How do proper names work in Latin?

I mean names that weren't around in the times of the Romans. How would you "Latinize" a name like America? Would it be America, Americanis, n, 3rd? Just sorta guessing there. What do you do with modern day proper nouns when trying to translate them into Latin for composition purposes?


Washington, Macarthur, Butler, Lincoln, so on and so forth . . . What are you suppose to do?|||Most modern names, and especially surnames, will likely be left undeclined in the English form. If a proper noun easily fits in with Latin declensions, such as America easily being able to act as a first declension noun, it will act in this way. There is always the potential of adding -us to masculine names; while this often results in the ridiculous, it has plenty of precedent, in Medieval Latin in particular (eg Eduardus for Edward, Henricus for Henry; more recently, 'Harrius Potter'). In terms of composition, it would depend on the length of piece you're writing. If it's just a paragraph as an exercise, I would recommend assigning them suitable titles, along the lines of dux or princeps, or assuming that their name has occured earlier in the passage allowing you to call them simply hic. For places, urbs or oppidum will usually do, possibly with an adjective depending on the place's nature; countries however often have either an original Latin form or one that can easily be made into Latin, due to the lrge number than end in a; at the very least, adding the suffix -ia could probably get around the problem.





If you really need to get a person's name into the text, making it third declension is probably the most acceptable way of doing so. There are precedents even in Classical texts for doing so, such as Hannibal Hannibalis, Hasdrubal Hasdrubalis and the like.





I hope this can be of assistance. In my experience of prose composition at least, just put in dux and claim to be Tacitean in your approach and there's little that can go wrong.