Kindly anyone change the name in Latin form please.


Hafiz Muhammad Umer Jahagir

Please translate it into Latin.

  • Welcome to the site! I hope the two answers you've got were useful. Please accept an answer that seems to settle the problem best for you. If you haven't gotten what you wanted, please edit your question to specify what converting a name to Latin actually means to you; there are several ways to interpret the task. – Joonas Ilmavirta Jan 17 '19 at 4:02

It is already in “Latin characters”, but perhaps you are asking for a Latin translation of your name? ʻUmar is a primary personal name in Arabic, without a transparent etymology, so perhaps it is best to transfer it as “Umarus”. Arabic Ḥāfiẓ could be “Protector”. Arabic Muḥammad is “Laudatus”. Persian Jahāngīr means “conquering the world”; I cannot think of a particularly good Latin equivalent, but you could try Greek “Cosmocrator”.

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  • Given how short /a/ often fronts in Arabic, perhaps the personal name might end up as Umer, Umerī/Umeris? (Or, a bit facetiously, Undris?) – Draconis Jan 16 '19 at 17:11

fdb has already given an excellent translation, but I'll take a different angle. Imagine you went back in time to the forum in Ancient Rome (somewhere in the Classical period) and shouted your name at random people until one of them wrote it down. What would the result look like?

There are a few different sounds here without exact equivalents in Latin, but adapting them is fairly straightforward. Here are two options which you can mix and match freely:

Hāfes Mohemmed Umer Zehāngīr

Hāfiz Muhammad Umar Diahāngīr

From Punic names like "Hannibal" and loans like have we know that the Romans turned /ħ/ into /h/ and dropped ayin entirely. In my experience, the vowel quality distinctions in Latin were much less extreme than in modern Arabic, so short /a i u/ would likely be turned into short /a~e i~e u~o/—but this depends heavily on dialect, and if you like the look better, you can swap these for a i u as you like.

Dz is attested for affricates in barbarian names, but Jordanes isn't exactly the best source for standardized Latin. However, later Latin definitely used z for something like a palatal affricate (the sound in Jahāngīr).

That palatal affricate seems to have developed out of earlier di, so depending on the time period, it might have been written with that sequence instead. Similarly, /z/ at the beginning of a word was written with s at some times and z at others (see sōna~zōna), and I'm extrapolating that to the end too.


As fdb quite rightly points out, these names wouldn't have been exactly the same back around the first century AD. Suppose that, instead of travelling back, Mr Jahangir were a first-century Persian merchant coming to Rome to capitalize on the craze for exotic curiosities. In that case, his last name would probably be transcribed Gēhāngīr. I'd have to do more research on the Arabic parts.

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  • Of course, if we really want it “the way a Roman might have written it” then we should not use New Persian jahān-gīr, but Early Middle Persian *gēhān-gīr, and transcribe the first sound as g-. The three Arabic names might have existed in much the same form in Ancient North Arabian, even if they are not as yet attested as such, though I really do not know what our Roman would have made of the final sound in Ḥāfiẓ (a voiced emphatic interdental). – fdb Jan 16 '19 at 16:41
  • @fdb Draconis, I would be more precise in the answer (and also more helpful for other users) by specifying that by "a Roman" you actually mean Classical Latin. This could also allow for others to contribute with e.g. Late Latin. – luchonacho Jan 16 '19 at 16:57
  • @luchonacho Fair; how's this? – Draconis Jan 16 '19 at 17:01
  • @fdb That's entirely fair, though I don't know enough about Arabic history to trace those words back. My gut feeling is that they would consider ẓ and z the same, based on how modern Arabic-English and classical Hebrew-Koine transcriptions tended to go. – Draconis Jan 16 '19 at 17:03

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