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In English, if you have people you are friends with from a forum (online or otherwise), you could call them "forum friends". How would you say this in Latin? Can you decline forum as a genitive like amicī forī, or would that be more like saying they are friends of the forum itself? Would you use ablative case instead with a preposition?

Edit: I did some search and found this post regarding using a noun as an adjective, which got me thinking that there might be an adjective that means "associated with the forum" or similar.

There is the word circumforaneus, which has the following meanings:

itinerant, that travels to market; of/connected with business of/around forum

With this adjective, I could do something like:

Amici Circumforanei

Would this make sense?

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'X friends', in English, I think can reasonably be reinterpreted as 'friends from X', and this suggests the Latin amici de foro, amici a foro or amici e foro. I'll leave it to someone with a little more knowledge of the three different prepositions to suggest which fits best here.

Using an adjective seems wrong to me, since being related to the forum isn't a property of your friends from the forum (any more than my school friends are scholastic, or work friends are... worky?).

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  • Can you elaborate on the choice of de? I tried to look into de, ex, and ab, and I ended up with no clear preference in this kind of use.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta ♦
    Commented Apr 26, 2021 at 9:49
  • @JoonasIlmavirta I didn't put a lot of thought into it, and don't have access to a dictionary other than Wiktionary, so don't want to give an impression of greater certainty than I have. Having said that, ex definitely sounds wrong to me since there is no movement out of the forum involved.
    – dbmag9
    Commented Apr 26, 2021 at 9:58
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    The preposition ex is not solely for movement; for example, e marmore factus is "made of marble". All these three prepositions have quite wide ranges of meanings. It might well be that de is the best, but I don't have a clear opinion yet.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta ♦
    Commented Apr 26, 2021 at 11:00

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