Talk:Noviomagus Reginorum

Translation of Noviomagus?

The translation of Noviomagus as 'new field' by an editor of this page is currently inconsistent with the translation 'new market' on the Roman_Britain page itself and also with the article on the meaning of word magus (in brief: astrologer; astronomer; magician (derog.); trickster).
I have placed -fact- tags on both editors offerings, for the time being.
EatYerGreens (talk) 12:18, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, i m sorry for my english , i ll try to explain from where come from Noviomagus. NOVUS or NOVI (NEW) ACTUS ( this word com from verb AGO and it has a plurality of meanings ,ie here it means trade,exchange, or exchanges,trades).. Novus/Novi Actus ,Noviomagus it could be a successive transformation or a misspelling/mispronunciation . —Preceding unsigned comment added by Without23 (talk • contribs) 19:18, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

We should not be doing our own translations but citing reliable sources. Dougweller (talk) 23:51, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Lots of Roman towns had "magus" as a place name element and I have often seen it translated as "market". I doubt if it has anything to do with astrologers. Itsmejudith (talk) 15:32, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Querying the redirect of Regnorum to Reginorum

1. If it was the Romans who gave the town its name and all their original inscriptions or contemporary writings said Reginorum then I cannot dispute that.
2. If the Romano-British named the town but practised bad grammar and/or spelling then that cannot be helped, I cannot dispute what the records say and the article title has to match it.
3. I am no latin scholar, by several very long chalks.
4. However, the conflicting offerings from the magus article, the Roman_Britain article and this article prompted me to experiment with an online tranlation page, with the following findings.
agus = agus (i.e. it won't translate)
field = agri, campus, ager
agri = farm, field, acre
novo = to make anew, refresh, revive, change, alter, invent
novio = newness, novelty, strangeness
noviom = newness, novelty, strangeness (stray 'm' is being ignored)
novoim = to make anew, refresh, revive, change, alter, invent (stray 'im' is being ignored)
magus = magical
regina = queen
reginorum = reginorum (i.e. it won't translate)
regnorum = to reign, rule, predominate
noviom agus regnorum = newness agus to reign (i.e. 'agus' fails to translate)
novio magus reginorum = newness magical reginorum (i.e. 'reginorum' fails to translate)
novio magus regnorum = newness magical to reign
Clearly, the way in which the town name is parsed into smaller words makes a difference in the resulting translation. This means that, even after the citations are inserted, the various articles will still not be consistent with one another.
If that is the case, we need to decide whether to : -
a) cut out the '...which means...' bits entirely (let the reader work out the meaning for themselves, if they are really that curious) or
b) expand upon it, to clarify that there are multiple opinions about the meaning of the name and flag it as a disputed fact.
5. I suspect the online translation service has its limitations so, if you profess to be an expert in latin, then please stick your oar in now.
6. If reginorum is grammatically incorrect - or untranslatable - but endemic in the historical literature about the town and thus the thing that we expect the majority of users be searching for then we need to agree a policy on what should be the main page spelling and what should be the redirection spelling.
7. For what it's worth, I like the sound of 'newness magical to reign'. EatYerGreens (talk) 13:20, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Post-script

regni = to reign, rule, predominate
regini = queen
So, I make that 'newness magical queen' or, if the 'field' bit holds water then it would be 'new field/clearing of the queen'. So can the cited author please name that queen?
EatYerGreens (talk) 13:26, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Noviomagus Reg(i)norum is, like most Romano-British placenames, a Latinised Brythonic name, which couldn't be analysed purely as Latin even if you were a Latin scholar. "Reg(i)norum" is instantly recognisable as a Latin genitive plural - in this case, of the Reg(i)ni, who are well known to be a local population group (although thanks to idiosyncracies in the transmission of ancient documents, the correct form of their name is not known, and the Wikipedia article is given under another variant, the Regnenses). This is a common pattern in Romano-British place-names - see Calleva Atrebatum (Calleva of the Atrebates) or Venta Icenorum (Venta of the Iceni), for example.

Which leaves "Noviomagus". The Persian-derived Latin magus, magician, is highly unlikely to be useful in interpreting a Romano-British name. The Romans didn't make up place names out of whole cloth. Usually, they used the local name, with minor alterations to allow it to carry Latin grammatical inflections. We know that Camulodunum is derived from Camulos, an attested Celtic war god, and the Celtic word dunon, "fort", (cf. Old Irish dún) with the Celtic nominative neuter ending -on changed to the Latin nominative neuter ending -um. -Magus, in this case, is the Celtic word magos, "field, plain" (cf. Old Irish mag). Novio- almost certainly does mean "new", as the words for "new" in many Indo-European languages are cognate and therefore similar.

I'm sure a proper reference can be found for all this, but really, attempting to translate ancient languages by search engine with no understanding of (a) what languages you're dealing with, and (b) how those languages work, is not likely to produce anything but gibberish. --Nicknack009 (talk) 14:27, 5 April 2009 (UTC)