Terminology questions

[MithrilCoyote]

(duplicate from the KoW Worldwide facebook page)
Lore question, probably not answerable right now but worth a shot.
Primovantor is a pretty obvious analog for the Roman Empire (much like its successor Basilea seems an analog of Rome’s successor the Byzantine Empire)

Presumably Primovantor grew much like Rome did… A central Empire that absorbed its neighbors through conquest and diplomacy, turning them into Provinces and client states. Resulting in a multicultural Empire.

In history, when the Empire took over a region, and that regions people were integrated into the Empire’s government, and the Empires Italian-sourced culture spread to it, we speak of that region and people being ‘romanized’, as the cultural elements of the wider empire, especially that of the italian city-state of rome itself, begin to alter the regional culture. Likewise, when speaking of the citizens of the Roman Empire, we refer to ‘Romans’, whether these be ethnic Romans from Rome itself or ethnicities from Syria, Thrace, Gaul, Brittania, Africa, Egypt, etc.

What would the comparable terms for the Empire of Primovantor be?

in my opinion it wouldn’t be as simple as ‘primovantorian’. for one, that is uncomfortably long and unwieldy to say, and by human nature you’d end up with a shorter term either by truncation or euphemism/reference. for another, given the existence of the locations "Primantor’ and ‘Vantoria’ on our map as flooded out regions, it seems likely that “primovantor” is a hybrid word… either the combination of references to such locations, or more probably in my mind, one cultural reference with some form of modifier appended to alter the meaning. the most obvious one would be "primo’ = ‘great’, making the empire’s name “greater vantor” of “Vantor the Greater”, perhaps in reference to the location Vantoria, which may have been the heart of their Empire. their equivalent of Rome and the Palatine Hills. which might explain the description of that region on the map as ‘the sunken republic’, if primovantor had an early history similar to Rome’s, where it went from powerful expansionist republic to authoritarian Imperium as it grew.

but "Vantor’, while a bit better, still feels unwieldy… Vantorians. Vantorized. etc.

[Angrypearl]

Maybe the original people were called Vanta leading to the Empire being called Vantor and later remembered as PrimoVantor (as in First Vantor = first Rome, Second Rome (Constantinople), and Third Rome (Moscow)). So maybe some people are calling Basilea Secundovantor – there may be a secret cabal of powerful individuals trying to restore the basilean control over successor kingdoms to make that a reality.

[MithrilCoyote]

reposting from the facebook thread.
it was pointed out that the book uses “primovantians”

my response:

i still argue that makes little linguistic sense. it sounds a lot like saying “i’m a united statesian”

i get that the writers probably didn’t think about any of this (though you never know), but given that Primovantor seems roman (given the byzantine coding that it’s fragment basilea is), ‘primo’ feels very latin, which in latin would be ‘first’. with additional (more informal) meanings like ‘great’, ‘superior’. that it is an adjective seems to follow through given that the city is “Primantor”, which repeats that ‘primo’ element as “priman” (actually a spanish variant of ‘Primo’, in this case derived from the latin.) -tor in latin is a modifier to create a masculine noun from a verb or adjective. so the holy city of Primantor basically translates (very roughly) as “the first”

and the presence of “vantoria”, nearby as a regional name gives us something else to work with as well… -ia is a latin suffix used to form an abstract noun from another term. such as “militia” from ‘miles’, Soldier. it is taking a specific and generalizing it.
usually you don’t use multiple suffixes, so it could be “vantor” as a proper noun, and “vantoria” being a generalized name with the colloquial meaning of “where the vantor live”
but latin ca get weird and add additional suffix forms sometimes appearing to be compund suffixes, so if we take “vantor” itself as a compound word, well we know “-tor” already as a modifier to create a proper noun, leaving ‘van’… which is not in latin itself, but it’s english, derived from the latin “vannus” “winnowing basket”
so “vantor” could be a compound word meaning loosely “those who winnow grain”. making Vantoria “the home of those who winnow grain” and primovantor “the greater home of those who winnow grain”

while this probably doesn’t work too well grammatically in latin, it holds up a lot more than i was actually expecting…

pure speculation, and probably putting way more thought into it than the writers did, but oh the worldbuilding potential there…