I was lying in bed last night, bemoaning the uselessness of my liberal arts education as I frequently do, when I thought it might be cool to translate minecraft into Latin. I'll admit my Latin skills stem from 3 years of High school Latin, so I might not have as good a grasp of the language as some, so perhaps someone can augment my proposed translations. I'd want it to avoid sounding like taxonomy, so brevity is desired. Perhaps leaning toward patristic rather than strictly classical words might be better since it was meant to be understood by as many people as possible. A lot of the items and mobs just have real world (and ancient) equivalents. We'd start running into trouble with stuff like TNT, gunpowder, and pistons, and we're in straight up neologism territory with stuff like zombie pigment and ghasts. Here are some of my ideas:
MOBS
cow: vacca
sheep: ovis
pig: porcus
squid: polypus?
wolf: lupus
enderman: finensis
zombie pigman: porcus bipes immortuus (this one's a stretch))
spider: aranus
cave spider: aranulus
creeper: reptor
skeleton: osses ???
zombie: immortuus
silverfish: pisciculus argenteus ???
spider jockey ????
slime: limus
magma cube: ???
ghast: larva
blaze: incendium/incendiculum
some of the less obvious items:
crafting table: mensa formandi
enchanting table: mensa larvandi
redstone: lapis ruber
ender pearl margaritum finensis
eye of ender oculus finensis
any more ideas? Do you like it?