noctivagant

[prettygoodword]

noctivagant (nok-TIV-uh-guhnt) - adj., wandering or walking about at night. n., someone who wanders at night.


One usage citation I came across is "Unhappily, we lost the big fellow, Smirke, to noctivagant predators some days back," which sounds like a perfect example. Not very common. Adopted from Late Latin, from the past participle of noctivagare, from Latin nocti-, night + vagari, to wander -- though going from -ari to -are makes me head-scratch: was that a common change in medieval Latin?

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Huh. Well, Perseus's Lewis and Short says that there's an adjective "vagus" alongside the deponent verb in classical Latin. When I first learned Latin, the Bulgarian who taught it me said that deponents tend to be older; making new -are and -ere (2nd conj.) forms is easier. I would rather expect an adj vagus/-a/-um to lead to an -are verb were such a verb backformed from it, but my medieval Latin is limited to the island of Britain and things may well have worked differently elsewhere. Also, for fundamental roots for which there are clear (P)IE sib words, it seems to me (in my tiny ignorance) that many things are possible.

(I looked up "vagrant" in OED, which turns out to be only 1916-not-updated and predicated upon L. vacare, which has the same root but at a remove; they trace "vague" to L. vagus, but it's still only the 1916 edition. Hurry up, please, third ed people.)

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

Many things are, indeed, possible. Had not known that about deponents -- interesting.