I’ve been making progress in Latin and have been looking at the modern things there are to read such as http://ephemeris.alcuinus.net and saw that they called the European Union “Unio Europaea”.
If that is correct, then declining that would give you words like “Europaeae”, which looks really strange to me. Are there other words like this (ending in aea/aeae) in Latin?
Searching the forum here, I saw that the EU’s Latin newsletter uses “Unio Europaea”.
My second question is why did they not choose “Europa”, which seems to me to be the Latin word for “Europe”?
Is it from Ευ?ωπα? Attic had long been established when Europa entered the Roman vernacular. I think it might be negated by the variant Europe (long e).
I wouldn’t be one for busting William’s chops.
Lewish and Short (via Perseus) also list Europensis as a possible alternative.
Not that I will be returning to discussing Latin nor using the term ‘chop-busting’ but I thought the mantle could be divided here. Varro (l.l.X) informs us that Accius was the first to employ Greek nouns in a declension drawn from the Greeks (although he still writes ‘Europae’ at trag.501); prior to that time Greek first declensions (masc/fem) were declined just as any other Latin first declensions (nauta, poina (>poena) etc.), a transference mollified by the fact that early Roman contact with the Greeks would have been in the Doric dialect (and therefore with final alphas in this decl.). When Ennius used Europa, therefore, at ann. 302, that was in accordance with the earlier method; when various Later writers use Europe, that was by virtue of the fact that Europa was not a common enough term to have been standardised as a bona fide Latin form, and therefore transliteration of the Greek was a natural option. Nonetheless, the Ennian precedent with Europa was sufficient to give it legitimacy for the likes of Cicero, Catullus and Livy inter alios. Propertius and Horace were the first to use the form Europe and metrical reasons cannot be dismissed, particularly since they (like many later poets) did employ both the Latin and the Graecising form. So L. is ultimately right, if a little curt. ai incidentally started to be written as ae in the early 2nd cent. BC.
Europensis is not found before the Script. Hist. Aug. and cannot be approved alongside Europaeos, which is supported by Nepos, Ovid and Curtius.
Finally, I recommend Ou. am. II.15.10 and id. met. IV.205, along with Prop. III.12.31 and V. Aen. III.386 to Joels, where the remarkable adj. form ‘Aeaeae’ can be found.
If that is correct, then declining that would give you words like “Europaeae”, which looks really strange to me. Are there other words like this (ending in aea/aeae) in Latin?
matt 2:1 says
“cum autem natus esset Iesus in Bethlehem IUDAEAE in diebus Herodis regis …”