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Colours in Latin


AureliaeLacrimae

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Colours in Latin

 

Well, now that I've done a section on adjectives, I wish to add colours as well. As in any other language, colours in Latin can be very useful and good for practice. Colours are adjectives, so they act like them - they follow the pattern of bonus, bona, bonum explained in the previous post.

 

Here is a list of Latin colours:

flavus, flava, flavum - blue

albus, alba, album - white

aureus, aurea, aureum - golden

purpureus, purpurea, purpureum - purple

caeruleus, caerulea, caeruleum - sky-blue

roseus, rosea, roseum - rose

 

There are some which follow the pattern of miser, misera, miserum:

niger, nigra, nigrum - black

ater, atra, atrum - dark

ruber, rubra, rubrum

 

Enjoy playing with colours!

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Well, now that we're discussing it, Minerva is the goddess of wisdom, Severus means stern. Alastor was Greek god of revenge, Cornelius means horn-coloured, Draco is dragon, Lucius is light-bringer (just like Lucifer), Luna is moon and Lupin comes from lupus, i, m. Oh, and Nimbus means rain, as far as I recall, so you'll see - Harry Potter is full of Latin words. I won't even start naming the spells. Their origins are mostly Latin - I'd never finish. J.K.Rowling was very careful in her selection of names, it seems.

I've also heard that Dumbledore is Old English for bumblebee. But I am not sure about this one.

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Thank you for the info Aurelia! I knew that J.K Rowling made up some of the expressions with the help of Latin. However, I did not know that she was that crazy about it :grin: The latin foundation of those words/expressions make them sound really special/unique! Absolutely brilliant!

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I must admit that this was one of the reasons why I'd started learning Latin - more seriously, I mean. I was simply amazed. All of these names... they meant something. By knowing someone's name, you could know their basic character. And the spells... well, the spells were something special. I used to leaf through the dictionary for hours, trying to find the equivalents.

Nox is an easy one. But what about Vipera evanesca? It isn't even entirely correct. I know how frustrated I was about this one, simply because I knew that evanesco, evanescere, evanui can't possibly have a form in ablative similar to that one: it would either evanescente in present, so the ''vanishing serpent'' or nothing at all. I was thinking about this one for a very long time.

You brought some very sweet memories back...

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