A somewhat silly question, but in playing around with some names for a product I hit upon Lixus, a Roman colonial city. I am wondering how this would be rendered into an adjectival form in proper Latin. Looking naively at its contemporary Tingis, which I think as an adjective is Tingitania, I would presume Lixus would render as Lixutania.
This is not, mind you for technical usage, but a bit of bastardly Latin for a high end kind of product. Faux snob appeal.
Interesting. Roman city names usually have feminine endings. I’m not positive about this, but my best guess is that something like Lixus as a place name would decline adjectivally as Lixanus-a-um
So, I’d suggest going with “Lixanus.” ( no snickering).
Well, that obviously wouldn’t work, for my purposes. What is the form that Tingis is declining to in Tingitania as in the form “Comes Tingitaniae”
Tingis is 3rd declension, but it looks like it declines in the feminine after adding the adjectival suffix “-ian.”
To do that with Lixus you could decline it as Lixiana/Lixianae (the “-a” ending is singular, the “-ae” is plural).
Ah, brilliant. Now that has a nice ring. Thanks mate.
Silly question, what is the rule in the declension that eats “us”?
This is precisely why tracking macrons is so important. It could just mean licking an old lady.
You mean what changes it from the masculine ("-us/-i") to the feminine ("-a/-ae")?
It’s just changing the gender to the more common Latin convention of using the feminine for cities and associated adjectives. Cities are usually “female.” Lixus is unusual in that it’s male. I just used an adjectival form that gives it a “sex change” (which I don’t think would be that grammatically unusual).
Latin offers a number of different ways to form adjectives from nouns, depending on the meaning of the adjective you’re looking for. Unfortunately, Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar doesn’t discuss which of these were productive in Classical times, and what determines which allomorph of the adjectival suffix you use. I’m going to throw out two candidates here:
Lixi-us/aa/um ‘of Lixus’
Lixaan-us/aa/um ‘belonging to, coming from Lixus’
Either of these can be declined as first declension feminines or second declension masculines or neuters, depending on the noun the adjective agrees with.
Another option would be to use the genitive singular, which is Lixii. That would just mean “of Lixus.” Since it’s a noun in the genitive case, you wouldn’t have to worry about declining it to match the other noun in gender, number, and case.
(Double consonants represent long vowels, since I don’t know how to produce a macron here.)
I have my keyboard languages set up so that I can switch to Maori. There it works just the same except that the back quote ` becomes a dead key which will macronize any vowel that follows it.
These are the same two options I already suggested.