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How do you tell time in Latin? For instance, how do you translate "it is 10 o'Clock" or how would you translate "it is 10:30"?
I am just curious and would appreciate a general response or a specific one. What I mean by general is the format and what I mean by specific is examples.
There are two systems, 1) one based on day & night, and 2) the AM/PM we use today (kind of).
Both systems divide the day in two halves of twelve hours: daylight and night, and before and after noon, respectively.
Bear in mind that number zero wasn't known to Romans as a proper number, and precise time reckoning wasn't possible before the mechanical clock. The earliest known mention of the minute (pars minuta prima, the first small part [of an hour]) seems to be from the XIII century. Hours were counted from 1 to 12, and it didn't have too much sense to be overly precise.
That said, the specific hours are said hora + [ordinal number]: hora tertia, hora sexta, hora nona, etc. Especially in the day/night system, these multiples of 3 also have a wider meaning (mid morning, noon, mid afternoon) and tend to be preferred even if less precise. In this system, hours of the night are called vigiliae [noctis] and also adapt their length seasonally.
The name usually refers to the whole hour, so hora prima may well mean (around the equinox) any time from modern 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM2, and quarta vigilia noctis → about 9 to 10 PM.
Most of the above also applies to AM/PM → hora tertia post meridiem → 3 to 4 PM.
To be more specific without knowing minutes, you can say hora quasi decima (cf. NVG Ioh, 1:39).3 I suspect you can also say, for example, hora prima dimidiata to mean around 6:30 AM. Update: I just found by chance a text in the Roman Missal for the feast day of St. Agnes (i.e., Ecclesiastical Latin, probably from Antiquity) that makes reference to the "second half", and the "beginning" of a time period (a Century in this case):
Altera meditate saéculi III, vel probabilius initio saeculi IV, Romae martyr occubuit / She died a martyr during the second half of the III cent. or more probably at the beginning of the IV,
so you could probably say altera meditate horae quartae to signify at/during the time between 9:30 and 10:00 AM, and initio horae quintae to mean shortly after 10:00 AM.
This question: How to express a time exactly on the hour?, already linked by Joonas which addresses a number of further details.
1 Not so for those like me living in the Southern Hemisphere, nor all year long for those living in the tropics. I might have been in my twenties when I realized noon was a relevant astronomical event, so I think it's worth mentioning.
2 Provided that your timezone matches the natural astronomical time. It may be usually off by a few minutes, and in some places—like western China—may even be off by up to three hours. See this map for details.
3 This could be debated, I think, since quasi means almost, but also as if. I've actually seen this verse translated to Spanish as era como la hora décima (it was approximately the tenth hour) in a fairly literal translation.
