About the name/Du nom

"Transponticae" is a plural, both nominative and vocative, form of the ad hoc collective noun transpontica, 'things cross-Black-Sea'. (The sets of prototypical Latin documented words include Transdanuuianus,-a, transmarinus,-a; and Pontica in the sense of ‘pontic [nut]’, see Rolfe, “The formation of Latin substantives from geographical adjectives by ellipsis”, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 31 (1900), pp. 5-26, p. 20). It is formed on the model of esca (pl. or collect. sg., 'food' (OLD, 1968)) – escae; esculentus (‘suitable for food’) – esculenta (“neut. pl., or rarely sg., as s[u]b[stantive]”; ‘eatables; eating-vessels’ (OLD, 1968)) - *esculentae,  uva (collective, '[a bunch of] grapes') – uvae (‘bunches of grapes’), anagignōscomena (‘things that are read’, deuterocanonical [books]) – *anagignōscomenae (mind the option of diverging lists of deuterocanonical books). (Philologically conservative readers of this note are urged to mind Blaise, A handbook of Christian Latin, 1955/1994, §55, and recognise transpontica as, grammatically, neutral plural reframed as feminine singular, or to admit it as a ‘hyper-plural’, cf. Ibriszimow, ‎Leger, ‎Schmitt, Studia Chadica et Hamitosemitica, 1995, p. 343.) The plural stays for the idea that the sea can be crossed along different trajectories and with different trajectories in mind. The vocative embodies the ambition of Transponticae to be an illocutionary act and our hope for perlocution.  In Bulgarian, it is pronounced as [transpontit͡sɛ] (and not as after Classical Latin, [transpontikɛ]). Such a pronunciation happily fits the focus of Transponticae on post-Antiquity. The 'inner form' of pontos suggests the less visible meaning of 'overcoming a difficulty, going through a peril/a marine desert'.