# Proto-Italic dictionary



## Aldarion (Jul 18, 2019)

In my world, "protagonist" country is essentially a cross of Western Roman Empire, Eastern Roman Empire and Holy Roman Empire, so the primary language is Latin. However, I want to make up my own place names, and for that I need a proto-Italic dictionary, as it will form the basis for most names. Does anyone know a good one?


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## skip.knox (Jul 18, 2019)

You mean like this?
Latin Place Names | An RBMS Resource 
What you want is not a dictionary but a gazetteer. A search on "catalog of european place names" turned up the above, plus many others.

As I used to tell my students: seek, and ye shall find; ask, and ye shall be pointed to the library.


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## Aldarion (Jul 18, 2019)

skip.knox said:


> You mean like this?
> Latin Place Names | An RBMS Resource
> What you want is not a dictionary but a gazetteer. A search on "catalog of european place names" turned up the above, plus many others.
> 
> As I used to tell my students: seek, and ye shall find; ask, and ye shall be pointed to the library.



No, that is not at all what I sought. I want a proper dictionary so I can make up my own names.


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## skip.knox (Jul 19, 2019)

A dictionary is a list of definitions. A gazetteer gives place names along with variant forms, which seemed like the best place to find inspiration for making up one's own terms that were linguistically consistent. You could always supplement that with some reading in the relevant linguistics texts. Here, for example Proto-Italic language - Wikipedia 
That was found by searching on "proto-italic"


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## TheKillerBs (Jul 20, 2019)

You could use the index diachronica to use Latin and revert the sound changes. I expect people would call the names using Latin pronunciations though, like how lots of place names in Europe have Latin roots but have diverged. You'll also want Celtic or Germanic roots for some of them.


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## Aldarion (Jul 21, 2019)

TheKillerBs said:


> You could use the index diachronica to use Latin and revert the sound changes. I expect people would call the names using Latin pronunciations though, like how lots of place names in Europe have Latin roots but have diverged. You'll also want Celtic or Germanic roots for some of them.



In the end, I had decided to use Latin and Welsh for basis, and then modify them. These are two examples:
Blue Ford – Caeruleum Vadum – Caeruledum
Mouth of River Slaughter – Mouth of Alanastra – Ceg Alanastra – Ceganastra


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## Insolent Lad (Jul 21, 2019)

I used not proto-Italic but Etruscan for something of this sort. The known word pool is rather small, but a number of them made their way into Latin.


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## Aldarion (Jul 21, 2019)

Insolent Lad Problem is that Etruscan has no connecton to Latin that I am aware of, so it would only be useful for a separate group of people, not for ancestors of the group using Latin.


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