Disputatio:Saeptum Collegii (Terra Mariae)

Nomen

In Latin you would only put two nouns in apposition like this if one is the real proper name of a thing and the other is a descriptor, like "fluvius Potomacus". Since that's not the case here, the reader will follow the route of reading this as a grammatical phrase, and will translate it "the impounded college".

To translate "College Park" we have to translate the meaning. The English page doesn't explain the etymological origin of the name explicitly, but I guess it's "the park/field/pound attached to Maryland Agricultural College". So the translation would be "Saeptum Scholarum/Scholare" or, if we admit the modern meaning of collegium, "Saeptum Collegii/Collegiale". Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 06:34, 3 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to Andrew for making a point that I'd have made last night, had circumstances not intervened. What I was going to say was that in the English phrase college park, the first word is what the OED calls an objective noun, which stands in what's felt as something like a genitive or adjectival relation to the next noun: it's the park of a college, or a collegiate park, not a park that's a college. With true appositives, we don't lose the sense by reversing the terms, but park college doesn't have the same sense at all. Trying to translate 'College Park' as Collegium Saeptum makes no more sense than trying to translate 'seashore' as mare litus, instead of maris litus or litus marinum (ignoring, for didactic purposes, that litus can mean that all by itself). IacobusAmor 11:20, 3 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Oops, you're both absolutely right -- I had forgotten that the Park was attached to the College, and hence it is actually the Park of the College. There's another Park in Maryland called Lexington Park, which is not a Park attached to anything, but a Park named after the USS Lexington, which in turn is named after Lexington, Mass (Lexingtonia). Would this be Lexingtonia Saeptum or Saeptum Lexingtoniae? Saeptum Lexingtoniense? --Robert.Baruch 13:56, 3 Maii 2011 (UTC)

None of the above, because, according to Wikipedia, the entity in Maryland is not a park named "Lexington": it's a community (a "census-designated place") named "Lexington Park." Your suggestions, however, might work for the baseball stadium once known as Lexington Park, though campus or stadium could be a better gloss of that kind of park. IacobusAmor 14:48, 3 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Discussion continued at Disputatio:Lexingtonia Saeptum (Terra Mariae). --Robert.Baruch 15:58, 3 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Saeptum & the Iron Curtain

Bear in mind that, according to our anonymous but possibly Iberian mainly geographical contributor, the Iron Curtain is the Saepta Ferrea (pl., gen. Saeptorum Ferreorum). IacobusAmor 12:13, 10 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Oh for crying out loud. Sometimes I wonder if I'm spoiled because the best dictionaries are English-Latin? Or, maybe in his language, the idiom isn't Curtain. Maybe it's an Iron "Park" where all the Soviets were stuck inside. --Robert.Baruch 13:02, 10 Maii 2011 (UTC)

The translation was not so bad. We use saeptum of an area that has a containing structure surrounding it, whose purpose is to prevent unauthorised movement. E.g. a pound or enclosure for animals; probably the original meaning of "College Park", as also the original meaning of the Saeptum in classical Rome, which must once have been a pound but became its most expensive shopping district! But that same term seems quite OK if transferred to the "Iron Curtain", which was surely visualised as a barrier on free travel, communication etc. Why not? Maybe saeptum gives the required sense better than curtain! Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 07:04, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)