Latin word for town

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Users of Neo-Latin have taken the Latin language to places the Romans, and consequently, their language, never spread to, and consequently, have created a need to construct Latin city names in these places.

Strategies for constructing Latin names[edit]

Little is known about how Romans adapted foreign place names to Latin form, but there is evidence of the practices of Bible translators. They reworked some names into Latin or Greek shapes; in one version, Yerushalem (tentative reconstruction of a more ancient Hebrew version of the name) becomes Hierosolyma, doubtless influenced by Greek ἱερος (hieros), «holy». Others were adopted directly, often treating the new place names as indeclinable nouns; here Yerushalem is brought over as Jerusalem, with the Latin J being pronounced as an English Y sound and the /sh/ being transliterated to the closest Latin sound, /s/.

Similar strategies are used for places beyond those known to the Roman Empire:

• A classical ending such as —um or —a is added or substituted on the end of the source word. Hence Baltimorum for «Baltimore,» Albania for «Albany.»
• The word may already be in Latin or Greek form: Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Atlanta.
• Calques are resorted to if the New World name is based on an Old World name; the various Parises in the United States are likely to become Lutetia, and Novum Eboracum or Neo-Eboracum represents New York, because Eboracum is the city of York in England.
• The words are adjusted to fit Latin declensions: Kansas appears as either Cansas, Cansatis or Cansa, Cansae; Chicago, Ohio, and Idaho become consonant stems, with genitives Chicagonis, Ohionis, Idahonis, &c., by analogy with many Latin nouns whose nominative form ends in o.
• The words are re-interpreted to fit Latin declensions; Illinois is treated as a third-declension noun.
• If the city is named for a specific thing, and especially if its name is a Romance language word or phrase, it may be directly translated into Latin. For example, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles is called Diocesis Angelorum in Latin, «Diocese of (the) angels».
• On the other hand, in some dioceses the church chose to simply apply a Latin locational suffix to the existing name; the diocese of Des Moines, Iowa is simply Dioecesis Desmoinensis.
• The words are treated as indeclinable, like some Biblical names; Connecticut is sometimes treated this way.

In many cases, there is no consensus as to how to treat any given names, and variants exist. A town which is the site of a university or an episcopal see is more likely to have a standard form hallowed by usage. Note that names of cities are usually feminine in gender in Latin, even if they end in –us. This rule is not always strictly observed in the New World.

Note on word endings[edit]

Latin being an inflected language, names in a Latin context may have different word-endings to those shown here, which are given in the nominative case. For instance Roma (Rome) may appear as Romae meaning «at Rome» (locative), «of Rome» (genitive) or «to/for Rome» (dative), as Romam meaning «Rome» as a direct object (accusative), or indeed as Romā with a long a, probably not indicated in the orthography, meaning «by, with or from Rome» (ablative). Similarly names ending in -um or -us may occur with -i or -o, and names ending in -us may occur with -um. The words urbs and civitas may occur as urbis, urbi, or urbe, and civitatis, civitati or civitate.

List of names[edit]

1. Latinized form of a Greek name. Naples/Neapolis is a rare exception to the rule of Latinization of foreign city names owing to the fact that it was established by the Greeks and predates Rome by many centuries. There was no need to change it as the name was too deeply entrenched.
2. Claudius Ptolemy mentions «Eblana» in his texts and scholars believe this is a name for Dublin. The Latinized name is more common in medieval texts.
3. Latinized form of a Hebrew name.
4. London was founded directly by the Romans as a fort, approximately where Westminster stands today. Classical texts written by Tacitus generally label this area of the frontier as «Britannia» with others later differentiating «Caledonia» or «Scotia» for Scotland. England didn’t quite exist as a concept yet as the entire island was largely inhabited by Celts; the Angles were centuries away.
5. Latinized form of a name derived from Amerindian languages.
6. Cincinnatus was a real figure in Roman history who died in 430 BC. The city in Ohio is named for the Society of the Cincinnati, which in turned is named for him.
7. -polis is a suffix from Greek; it belongs to the third declension.

See also[edit]

• Names of European cities in different languages
• List of city name changes

External links[edit]

• Dr. J. G. Th. Grässe, Orbis Latinus: Lexikon lateinischer geographischer Namen des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, online at the Bavarian State Library
• Grässe, Orbis Latinus, online at Columbia University
• Hofmann: Lexicon Universale
• GCatholic — Curiate Latin names of Catholic jurisdictions (usually the sees: cities)

Oct 26, 2014 by

[This post, originally published in April 2012, examimes the etymologies of the words for ‘city’ and ‘town’ — Many thanks to Vitaliy Rayz for excellent photography]

The etymologies of the words for ‘city’ or ‘town’ are interesting in their own right, especially where related languages use non-cognate words, highlighting different aspects of what it means to be a city.

For example, the toponym Carthage contains the Phoenician root for ‘city’, qart. A cognate word qarta is found in Aramaic, but other Semitic languages use a different root for ‘city’. For example, the Hebrew word for ‘city’ – ir – is found in the toponym Jerusalem, or in Hebrew Yerushaláyim. This toponym translates variably as ‘the city of peace’, ‘foundation of the god Shalem’, ‘dwelling of peace’, or ‘founded in safety’ (there several additional etymologies). Some scholars connect this word to the Sumerian yeru meaning ‘a settlement’ (and even to the Sumerian city of Ur) or the Semitic root yry meaning ‘to found’. Thus, ir is a settlement that has been founded. The Arabic word for ‘city’ is again different, and the settlement known simply as ‘the city’ is Medina (Saudi Arabia). The full name of this city is alternatively al-Madīnah al-Munawwarah ‘the radiant city’ or madinat al-nabi ‘the city of the prophet’. Unlike the Hebrew ir, the Arabic medina highlights a different aspect of a city, its self-governance. In fact, in Hebrew medina means ‘state’, as in medinat-Israel ‘the State of Israel’, the official name of the country. Interestingly, while the connection between ‘city’ and ‘state’ has its roots in antiquity, the expression city-state in English is first attested only in 1893.

And what of the English city, town, and borough? The word city appeared in English in the early 13th century and was used to refer to a cathedral town, but originally it meant any settlement, regardless of size. The word itself is a borrowing from Old French cite ‘town, city’, ultimately deriving from the Latin word civitatem (nominative: civitas) which meant ‘state, polity, political entity’, not unlike the Arabic medina. The Latin word for ‘city’ was urbs from which we get both urban ‘characteristic of city life’, and urbane ‘having the manners of townspeople, courteous, refined’. Civitas seems to have replaced urbs as Rome, the ultimate “urbs”, lost its prestige. The progeny of the Latin civitatem in modern Romance languages also mean ‘city’: Italian città, Spanish cuidad, Catalan ciutat, Portuguese cidade, and (older forms of) French cité. The history of this word in French is particularly interesting as it has changed its meaning from ‘polity’ to ‘city, town’ to the modern meaning of ‘citadel’ (as in Cité de Carcassonne, see picture), a meaning to which we will return below. The modern French word for ‘city’ is ville related to the words village (a loanword from Old French village ‘houses and other buildings in a group’) and villa (a loanword from Italian villa ‘country house, villa, farm’), both deriving from the Latin villa ‘country house, farm’.

The English word town refers to a settlement that is larger than a village but smaller than a city, although actual usage varies. The distinction between city and town appears to date from the 14th century. The word town descends from the Old English tūn meaning ‘enclosure, village’, which in turn derives from the (reconstructed) Proto-Germanic word *tūnan meaning ‘fence’. Its relatives in other Indo-European languages include the Dutch tuin ‘garden’ and Irish dún ‘fortress’. What do ‘garden’ and ‘fortress’ have in common? Both were originally enclosed, fenced, or fortified places.

The word borough developed from an earlier form burg which too meant ‘a dwelling or dwellings within a fortified enclosure’ (its dative singular form byrig is found in many place names as ‑bury). A number of older Germanic languages has a similar word: Old Frisian burg ‘castle’, Old Norse borg ‘wall, castle’, and Old High German burg and buruc ‘fortified place, citadel’. Modern German Burg ‘castle’ is another relative. The ultimate source of these words is the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European form *bhrgh which meant ‘high’ and had derivatives in numerous languages referring to hills, hill forts, or fortified elevations: Old English beorg ‘hill’, Welsh bera ‘stack, pyramid’, Sanskrit bhrant– and Avestan brzant– meaning ‘high’, and even Greek Pergamos, name of the citadel of Troy. In English the meaning of burg and later borough shifted from ‘fortress’, to ‘fortified town’, to simply ‘town’ (especially one possessing municipal organization or sending representatives to Parliament). The Scottish English form is burgh, as in Edinburgh.

The connection noted above between ‘city’, ‘garden’, and ‘fence, enclosure’ is discernible also in the Russian words gorod ‘city’ (as in Novgorod) and ogorod ‘vegetable garden’, as well as in ograda ‘fence, enclosure’ and grad – the archaic word for ‘city’ found in such names of Russian cities as Leningrad, Kaliningrad, Volgograd, and many others. The form grad, which in Russian derives from Old Church Slavonic, is also the word for ‘city’ in South Slavic languages such as Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. Another Slavic root for ‘city’ is mesto: forms of Serbo-Croatian have mjȅsto and mȉsto, Slovak and Slovenian have mesto, Czech and varieties of Sorbian have město. These words all derive from the (reconstructed) Proto-Slavic *město, meaning ‘place’.

So what is a city? It is a place, where a settlement has been founded, often enclosed and fortified, and sometimes – though not always – a self-governing polity. And the words for ‘city’ reveal as much.

Definition, Meaning [en]

town — an urban area that has a name, defined boundaries, and local government, and that is generally larger than a village and smaller than a city.

Other translation options [v1]

Synonyms: town