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I just realised something.

Adeptus Astra Telepathica.
Adeptus Astartes
Adeptus Terra
Adeptus Mecahnicus
Adepta Sororitas.

Is it because the Sororitas are girls that they get the -a?

Contrary to popular belief, no! This is actually not an example of Bad Latin.

The Adepta Sororitas get the -a ending because, unlike the other Adepta, the Sororitas comprises of multiple organisational types. -a indicates a plural, not a feminisation, in Latin - and there are several departments of the Adepta Sororitas;

The Sororitas Dialogous
The Sororitas Militant
The Sororitas Hospitaller
The Sororitas Pronatus
The Sororitas Sabine

And the other one I can never remember. Adepta Sororitas - because they are multiple.

In short, yes. Adepta is just the feminine version of adeptus. Imperial Gothic seems to have similar rules to latin.

All the groups there are multiple groups. The Adeptus Astartes are not a monolithic unit, nor are the Mechanicus and Emperor knows the Adeptus Terra is a sprawling organisation. Any resemblance to deeper meanings is, I am almost certain, purely coincidental. Whoever named them did so, I would wager, because they're girls.

But Adepta is not the correct feminine declension for Adept.

If this is the care, then Adeptus Terra should also be Adepta. As technically the Adeptus Terra is what all the other Adeptus fall under.

Sororitas Famulous is the one you're missing and, yes, possibly so.

The Astartes are, at their core, a "monolithic" unit. That is to say, stripped of all the cultural traits and geneseed variances that separate the Chapters, a Space Marine is a Space Marine is a Space Marine.

Same with the Adeptus Terra. What department one works in doesn't really matter... again, stripped of all those job title variances, a member of the Adeptus Terra is one who works for the bureaucracy that runs the Imperium. A paper-pusher of some sort or another.

The Sororitas vary in that, apart from the Orders Militant, their members are not in combat-oriented roles and, beyond the basic training of the Sororitas in general, they perform wildly-different roles in the Imperium in general, or even within the Ecclesiarchy specifically.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
But Adepta is not the correct feminine declension for Adept.

Out of curiosity, what is the correct declension? My cursory research suggests Adepta would be appropriate for a feminine name. But if it is, as you suggest, due to the multiple organisations within the Sororitas, surely the same should apply to the Adeptus Terra?

Psienesis wrote:Same with the Adeptus Terra. What department one works in doesn't really matter... again, stripped of all those job title variances, a member of the Adeptus Terra is one who works for the bureaucracy that runs the Imperium. A paper-pusher of some sort or another.

I believe you're confusing the Adeptus Terra with the Administratum, who are merely one branch of the Adeptus Terra.

The Adeptus Terra is made up of everything from the Imperial Guard, to Assassins and Navigators (and technically Space Marines). They are most definitely not simply reducible to 'paper pushers of some sort or another'.

You are correct, I was. It was a pre-coffee post.

 Kojiro wrote:

 Furyou Miko wrote:
But Adepta is not the correct feminine declension for Adept.

Out of curiosity, what is the correct declension? My cursory research suggests Adepta would be appropriate for a feminine name. But if it is, as you suggest, due to the multiple organisations within the Sororitas, surely the same should apply to the Adeptus Terra?

There isn't one - Adeptus is a masculine noun. The gender of the word has nothing to do with the gender of the people it's being applied to.

However, in comparison to the Adeptus Terra, we can clearly see that the good writers at GW, who should indeed have called it the Adepta Terra, had no idea what they were doing and decided to use maul the language and pretend that the plural of a second declension (masculine) noun can be terminated as if it were a first declension (feminine) single (if it were a plural first declension noun, it would be Adeptae).

In case you haven't ever noticed before, MOST Imperial words are mangled Latin. Trying to apply the real rules of Latin to something some schmuck thought sounded cool that way is doomed to failure.

Not really an epiphany. If indeed so, reassess your direction in life.

I think Furyou you're being generous. I think it's far more likely that Rick Priestly simply didn't have a great grasp or Latin or just thought Adeptus sounded cooler. For whatever reason though he did put Adepta Sororitas in Rogue Trader, so the distinction is deliberate. I doubt it's based on much more than '-a' sounds feminine.

 greatbigtree wrote:
In case you haven't ever noticed before, MOST Imperial words are mangled Latin. Trying to apply the real rules of Latin to something some schmuck thought sounded cool that way is doomed to failure.

Not really an epiphany. If indeed so, reassess your direction in life.

Since my direction in life is the study of language, I think I'll decline :p

Given that Rick Priestley DID attend a "public" school (which is not the same as a public school in the US or Australia), and is of a certain age, one can certainly assume he did learn latin at school.

whether or not he cared enough about "proper use" in a game set 40,000 years in the future when language, that mutable thing that it is, would undoubtedly change anyway over time, is moot.

They use almost latin words to add a certain "gravitas" to their game world, to make it look impressive, not because they are linguistic pedants. Indeed, their own use of the King's English is enough to give language majors a major conniption.

I know news travels slowly down under, but we have a Queen now. :p

Royal marines don't count. :p


Don't ask, don't tell.

lol.

QE2. QED.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
I just realised something.

Adeptus Astra Telepathica.
Adeptus Astartes
Adeptus Terra
Adeptus Mecahnicus
Adepta Sororitas.

Is it because the Sororitas are girls that they get the -a?

Contrary to popular belief, no! This is actually not an example of Bad Latin.

The Adepta Sororitas get the -a ending because, unlike the other Adepta, the Sororitas comprises of multiple organisational types. -a indicates a plural, not a feminisation, in Latin - and there are several departments of the Adepta Sororitas;

The Sororitas Dialogous
The Sororitas Militant
The Sororitas Hospitaller
The Sororitas Pronatus
The Sororitas Sabine

And the other one I can never remember. Adepta Sororitas - because they are multiple.

Well, as someone interested in languages, know this first: It does not mean anything, and no, in no correct latin declination would "-a" be a plural of "-us". (EDIT: unless it was the consonant declination but then it would be "adeptora", which it clearly is not. )

Adeptus is a perfect participle and means "obtained" or "overtaken" or "achieved". As such it could have been adepta, if the noun was feminine singular.
On the rare occasions it was used as a noun, it followed (masculine) u-declination, so the plural would be "-us" (long vowel, i.e. "ooos").

All the pseudo-latin is there to look and sound cool to people with only cursory knowledge of latin.

Real world linguisitics aside, it is obvious that at some point in the the future humanity changed english into a pidgeon latin of sorts and then "Adeptus" meant something completely different.
(Also, in that fiction, "Astartes" is not the wrongly spelled hellenized name of a middle eastern goddess! )

"Astartes" is used to stand in for "star" or "space" as real-world goddess was often depicted as or associated with the evening star (which is, in fact, the planet Venus, but people of the ancient world had no way to know that.). This, ironically, makes Astarte analogous to Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of Passion, in both love and war, which might make Space Marines the "sacred whores" (Inanna's real-world priestesses) of the 41st millennium, but I digress...

Keep in mind that the pseudo-Latin that we get in publications is *not* the words that people in-universe speak to one another when speaking High Gothic. These terms are simply the closest translations available.