen either online or in print somewhere. A small handful of people continue to write Latin, and they have to Latinize contemporary names. -- Smerdis of Tlön 14:22, 15 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Well I suppose that makes sense...you should probably mention that in the article though. And would you just include ones that have actually been used, or the names of every possible city in Latin? Adam Bishop 16:51, 15 Oct 2003 (UTC)

The ones I added (didn't start this) are ones I have seen, either in documents or used on various Latin mailing lists. I've also added a number of notes on the "rules" (rather informal) of their formation. -- Smerdis of Tlön 20:34, 15 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think that the Roman Catholic angle is interesting here, since all cities with a Roman Catholic episcopal see has a Latin name, which to some extent is in use. All of them are found in the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican's yearbook. The problem with this list is that it differs from the Catholic usage, e.g. 'Vasingtonia instead of Vashingtonia, Cansae, Civitas instead of Kansanopolitanis etc. If the Catholic use of Latin name is the main reason to keep the page, it should be used throughout the article, I think.

[edit] Sources needed

I've edited this article, to correct some obvious mistakes in the Latin. "Africa Australia" puzzled me, until I realised that Auatralia was a mistype for Australis meaning "South". But reflecting further, the number of errors made me wonder as to the accuracy of the sources. There's a danger that people just invent names for the purpose of such a list. I'm not accusing current contributors, who claim to have found the names cited in the literature, but it could be a danger that people would invent names for this article, which would severely undermine the authoritativeness of Wikipedia in this respect. I would like to see sources quoted for the various names, which would help hte reader to judge how reliable they are. It would also throw an interesting light on different approaches to Latinization - for instance why are some cities called "Urbs" and others "Civitas" (two alternative translations of city with rather different meanings)? rossb 07:38, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Cities that were part of the Roman empire

North Africa and the Levant were part of the Roman empire. I do know that Tingis was the name of Roman Tangier. What names were used for Algiers and Damascus at the time?

[edit] V and W

The article state: "The words are respelled to eliminate non-Latin letters; hence Washington becomes Vasingtonium. Note that "V" in Latin is pronounced as an English "W" There was no W in Latin."

Historically speaking, isn't it quite the other way round??!

Letter W (formerly the digraph uu or vu) is actually quite ancient, and Latin (at least medieval and renaissance Latin) actually did use it quite extensively, especially in germanic proper names and loanwords such as Willelmus or werra (war, whence e.g. Italian guerra).

On the other hand, until the 17th-18th centuries, letter 'V' did not exist as a separate letter from U, either in Latin or any other European languages: U and V where one and the same letter, whose uppercase shape was V and lowecase shape was either v or u, depending whether it was word-initial or not.

Beside that, the translation VasingtoniUM for Washington is quite odd, especially if you use it as an example! The English suffix -ton is normally Latinized in -tonia (cmp. Bostonia), and everybody knows that the Latin for Washington is actually Washingtonia (also a botanical genus).

-- User:Cingar 12:32, 5 Oct 2006 (UTC)