Anyone Speak Latin

I think you are right about the pronunciation, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone can come along who knows.

As per Spanish, it's most commonly used for 'traffic'. As in, 'Dang, this traffic is horrible!' Which makes for a quirky character name for us bilinguals, if that's your intention.

No-one actual know what Latin sounded like, and medieval Latin is highly corrupted compared to the language of the Romans. What a lot of Latin learners do, is to speak in a highly accented Italian.

Spanish, French and Italian are Romance Languages [they all derive from Latin.] In English, the roots are weaker.

Brutal Mustang said:

As per Spanish, it's most commonly used for 'traffic'. As in, 'Dang, this traffic is horrible!' Which makes for a quirky character name for us bilinguals, if that's your intention.

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In Latin, it means 'I pass through.'

OP, are you aware of the difficulties of Latin declension? The subject of the verb affects the verb ending.

*Anyone more experienced, please correct me. As I'm a sixth month learner.

Seconding what Gothicangel said.

I think you have the pronunciation correct (going off what most peeps believe today).

On conjugations . . .

trānseo (-īre -iī -itum): go across

http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?T1=transeo&imageField.x=9&imageField.y=8&D1=9&H1=109

Not sure the above helps, but there is a lot to do with it. Depends on how you're using it. "I go across." "Go across!" (an order) "We go across." "You go across," etc.

gothicangel is probably the best expert so far. I've had a few years, but hell if I remember a lot of it. It's been a LONG time. GothA is fresh into it, it seems.

transito can be an intensified form of transeo. Intensives and frequentatives can be formed by adding first conjugation endings to the supine stem or ito to the present stem.

Where transeo means "I cross over", transito means "I pass through."

transito can also be a simple, bog-standard, singular, 2nd or 3rd person future imperative of transeo.

Monnrella said:

There's an accent over the A, so I believe it's "trahn-zee-toh," but I wanted to check with a Latin speaker to be sure.

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Sorry, you mean there's an accent over the A in the Spanish version, correct? Latin did not use diacritic marks.

Allen R. Brady said:

Sorry, you mean there's an accent over the A in the Spanish version, correct? Latin did not use diacritic marks.

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Latin didn't use diacritics, but we do know roughly how the words were accented, and long/short vowels, so dictionaries for Latin often helpfully note the accented syllable.

Monnrella said:

Hmm...I found the word in a baby names book with the definition "to go to another life."

Am I completely off the mark here??

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If it's a name of a character, then go for it.

Struggling to see it as a correct definition. The correct translation should be: "ut peto alius vita."

Oh, I see. It's Spanish, not Latin.

http://www.allbabynames.com/BabyName/Spanish/Transito.aspx

Monnrella said:

Hmm...I found the word in a baby names book with the definition "to go to another life."

Am I completely off the mark here??

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I would be DEEPLY dubious of any definition for a word offered in a baby name book. They're fond of jumping off to wild, fancy explanations for what are often very simple original meanings. And in this case, it sounds like the equivalent of someone saying "The name Pass means 'to seek the afterlife'" because "to pass away" is a euphemism for dying.

Which is to say... it might not be entirely incorrect? But I don't think it really has that connotation as its first definition in Spanish or Latin.

Monnrella said:

Hmm...I found the word in a baby names book with the definition "to go to another life."

Am I completely off the mark here??

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You aren't but the baby name book is.

They are often far off the mark with respect to etymology.

The "a" would be pronounced as "ah", the "i" as a short "i" as in "with", and the "o" as "oh".

Make sure it's the right word form, however--in Latin (late Latin, not classical) the word "transito" is a declined form of "transitus", which means "a passage" or "a crossing over". There is also another noun derived from transitus, "transitio", meaning the same thing. However, there's a modern Italian word "transito" meaning the same.

fadeaccompli said:

I would be DEEPLY dubious of any definition for a word offered in a baby name book. They're fond of jumping off to wild, fancy explanations for what are often very simple original meanings. And in this case, it sounds like the equivalent of someone saying "The name Pass means 'to seek the afterlife'" because "to pass away" is a euphemism for dying.

Which is to say... it might not be entirely incorrect? But I don't think it really has that connotation as its first definition in Spanish or Latin.

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I agree. Also, you have to think about whether your reader will understand it, as it doesn't appear to be a common phrase.

Don't put the macron (the line over the a) in. The macrons are for teaching purposes only.

And "transito" would connote a physical crossing to anyone familiar with Latin, not any kind of metaphysical crossing over. I would encourage you to rethink the title.

Monnrella said:

There's an accent over the A, so I believe it's "trahn-zee-toh," but I wanted to check with a Latin speaker to be sure.

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One of the major problems with a language like Latin is that there are no 'native' speakers. That is, it's hard to tell what the accent etc would have been because we simply don't know.

I've had several latin teachers over the years and they all have their own interpretations of pronunciation.

One of my favourite teachers liked to speak Latin with a flamboyant Italian accent.

Nobody really speaks Latin. If I can remember my GCSEs correctly, the emphasis would be on the last syllable, as that contains who is doing the verb.

While it's true that no one speaks Latin anymore (although several scholars do speak fluent Latin), linguists can ascertain from a number of evidential sources pretty much what the language sounded like. For example: Roman grammarians left detailed notes about the sounds of the language; Latin was entirely phonetic; there were a lot of spelling errors with two letters or words that sounded alike (like homophones in English); spellings changed as pronunciations changed (for example, the word "honos"--the root of the English word "honor"--came to be written in later Latin as "onos", because the initial "h" was dropped in speech, just as it is in English); and transliterations of Latin words into other languages preserved how the language sounded.

Latin was not pronounced like modern Italian.

If you ever want to hear what spoken Latin sounded like, find a copy of the 1989 unfortunately-titled movie "Norman's Awesome Experience". In it the heroes time-travel back to the Roman Empire and once they arrive, quite a bit of the movie is in spoken Latin with English subtitles.

guys, stop confusing the poor girl. She asked a simple question - how it's pronounced. Going into deep theory is a bit too much for someone who doesn't have any connection to this language. The answer is yes, it's pronounced that way. That's all she needs to know

brianjanuary said:

If you ever want to hear what spoken Latin sounded like, find a copy of the 1989 unfortunately-titled movie "Norman's Awesome Experience". In it the heroes time-travel back to the Roman Empire and once they arrive, quite a bit of the movie is in spoken Latin with English subtitles.

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My Latin tutor [ex-Cambridge University lecturer in Latin] would disagree. No-one knows how it was spoken, it's all academic guesswork.

The reason learners choose Italian, is because it is the closest accent we have.

gothicangel said:

My Latin tutor [ex-Cambridge University lecturer in Latin] would disagree. No-one knows how it was spoken, it's all academic guesswork.

The reason learners choose Italian, is because it is the closest accent we have.

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Heh. My Latin professor would disagree on both points; he uses recreated classical pronunciation, and insists on it firmly. (Nicely. But firmly.) People reading Latin in class who accent the wrong syllables, or make the wrong vowels long or short, or don't make ever C a hard one, will be corrected and then asked to read again properly.

I rather like this approach. It's easier to imprint the vocab in my head if it sounds like its own language, and not like an odd new series of words for another foreign language that I already know. And it makes Latin poetry sound much better when recited, IMO.