Bad spelling in Latin

[emily_shore]

My character is a new boy at a public school in England, circa 1913. He is a very bad speller and what I need is for him to make a common error in Latin, writing one word when he means another. Extra points if it's a particularly funny mistake. Thanks for your help!

Search terms tried: "Latin errors," "Latin misspelling."

Comments

[sca_sethe]

Also try the linguaphile community - they might be able to recall something for you :)

[conuly]

linguaphiles.

[sca_sethe]

May I ask how you input the coding to produce the link? o3o

[dont_even_blink]

Please don't mind me butting in!

< lj user="username" >

Keep the space between "lj" and "user" but remove the others, and you're good to go!

[dark_roast]

There's also latin. Those are some fun folks. They helped me name my evil spell-book (um... for a story, I mean). =)

[dark_roast]

Feel free to snag it. It's by iconomicon. :)

[in_excelsis_dea]

When I was in 10th grade, the entire 11th grade Latin class mistranslated "eis" on a Latin exam. "eis" is...um, genetive and means "themselves", I think? (Been about six years since I've had Latin, and I learned Latin in German, so both factors are making my memory bad). In any case, the root form is "is, ea, id" (again, I believe). However, "eis" itself means, well, "Eisvogel" in German, so ice bird? I'm sure if you looked it up in a dictionary, you'd find the proper English term. Mind you, this Latin class had had Latin for the past five years and this is something you learn pretty early on -- and the entire class did it, a class of at least twenty people (and probably more like 30-40). In any case, by the end of the day they got their exams back, the story was over the entire school

[zeecoldwater]

"Eis" is, depending on context, either ice or ice cream.

Latin is murder. I gave up on it quite quickly. Didn't help that I was trying to self-teach!

[in_excelsis_dea]

Do you mean in German or Latin? Because yes, the German word "Eis" means ice or ice cream, but I was referring to the Latin word "eis"...which I suppose could mean that, but I was under the impression that it didn't (and did they have ice/ice cream back then? I can't recall). I'll try to find my Stowasser Latin/German dictionary and look it up.

[zeecoldwater]

Aahh, sorry, I meant "Eis" in German. I should've made that clear!

[lilya7]

My entire class translated "Genoa" (as in "Italian city on the Mediterranean Sea") for Geneva: we thought it was a little strange the passage kept mentioning mountains, bridges over ravines, snow and crevasses, but the dictionary said Genoa - and the teacher refused to hear our questions when we tried to ask her.

[yudinsoha]

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bellus
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bellum

The first means beautiful, the other means war. You can see that depending on case and gender, they can actually be written the same way, so it's very easy to get them mixed up.

[fiorediloto]

This is a common enough mistake, but one should bear in mind that in classical Latin "bellus" is not the first choice for "beautiful". Authors of the Classical period used "pulcher" or "formosus"; "bellus" is, like, the popular, less elegant choice. (To my knowledge, only Catullus used it once.)

This is to say, it would probably make more sense if he found "bellum" (war) and mistook it for "bellus" rather than the other way round.

[yudinsoha]

I'm sure someone can find humorous or humiliating possibilities using:

malus - bad, evil

malus - apple tree

maleus - hammer

mallus - a lock of wool