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I am not at all an expert in Latin, but I am a Spanish speaker so our languages are a little related, at least. I was wondering if I could just add suffixes to words to make new words. Sometimes, in Spanish, they don't make a lot of sense, so I was wondering if this word made some sense, or if it could at least exist because I didn't find it anywhere on the internet.

mariogarcc
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Yes, but it's either archaic or incorrect.

In Latin, all nouns follow a declension pattern. You know how verbs in Spanish act differently depending if they end in -ar versus -er versus -ir? In Latin, nouns work the same way.

The word dominus "lord" follows the "second declension pattern", which means that the nominative plural ("lords") and the genitive singular ("of the lord") are both dominī in Classical Latin.

However, in Old Latin, the genitive singular was dominī, and the nominative plural was dominei. (If you go back even further, it was dominoi.) So in Old Latin, dominei means "lords", or "the lords".

Later, ei started being pronounced just the same as ī. Eventually it started being spelled as ī too. But for a while in the middle, people mostly used ei and ī interchangeably. During this time, the genitive singular might also be spelled dominei just by "mistake", like how people sometimes substitute an s for a c in English. While Cicero wouldn't consider this correct, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it in graffiti.

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Draconis
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  • Thank you for your time, very insightful answer. However, "genitive" appears to mean "that expresses possession or relation, equivalent to the English of", so would that make it mean "of the lords" instead of just "lords" or "the lords"? I am aware that meanings may be different in different contexts. I am interested in this particular word/case because of some wordplay I'm interested in making with it, so I am not too worried about 100% serious/literarily correct meanings, and if it means "of the Lords", it would be the best case scenario for this wordplay I'm trying to make. – mariogarcc Mar 25 '19 at 23:53
  • Not quite, @mariogarcc: the form Draconis is talking about is genitive singular: "of the/a lord". The genitive plural would be dominorum in classical Latin. – Colin Fine Mar 25 '19 at 23:59
  • @ColinFine oh, that's fine then, I meant to write as in both singular and plural, hehe. Thank you both for your time and assistance.

    P.S.: if anyone was curious, the wordplay I was trying to make was related to making a website called dominei.me, which now has four different meanings/implications, thanks to this.

     – mariogarcc Mar 26 '19 at 00:04
  • @mariogarcc As Colin mentions, this is either genitive singular or nominative plural. So it's either "of the lord" or "the lords", not "of the lords". But it sounds like that still works for you! – Draconis Mar 26 '19 at 00:15