Anyone with a working knowledge of Latin?

[Neishai]

As you may know I've been trying to consolidate my agencies onto my own planet, off-Alskyr. I was very tempted to name most of my agencies "House ___" as the majority seem to be run by my Tarati (animal shifters). But it occurred to me that naming them in a more "conventional" sense might make the purpose/culture of each more apparent to everyone.

So I was trying to name some of my affiliations/agencies with the Arx/Nidus naming conventions, but other than roots, some prefixes and suffixes, I know little about proper Latin usage. So I'm mainly going with what "looks" or "sounds" good to me. Doesn't make it correct. I was using Google Translate for these.

I have a question that I feel should be asked: As far as Aeries, Caers, and Coves are concerned, what are the off-world equivalents? I've been assuming 'Nidus' is the same as 'Caer' (no idea about the other two but I don't want to keep assuming when I could be totally off. This will likely affect at least some of my agencies listed below.

They can be found in this directory:

http://neishai.zymichost.com/

The Aerie
- - I don't know what to do with this one, but I like the word 'Petra' for 'cliff'. Petra Aerie? It'll be far north. I know there are other agencies with that theme but I don't know many of their names. Belrin Isle had one --Ice High? and I remember Trandiok Glacier. But I'm not sure if others exist.

Alveo Caecus
- - "Blind Hive" the xenodragon (and related dragon) hive run by "queen" Makon's House Hshchii.

Arx Draco Fures (Gildam Draco Vola?)
- - my notorious Dragon Thieves Guild. They tend to recruit hydras, chaotic dragons, angry dragons, outcasts, and the like.

Arx Dominium Mali
- - This is House Rh'thaou (my evil tarati/shifters and their slaves) (I think the key words were evil dominion; I played with it). They like evil, violent and/or sadistic beasts.

Nidus Feriatum Eccentrici
- - my Holiday Misfits (keywords used: eccentric holiday). They are the holiday, festival, library, and general cultural hub.

Other:
- - Some of my Houses have no name beyond the House name --Nhonn (feline-shifters mostly), and H'thraai (another Northern theme).
- - I may also do separately a Caer/Nidus and an Aerie for all of my whorlings, since there are so many; but I may simply add them to The Obelisk and "Petra" ranks. This is mainly because I'm a little uncertain about their breeding rules. So I'm undecided.


As always, I appreciate any outside feedback. It will be really helpful! Thanks! :D

[Starburst]

I do speak/write Latin to some degree thanks to a couple of course I've been doing this year. The way it works is basically every word has a stem and you add case endings to determine its function in the sentence. There are six cases altogether for nouns: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative and vocative. Depending on the meaning you want something to take, you slap different endings onto words and there you go.

(I'm moderately doped-up on cold medicine at the moment so forgive me for rambling.)

For example, "Alveo Caecus" literally means "Blind Hive"; both words are in the nominative case -- if they were in a sentence, this phrase would be the subject of the sentence.

Changing the phrase to read "Alveo Caecorum" would change its meaning to "Hive of the Blind" simply by changing the case ending of 'caecus' into a genitive plural one. Which I personally think sounds better in English, but again, keeping it as-is still works.

I'll run over the other translations when I'm not so high on cold medicine, but there's a basic idea.

The other case endings for nouns translate like this -- I'll use the noun draco to do a basic translation for you. Different declensions have slightly different paradigms for their endings, but this will at least give you an idea of what each case translates to:

Nominative: draco - "the dragon" or "a dragon", used as the subject of a sentence (performing an action)
Genitive: draconis - "of the dragon", indicates possession
Dative: draconi - "to the dragon" or "for the dragon"
Accusative: draconem - "the dragon" or "a dragon", used as the indirect object of a sentence (receiving the action)
Ablative: dracone - "by the dragon", "with the dragon", or "for the dragon", the ablative case has a ton of uses that basically account for anything that the other five cases can't do with a noun in a sentence.
Vocative: draco - "dragon!" or "O dragon!", used as an address/interjection.

For example, the sentence "Draco dat rosam alteri draconi" means "The dragon gives a rose to the other dragon." Same root word is used twice, but based on its ending it has two different meanings. In Latin the number of words is far fewer than it is in English because the little words like "to", "of", "by", etc. are all built into the case endings of nouns and adjectives.