New answers tagged vocabulary
1
I don't know of a single completely obvious choice, so this is just my thoughts on some possibilities. The order here is just to make this answer less similar to the existing answers.
"Sariga" (or similar: sarigua, sairguea)
I wouldn't go so far as recommending it, but I wanted to mention that another stem used in a few Romance languages' words for opossum ...
3
If you are looking for something to call these animals colloquially, I would go with the simple neuter opossum.
No other name will be easy to understand, and I value functional communication above sticking with classical words.
To in no way help me drive home this argument, here is a hendecasyllabic verse:
O, possum hoc animal vocare opossum.
Oh, I can ...
-1
Actually all animals have official zoological names, in this case Didelphis virginiana.
2
The adverb comminus should be considered. It literally means "hand-to-hand" or "at hand" and was used especially to describe close combat or contest. Cornelius Nepos:
comminus pugnans telis hostium interfectus est
which translated to English (J. C. Rolfe):
he was slain by the enemy's weapons in hand-to-hand-combat
12
Indeed, pestilentia does seem to describe any contagious disease as well as actual plague, just like Italian pestilenza, Spanish pestilencia, and Old French pestilence. The Romans didn't think twice about pretty much reducing any epidemic to pestis, plague.
Actually I couldn't find any attestation of something like lebra est pestilentia, which would close ...
6
I'd use either pestilentia, plaga or, as you said, an epidemia. I'd call a pandemic a pandemia, simply because it makes perfect sense and is clear.
4
The expression in faciem expresses the idea of "man to man" or "face to face", but to emphasize doing so in a manly way, I would use the expression ut vir (or sicut vir), which means "like a man". This phrase can be use with an appropriate verb such as resistere (to resist) or contendere (to contend).
Cicero for example wrote the following:
Ita et tulit ...
2
There are a lot of good answers here, but the one I like best is in the OP's question, minister and ministra.
It is true that minister has a somewhat broader meaning than "waiter", but if you are in a restaurant setting, I don't think there will be any ambiguity. I also note that John Traupman's dictionary lists minister when you look up "waiter" in the ...
5
The selenographical names can perhaps be viewed as appositions and would as such not be ungrammatical (Latin appositions may be incongruent in number or gender, like urbs Athenae). In that case both parts would have to be declined in parallel, e.g. Videsne Montes Agricolam? In my opinion one should take this as scientific terminology based on Latin, not ...
3
Although the word terra is the usual way of speaking of the Earth, some form of tellūs is also a possibility. The latter is used in this sense most commonly in poetry. According to the lexicon of Lewis and Short, it is defined as:
tellus — the earth, opp. to the other planets or to the sea, the globe
(a word belonging almost entirely to poetry).
My ...
11
A good word for "liar," which can be used either as an adjective or as a noun alone, is mendax, -cis.
Here's Plautus in Truculentus:
D. Redin an non redis?
A. Vocat me quae in me potest plus quam potes.
D. Vno verbo
A. Eloquere.
D. Mittin me intro?
A. Mendax es, abi. unum aiebas, tria iam dixti verba, atque ea mendacia.
My quick translation:
...
8
According to L&S, the adjective mendax was used as a noun to mean liar:
I.given to lying, mendacious; subst., a liar.
I. Lit.: “mendacem esse adversus aliquem,” Plaut. Poen. 1, 2, 188:
“cum mendaci homini, ne verum quidem dicenti, credere soleamus,” Cic.
Div. 2, 71, 146: “Carthaginienses fraudulenti et mendaces,” id. Agr.
2, 35, 95: “...
2
The Irish word "dún" means a "fort" and has meant that since the Early Irish period as far as I am aware, also Modern Welsh "dinas" means a city (Old Welsh "din"), both the Irish and Welsh words appear in placenames usually suggesting a fort, or fortified hill or promontory. I wonder if the Gaulish word "dunom" generally meant 'fort' too during the Roman ...
6
It depends on the exact word they'd be trying to borrow. Proto-Germanic was spoken in the first centuries CE and the Proto-Germanic word reflected as English dune is reconstructed as *dūnǭ or *dūnaz; the latter would be a straightforward dūnus (compare e.g. rattus 'rat' < PGmc *rattaz), the former likely dūnō (third declension, like sāpō 'soap' < PGmc *...
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