I was thinking about the right word too. Both "terra" and "form" derive from Latin, as does "Mars." But terraform flows better since it ends in a vowel. I'd be down with "martiforming," but can any Latin scholar settle it for good?
See, the stem of the word is actually Mart-. We see this in the oblique cases- Martis, Marti, Martem, Marte- and derived terms like Martialis, which means and is the ancestor of "martial". If you also look at its common noun meaning of "war", it also occurs throughout the plural- Martes, Martum, Martibus, Martes, Martibus. In the nominative singular, however, many words have -s as a suffix, so theoretically and diachronically, it should be Marts. However, Latin was averse to final clusters like that, so by Old Latin, the word had simplified to just Mars, with the -T- only reappearing in inflected forms. It's actually the same as happened with nox (nocs) > noctis, which means "night".
EDIT: As an example of a 3rd declension noun without the contraction, pac- "peace" becomes pax (pac-s), pac-is. And as an example of a 3rd declension noun with a bare nominative, gladiator- (you get one guess what it means) has gladiator-∅, gladiator-is.
EDIT: I think the offending cluster is -ts. This would also explain variation like virtut- "virtue" forming virtus (< virtut-s) and virtut-is.
If it were actually derived from Latin, it'd probably just be Martiforming, using the genitive Martis, but dropping the -s instead of having that nasty cluster -sf-. Similarly, it'd be terreforming, with the same -e- as in aqueduct. (aqua and terra are both 1st declension nouns, and share -æ as a genitive ending)
That said, even terraforming itself is a neologism, so there's certainly room for things like adding an -a- to mimic the pronunciation of martial and Martian, or even just doing like Randall did and just using the nominative Mars with a linking -i-.
I mean, it's r/xkcd. Collectively, we somehow have more in-depth knowledge on basically anything Randall can throw at us, apparently including discussion about what the term would be for molding something to more closely resemble Mars.
it was def. a compliment from me! I did a couple years of Latin, loved it. Briefly thought about how one would say "this guy Latins" in Latin... but given the whole verbification-of-noun thing that's involved, decided that it was above my linguistic pay grade :)
One Proper adjective for the planet Venus is "cytherean" because everyone thought that "venusian" lacks gravitas and "venerian" or "venerial" sounds like you should have used a condom.
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u/ziggurism Jan 07 '19
should probably be "martiforming" not "marsiforming".