Lucus Eques wrote:I imagined this short for "campus signalis telephoniorum cellularium," though even "campus cellularis" probably would have been sufficient. The term I was glossing was "cellphone reception." Better suggestions?
Haha, beats me! At first, I was thinking "telephonium cellulare" was an Americanism, but evidently it is the Italian term as well. Otherwise, I think maybe "t. gestabile" is more common; personally I'd favour it anyway, or maybe "t. mobile". As for "reception"... Nah, I won't venture there now.
In the last news, you used the form "Beijingi". May I say that I thoroughly dislike this spelling? Why? Because it relies on the rules of English orthography: "Beijing", if pronounced according to English pronunciation, fairly closely emulates the modern standard Chinese pronunciation, [pèitɕíŋ]. That is to say, "b" was chosen in the transcription for no other reason than to prevent the stop from being aspirated, and for similar reasons, "j" is used for [tɕ]. Hence, it is good for English, but to impose this idiosyncratic English orthography on Latin is no less than an atrocity. A saner Latin transcription of the modern pronunciation would probably be "Peitjing" or "Peitsing", or something similar.
But, I see no reason what so ever to not use the traditional Latin rendering of this word,
Pekinum (variant spellings:
Pechinum or
Pequinum), (which was based on the Chinese pronunciation of the city before a sound change [kʲ] > [tɕ].) These spellings, rather than "Pecinum", is of course in order to prevent the velar from being softened in post-classical pronuncation. (Although, as a matter of fact, "Pecinum" would be a very clever spelling, since, if you use a classical pronunciation, you get the traditional Latin form; if you use a post-classical pronunciation, you get closer to the modern Chinese pronunciation.)
