Hilaire Belloc was a nasty piece of work, but I have to agree with this reactionary lament (via Laudator Temporis Acti):
The first thing that so arises in my mind, my ignorant mind, is the soft, suffused air of delight evoked by the word ‘Livy.’ It is one of the very few left of those idiomatic English names, transformed from the Latin, which we can still boast.
Our fathers used to call Cicero ‘Tully,’ and we still talk of Ovid and of Virgil and of Horace. But for the most part the Latin names have broken back upon our tradition and have re-established themselves. It is an evil and the symptom of an evil; for an idiomatic form given to classical names betrays a familiar and intimate knowledge with the work for which they stand: makes them part of the furniture of an English house.
We can appreciate Roman culture without pretending that we’re Romans!
Remnants survive here and there.
In French, Donatus is known as Donat.
Priscianus is known as Priscian in English.
I still recall my surprise, verging on shock, when I learned that the French call Dionysius of Halicarnassus ‘Denys d’Halicarnasse’. It had never occurred to me that the name Dennis might have come from Dionysius.
Mark Antony still gets called by his true English name. And that nasty piece of work Pompey (L Septimius had the right idea,) And Tarquin the Proud. And Trajan, but the -an names probably are cheating (Vespasian, Diocletian …) Constantine …
Pontius Pilate…
It probably goes without saying that using people’s names in the original language is part of a trend. The kings of Spain include Philip I, Philip II, Philip III, Philip IV, Philip V, and Felipe VI. And in addition to dozens of Roman Catholic Saints John, there’s now a Saint Juan Diego.
Two famous Italian mathematical physicists were Tullios: Levi-Civita and Regge.
Pontius Pilate…
Who really should be Ponty Pilate. But consistency was never a strong point of the English…
Pliny, who still seems to be recognised as important to early science.
Of the Reyes Católicos, Fernando needed Englishing but Isabella was just about English enough.
Even when we keep reasonably close to the Latin spelling, our pronunciation still makes these names extremely English. There is nothing remotely Roman about the sound of Cicero or Julius Caesar in English.
Belloc’s own refusal to be domesticated to “Hilary” raises some questions here …
@hans
These names with y sound slightly like “Kose(or Spott)namen”, so more appropriate for Cicero than for Pilate. Someone calls Plantagenet Palliser “Planty Pal” in one of Trollope’s novels, I think.
Someone calls Plantagenet Palliser “Planty Pal” in one of Trollope’s novels, I think.
The surname was discussed in 2020 by the much-missed AJP.
Tully is more fun to say than Cicero, but of course the “evil and a symptom of an evil” bit is the kind of fatuity that Belloc and his homeboy GKC made their names from. At least I don’t think contemporary Francophone culture is marked by a familiar and intimate knowledge of the works of Denys d’Halicarnasse.
@mollymooly: Her name was Isabel. I had a Spanish-professor friend who cringed every time he heard her called “Isabella” in English. Her coins say HELISABETH.
I’m surprised English speakers didn’t call her Elizabeth, the way Spanish speakers call the English Elizabeths “Isabel”.
Yes, there are a number of oddities like that.
Sheer ignorance, like “the collective West”‘s complete failure to notice that Ivan is just John.
Anyway, I didn’t think of any Tullius when I saw the title, but of the Tully monster, whatever that is.
Belloc’s own refusal to be domesticated to “Hilary” raises some questions here …
it does make it easier for him to be posthumously insulted by the (now-dated) slang contraction “hilar”, pronounced with the vowel he preferred – which i think may be sufficient justification.
–
with helisabeth la católica (and isabel la virgen) in mind, is continuing to call the habsburg monarch charles V simply a way to avoid the question of whether he’s a carlos or a karl?
Michael Hendry: For a long time the French managed to convince themselves that Dionysius the Areopagite (person mentioned briefly in Acts of the Apostles, whose name was attached to an angelology treatise whose author is now known as Pseudo-Dionysius) and St. Denis (martyred bishop of Paris and alleged cephalophore from two centuries later) were the same person. So I guess they thought they had to be consistent.
J.W. Brewer: If I recall correctly, Chesterton preferred to call Belloc “Hilary.” In context it was probably meant as an endearment.
continuing to call the habsburg monarch charles V
Is it really a question of continuing? It seems like historical monarchs are still called by their English names (though it was never really consistent), but over some transition period English speakers stopped translating names for the new monarchs (though popes are still translated).
i suppose i think of it as “continuing” because i often think of the practice in reference to (often more recent) people who used to be anglicized but generally aren’t anymore, like peter kropotkin.
James Kabala:
Thanks. I’ve always thought “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite” should be called “Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite” since a very likely contributing cause of the confusion was that both were named Dionysius, a very common name.
Maybe it’s a well-known tale of which I’m just lamentably ignorant, but it’s not clear to me what motivated the historical shift to conventionally referring to Marcus Tullius Cicero in English by (a version of) his cognomen rather than (a version of his) nomen gentilicum. It makes perfect sense that Tullius would have yielded “Tully”* for Anglophones because that’s the same pattern as Livy for Livius and Pliny for Plinius and indeed Hilary for Hilarius; it likewise makes sense that “Cicero” would not have been subject to the same sort of modification just as e.g. “Scipio” was not. But that doesn’t explain the switch in which part of MTC’s three-component name was standardly used as the short form. It’s not like there was another Tullius of sufficiently equal subsequent fame to cause ambiguity. Are there other European languages in which a version of the T-name rather than of the C-name is or previously was the standard short way to refer to the man?
*Although wikipedia advises that 19th-century America was adorned by the unreduced Tullius Cicero Tupper (1809-1866), “a Mississippi lawyer, newspaper publisher, and major general of the Mississippi State Troops in the American Civil War.”
That’s an excellent question, and one that I hadn’t thought of.
I hadn’t realized before this post that the person referred to as Tully was the same person I’ve always known as Cicero.
I expect the producers of The X-Files didn’t like the sound of Cicero and Mulder as names of the protagonists.
Trond’s post raises the question of which dorky philosopher was the first one to come with the example of “Cicero” and “Tully” as co-referential proper names that not everyone actually knows are co-referential, as in the examples given at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_context It’s presumably more recent than stock examples on the same situation based on certain folks not knowing that “the Morning Star” and “the Evening Star” are both the same astronomical object.
A Dutch friend was surprised to learn that we Anglophones call the conspirator Catilina Catiline.
Sallust …
Terence …
“Polycarp” is another, if not quite such a household name. (I did once actually know someone called Polycarp.)
Saints in general quite often seem to get their names as historical figures backported from the forms used in contemporary names. Anglophones don’t talk about St Marcus or St Maria or St Paulus. Clement, Benedict … John Chrysostom …
“Hilaire Belloc was a nasty piece of work” – why? I just looked him up (I had heard of him but knew nothing of his life) and he doesn’t seem nasty.
Marcus? Paulus? The NT figures’ names would be more authentically romanized as Markos and Paulos, but switching in -us for -os in Greek names mediated via Latin is so common it often goes unnoticed. There’s of course the additional complication that “Marcus” in Latin was already a common paraenomen borne by various unsaintly pagan Romans before the Evangelist Μᾶρκος came along and wrote his Gospel in Greek. There were also various unsaintly pagans with the cognomen Paullus or Paulus long before Saul’s transformation into Paulos on the road to Damascus (e.g. Lucius Aemilius Paullus, killed at the Battle of Cannae). It was I suppose also common/unremakable for Latin-origin names to have a final -us shifted into -ος if they were Hellenized.
Speaking of the continuing use of “Bible names” in the modern Anglophone world, I just yesterday found myself quite literally on the road to Damascus, i.e. Damascus, Pennsylvania. However, I didn’t quite get there, contenting myself instead with parking my car on the New York side of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochecton%E2%80%93Damascus_Bridge, walking out onto the bridge to get a photo of the river from that angle, and then walking back to the N.Y. side.
@DE: But “Cicero” is used often. Nobody knows who Afer or Crispus or Tranquillus are.
Polycarp makes me think of a fishpond.
“Hilaire Belloc was a nasty piece of work” – why?
He was a vile and unapologetic antisemite. Here’s a sample (written in 1937):
Bernard McCabe says in a 1985 NYRB review:
And he dragged his pliant friend Chesterton into the gutter with him. There’s a lot about that in a recent review of a Chesterton bio I read, but I can’t lay my hands on it at the moment.
Ah, here it is, Peter Howarth in the 15 December 2022 LRB (archived; Cecil was G.K.’s younger brother):
Follow the link and read on for many depressing details.
Re “rich Jews and Liberal politicians,” Belloc was himself a capital-L Liberal when he sat as MP for Salford South from 1906 to 1910, although perhaps that’s the sort of in-depth personal exposure to a given political party that can lead to subsequent alienation or estrangement and/or perhaps various prominent capital-L Liberals came to believe that Belloc’s parliamentary career was not particularly helpful for their party’s image to be associated with.
And speaking of the road to Damascus, as admittedly only I was, I now have a completely off-topic toponym-etymology query. The town in New York right across the river from Damascus Twp., Pa. is Cochecton, which sounds rather similar to Coshocton, Ohio. Wikipedia says the name of the first is from “Lenape” and that of the second (in the story about the county, not the city of the same name that’s its county seat) from “Delaware,” which are just different labels for the same Algonquian language (or dialect continuum), so a common etymology is feeling plausible, but then glosses the underlying etymon of the first as “place of red stone hills” but that of the second as either “union of waters” or “black bear crossing,” with none of these three being particularly semantically close to any of the others. Admittedly the two different wikipedia articles probably reflect the input of different contributors who didn’t compare notes with each other, but still. Does anyone have any more scholarly insight to contribute?
The Howarth piece hat linked to mentions among relevant Chesterton biographers/enthusiasts the late William Oddie (1939-2019). I attended a talk by Oddie circa 1989, which I think was fairly shortly before his personal transition from C. of E. priest to Roman Catholic layman. One striking moment in that talk was when he tried to preemptively rebut any claim that his sincere theological opposition to the ordination of women was rooted in sexism by stating that he believed that women, and only women, should serve as dentists.
An amusing paragraph from an obit of Oddie:
“In his later years Oddie, with increasing rotundity and love of combative paradox, came more closely to resemble the subject of his last – and arguably his best – book ‘Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy’. If in the eyes of many it failed entirely to vindicate its subject in the matter of anti-semitism, it stands beside Ian Ker’s biography as one of the most significant achievements of Chesterton scholarship.”
chesterton, i’ve always thought, is at his best when he’s of the devil’s party without knowing it: in much of The Man Who Was Thursday and the parts of the father brown canon that lean towards firbank or waugh, for example. the rest of the time, i find him as smug and unreadable as c.s. lewis.
women, and only women, should serve as dentists
There is fairly substantial evidence that women (on average) make better doctors (better in the sense that their patients are more likely to get better and less likely to, like, die.)
Chesterton can be anything from sublime to unreadable. I think it was here on LH that I first encountered the not-implausible theory that this was because he wrote much of his work while drunk.
Nobody knows who Afer or Crispus or Tranquillus are.
I should have added Maro and Naso and Cilo, as well.
Too bad about Belloc. All I knew about him before this posting were his Cautionary Tales, which I like.
I have actually read both The Path to Rome and The Cruise of the Nona, both of which I enjoyed. There is, alas, no doubt about the antisemitism; I think that in some respects, though, he had the vices of his virtues. Not exactly corruptio optimi pessima, but something a bit like it.
Chesterton’s also-evident antisemitism is more upsetting, as Chesterton clearly was a good man, as men go. I don’t think anyone would feel quite the same about Belloc.
The antisemitism seems to be a fairly specific pre-Second-Vatican-Council Roman Catholic brand, evident in our day (si parva licet componere magnis) in Mel Gibson.
@David E.: the problem with Oddie’s dentist argument was that he was taking a (not-implausible-sounding) claim about women being more likely to possess a certain inclination or personality trait that is important in dentists but treating a perhaps-evidence-based general-statistical-tendency-on-average claim as it it were an exceptionless and essentialist claim. This made it a bad analogy because pretty much no one (in least in that particular historical context) arguing for the desirability of an all-male presbyterate would want to say that presbyters should be selected only from those with an unusually high degree of such-and-such trait where it just so happened that the sex-blind application of that criterion would give you a candidate pool that was 90% or 95% (but not 100%) male.
Quite so.
It probably goes without saying that using people’s names in the original language is part of a trend. The kings of Spain include Philip I, Philip II, Philip III, Philip IV, Philip V, and Felipe VI.
IIRC there was some discussion of whether Charles III (of the UK) should have his name translated upon becoming king, in languages (such as Russian) where the name used for Charles II (and Charles I) of England was different from the name used for Prince Charles.
(AFAICT the answer seems to have mostly been positive in the cases where the question occurred in the first place; apparently a lot of languages already translated his name even before he became king, and a few languages don’t seem to translate [any more?] the name of Charles II either, but in Czech, for example, Prince Charles suddenly became King Karel.)
I remember thinking it rather quaint seeing the various French kings referred to as Lewis rather than Louis the first time I read Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.
discussion of whether Charles III (of the UK) should have his name translated
i vote for charlemini!
if we can get that going, i might even stop calling him charli3.
Swedish kings seem to have switched from Gustav [1 to 4] to Gustaf [5 to 6]. Only the second gets Latinised in English. Their present Charles is Carl but the previous ones were Karls.
By the way, there’s another more recent L.T.A. post with a different Belloc block quote in which he refers to Tacitus* as “Tacit” and also references Livy [Titus Livius is his full Latin name**] as “‘Tite-Live,’ as they call him over the water.” The man was apparently more devoted to this little comic bit re the domestication of Latin names than its actual comic potential may have justified.
https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2024/08/jolly-jingoism.html
*Tacitus’ full name was Publius Cornelius Tacitus. “Cornelius” is extant as a not-very-common name in English and to my knowledge has never been rendered as “Cornely.” I think maybe the stress pattern may have blocked that option?
**The poor fellow wasn’t posh enough to afford a cognomen, apparently.
I remember thinking it rather quaint seeing the various French kings referred to as Lewis rather than Louis the first time I read Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.
Only the first time ? But then Il n’y a que la première lecture qui coûte, so I still have a chance to work off a feeling of inadequacy.
The Anglo-Saxon name Cornely comes from Cornelius, a given name that came to England in the 15th or 16th century from Holland or Belgium.
I will admit to never having encountered anyone (that I can presently recall) surnamed “Cornely,” but now I am better informed. I guess one would need to know the stress pattern of “Cornelius” in the relevant time and place to ascertain whether my ad hoc theory about stress pattern blocking the -ius -> -y shift is in fact falsified. Do we know whether “Cornely” is stressed on the first syllable versus the middle syllable?
In the 1990 U.S. census, “Cornely” was the 47869th-most-common surname. borne by 0.000% of the population, which obviously doesn’t mean literally zero, but <0.0005%. "Cornelius" by contrast was 1762nd-most-common and borne by 0.007% of the population.
The most common two surnames beginning "Corn-" are "Cornett" (#1449) and "Cornell" (#1577). As to the latter, wikipedia says "Cornell is an English name derived from a shortened form of Cornwall, Cornwell or Cornhill,[1] and a Dutch Surname, which derives from the Latin Cornelius. Sometimes the name is an Americanized form of the Czech Kornel, or the German and Swedish Kornell." No one has inserted [citation needed] after the Dutch claim, but there is in fact no citation for it.
Now, Americans are vocally and loudly and simply and in child-like fashion Jew-haters.
Was Belloc also trying to make Americans look provincial and inferior here? I don’t think there was ever a period in history where American anti-semitism, ugly as it may be, could really compare with European anti-semitism in its sincerity and depth of feeling.
@Peter Akuleyev: the blockquote from Bernard McCabe that hat posted upthread claims that Belloc was not always very reliable in his statements on what would seem to be matters of empirical/historical fact. The statement you quote may be an example of that.
Looking at another obit of Chesterton-biographer Wm Oddie, whom I mentioned above, I find a selection of quotations from him that includes this one (from eight years before he died), demonstrating a commendable degree of self-awareness perhaps often lacking in [other?] reactionary polemicists including but by no means limited to Belloc:
“’Elf and safety, political correctness, and a whole load of other issues, illegal immigrants on our benefits, the general moral collapse of our society and so on, are (some of them) serious enough: but maybe we need to think a bit more about what’s involved rather than simply relapsing into ‘disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ mode. I only suggest this because with advancing years I detect this tendency more and more in myself. The danger is that it induces a willingness to believe anything at all which feeds our prejudices.”
@Peter Akuleyev: I imagine that this is just another flavor — uh, flavour, of the anti-American snobbery of Belloc’s social class: oh, those foolish American upstarts didn’t really get going until nearly seven centuries after Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln.
(Cue “Tradition!” from Fiddler on the Roof.)
“Isabella” for “Isabel” is of course an Italianism, and it hits me now that my late friend probably was specially annoyed by it because it exemplified, to him, the British tendency to treat Spanish as a low-prestige dialect of Italian.
I’m hoping that from now on I’ll be able to distinguish between the William Oddie who was an atheist turned C. of E. priest turned RC lay polemicist, and the Bill Oddie who is a comedian turned presenter of nature shows.
I’m sure that Belloc’s antisemitism won’t stop me from enjoying some of his gems of light verse.
And speaking of poetry, “Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need.”
“Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need.”
I guessed that was Browning before looking it up.
And of course Praxed is a good Tully-equivalent.
@Jerry F.: Alas, had it not been for the reportedly baleful influence of his brother + Belloc, perhaps Chesterton himself could have become a comedian-turned-presenter-of-nature-shows.
Browning seems to think that St Praxed was a bloke.
Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats…
Indeed.
#
Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him.
# [Bill Bryson]
I remember with delight an incident within my family, when my parents and two siblings were doing Germany in 1973. I was driving them around, our final destination being a vacation house just over the border in Austria, where I got my last round of laffs.
My mother, despite marriage to a radiologist farm-boy, preferred euphemism. My sister, about 12, was also averse to plain-speaking. She had acquired some “digestive condition” (constipation or diarrhea) and conversed with my mother about what to take against it – prune juice or banana juice. Apparently the exchange of information was so delicately conducted that the wrong kind of juice was decided on. The condition had not been clearly identified.
Chesterton himself could have become a comedian-turned-presenter-of-nature-shows
i can picture this way too easily; the next time i read The Man Who Was Thursday, i’ll try to keep my mind’s voice tuned to david attenborough (unless someone thinks he could be persuaded to record it himself?)
Danish generally uses the full Latin form, but there are remnants of older practices: Ibsker (town in Bornholm) for St. James’ Church and so on. Also Ans’gar for Saint Ansgarius, but TIL that that form may have been the OHG cognate of ON Ásgeirr and loaned as such (back in the 9th). The form in Modern Danish is Asger, but whether that is from the saint or from the sagas is hard to tell. (I recently learned that ON Helgi became the boy’s name Helle in mediaeval Denmark, but it was lost long before the identical girl’s name from Helena became fashionable. Also names directly from ON, loosely adapted, became fashionable in early 19th Romanticism here and never really died out: My mother is Inger, her mother was Gudrun).
Also I’ve never heard King Charles the current spoken about as Karl, but wp.en uses the form Charles for the Swedish kings of that name, as well as the Danish Prince Carl who later became Haakon VII of Norway.
IIRC, some older thread has my findings on how King Charles may ultimately derive from one of those Swedish kings by way of princesses. Des would surely have the details if he deigned to attend us.
Browning seems to think that St Praxed was a bloke.
Surely Browning knew that the name of the church was Santa Prassede. It seems more likely that the half-delirious bishop mixes up St. P. with Jesus. See the note on “Thyrsus” at this site.
Re Chesterton/Belloc, possibly relevant:
Chesterton interviewed by the Jewish Chronicle, Sept 22, 1933, p. 14:
Today, although I still think that there is a Jewish problem, and that what I understand by the expression ‘the Jewish Spirit’ is a spirit foreign in Western countries, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities in Germany. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them, and are quite obviously the expedient of a man who, not knowing quite what to do to carry out his wild promises to a sorely-tried people, has been driven to finding a scapegoat, and has found, with relief, the most famous scapegoat in European history – the Jewish people.
I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and myself will die defending the last Jew in Europe. Thus does history play its ironical jokes upon us.
J. W. Brewer:
One of the very few things I learned from one of my teachers in grad school is that the French use hyphenated double names for three Latin authors: Tite-Live, Quinte-Curse, and Aulu-Gelle. English-speaking scholars generally call them Livy, Curtius or Curtius Rufus, and Gellius or Aulus Gellius, so sometimes double but never hyphenated.
Livy’s lack of a cognomen (third name) had nothing to do with class: he was from a small town, where cognomina were unnecessary. (With ~73,000 people, Pavia, Livy’s Patavium, is still relatively small for a town that many non-Italians have heard of.) Cognomina were used to distinguish branches of the family/clan specified by the ‘nomen’ (second name), so only necessary if there were too many Livii in town to keep them straight (Romans only had a dozen or so first names, praenomina). Being a Cornelius Scipio as opposed to a Cornelius Tacitus must have been something like being a MacDonald of Glencoe vs. a MacDonald of Glengarry or Sleat or Keppoch – only very distantly related.
Tangential story on Roman small-town names: the comic poet known in English as Plautus calls himself Titus Maccus or Maccius Plautus, and an eminent Plautus scholar pointed out a few years ago that it must be a comic pseudonym, for a combination of reasons:
1. He would only have had two names, coming from the tiny town of Sarsina, still called Sarsina, and only known outside Italy because the world’s Plautus scholars gather there every few years for a convention.
2. Scansion proves that he calls himself both Maccus and Maccius in different plays, and a real name would not have varied like that. (Is Shaxspere a counterexample? Probably not: there I think the pronunciation was fixed, but can be expressed in a dozen or more spellings in English.)
3. Macc(i)us and Plautus are both cognomina, so he has two too many of those, and no nomen at all, which is impossible.
4. Finally – the icing on the cake – all three names have comic meanings. Like Dick and Peter and John Thomas in English, ‘Titus’ also meant penis. ‘Maccus’ was a named clown character in the ancient version of Commedia dell’Arte, who gobbled up everything in sight. And ‘Plautus’ meant flatfoot, which implies comic actor, since tragic actors wore elevator shoes (‘buskins’). So his stage name means something like ‘Dick Bozo Flatfoot’ and, the author sadly concludes, we will never know the actual name of one of the greatest comic poets in history.
I can look up the article reference if anyone wants to know more.
Yes — I do!
Found it in an on-line Plautus bibliography, and “a few years ago” turns out to be 51 years:
“Gratwick, A. S. 1973. Titus Maccius Plautus. Classical Quarterly 23:78–84.
“Discussion of the three elements in Plautus’s name, with the conclusion that the name is a pseudonym with the sense ‘Phallus son of Clown the Mime-actor.'”
That’s the best thing I’ve learned in ages (and 1973 seems like “a few years ago” to me too).
That’s a good article. Thanks! Gratwick notes, too, “it was pretentious to adopt a form of name proper at that time only for the more socially prominent Roman families.”
@Michael Hendry: Oh, so that’s why Australians call McDonald’s “Macca’s”.
Actually, the Romans had dozens of praenomens, but it’s true that only a small number were common: the numerical ones, as well as Marcus, Gaius, Lucius, Gnaeus, Tiberius, Titus, and arguably some others. Many of the remainder were limited to one or just a few specific families. Claudii were often named Appius (originally a Sabine, not Latin name), Valerii often Publius, Manlii often Aulus, etc. One of the early family-specific names could spread to client families of a patrician gens that used it and gain wider usage that way. It also wasn’t unheard of for plebian clients to take a form of a patron’s nomen or cognomen as a praenomen. However, the detailed statistics of how personal names were used among ordinary Italians and how that changed with time is rather poorly understood.
Gratwick also argues that a plebeian like Plautus would have such a cognomen pronounced and written as Plotus. The WP discussion of Publius Clodius Pulcher’s nomen (following Rigsby) makes that distinction less clear, though: the -o- spelling does not indicate a plebeian background. However I don’t know if -au- necessarily indicates a noble one. Rigsby argues that -o- is a feature of Umbria (where Plautus was from).
There is currently a candidate for POTUS named Cornel West. Other than him I haven’t seen that name in English. However, in my generation, unabridged Cornelia was a reasonably common name for girls; and there’s a northern German last name Cornelsen, stressed in the middle (with /eː/).
Pseudo-Dionysius the Pseudareopagite. Obvs.
…I had kinda noticed…
Isabella has escaped, though. I knew one when I was little.
Of course he was appalled. The heathen Nazis were antisemitic for the wrong reason and the wrong logic. For example, they didn’t give a fuck about who might have killed Jesus, and they believed it was entirely impossible to stop being Jewish.
See also: Austrofascism (1934–1938, isolated nostalgics still today). The whole point of it was to tell Hitler “no, you’re doing fascism wrong and you’re doing German nationalism wrong, here’s how to do it right”. It has a martyr who was assassinated by a Nazi.
FTW.
If I recall correctly something I read many years ago, some Dutch or Belgian Nazis under German occupation were brave and stupid enough to demonstrate carrying signs saying “Keep Your Dirty Hands Off Our Dirty Jews”.
Herr Doktor Professor (or is it Herr Professor Doktor?) Cornel West was born in Oklahoma in 1953. According to the Social Security Administration’s panopticon-like baby name database he was one of 33 1953-born boys in the U.S. to receive that name, compared to 209 born that year who were named “Cornell.” I suspect the one-L name is simply a spelling variant of the two-L name. The one-L version has never been among the thousand-most-popular boys’ names for any year of birth, but the two-L version was in the top 1000 more often than not during the 20th century, last appearing in 1990. It scraped into the top 500 for a few years in the late Forties and early Fifties, and it makes sense to think that the one-L version bestowed on the presidential candidate moved up and down in rough synch with it.
I strongly suspect that “Cornel[l]” as a first name in the U.S. derives from the surname Cornell, which as I noted upthread has nothing to do with “Cornelius”* at least in its immigrant-from-England version. The internet advises that the prominent rapper Nelly (born 1974) is more formally Cornell Haynes Jr. I can’t immediately recall personally knowing anyone bearing either the one-L or two-L version. Note FWIW that in West’s year of birth “Cornel” was right behind “Elvis,” which was given to 34 boys, this is in the last full year when literally no one in the world who hadn’t gone to school with him or lived in his neighborhood or the like had ever heard of Elvis Presley. Only 35 boys got named Titus, which was not only a perfectly good Roman praenomen but a genuine “Bible name” and indeed the New Testament St. Titus got an epistle addressed to him by St. Paul.
*1953 saw the births of 291 American boys named Cornelius. It was the 412th-most-popular boys’ name that year, having dropped out of the top 200 after 1907.
Wikipedia reminds me that there was once a prominent-in-his-day Hollywood actor named Cornel Wilde, who at the time of his birth (in the part of pre-Trianon Hungary that’s now Slovakia) had been named Kornél Lajos Weisz. So, yeah, that one’s probably a clipped Cornelius.
I was separately checking up on the fine R&B guitarist Cornell Dupree, since I wasn’t sure if he was a one-L or a two-L, and thereby learned that his name is strikingly similar to that of the South-Africa-born rugby player Cornell du Prees, with whom I had not previously been familiar.
Another famous Cornell was Cornell MacNeil, 1922-2011, long-time singer at the Metropolitan Opera. His daughter was a classmate in college.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Pseudareopagite
pseudy, to the bellocians? or just pseu (pace silverstein)?
So Titus means Dick. Well, when I read in English books that things are going “tits up” or that someone behaves like “a real tit”, I imagine a different part of a differently gendered person, but, you know, it works this way too.
For example, they didn’t give a fuck about who might have killed Jesus
Well, among the Deutsche Christen who wanted to bring the Protestant church in line with the Nazis and to “de-Jew” the Bible were people who believed that Jesus was Aryan and killed by the Jews for that reason. But they were only one, minority current of the Nazis; most of them were either anti-Church or didn’t see a problem in being both traditional Christians and Nazis at the same time.
One of Chesterton’s other grievances against the Nazis, FWIW, was their assassination of that noted exponent of the practical application of Catholic social teaching Engelbert Dollfuss. “This little* man happened to be fighting to keep one little corner of Germany still a part of Christendom,” said Chesterton in the Times in the wake of the killing, perhaps failing to appreciate that Dollfuss and his successor Chancelor Schuschnigg were anti-Anschluss Austrian nationalists, whose desire for an independent Austria would not have faded away if the then-current regime in Berlin had been less odious.
*Dollfuss was less than five feet tall, and the Hapsburg army had refused to let him enlist during WW1 because they deemed him too short for military service.
@Michael Hendry: Patavium is today’s Padua (210 000 people), while Pavia was Ticinum (indeed, one of the very few Roman towns in Italy which changed name in the Middle Ages).
Re: Frenchification of Classical names, I’ve always been mildly puzzled by Aulu-Gelle (either -us as in Marius or loss of the ending as in Claude would be unremarkable, but -u somehow feels wrong) as well as by Galien (from Galenus) with its intrusive-looking -i-, especially considering that Gallienus is a whole different name.
That was brought up here in 2013:
More discussion in comments.
It is; Dr. is always closest to the name.
There’s a rather important Cornelius in a gospel, too.
That’s news to me. Schuschnigg refused to order military resistance “lest German blood be spilled”. The First Republic and the dictatorship did create a base for mental independence from Germany that the Second Republic was able to build on in the 1950s, but to the extent they did it they had to – Anschluss and the name Deutsch-Österreich had been forbidden by the treaty of St-Germain-en-Laye, and Weimar Germany was doing Germany wrong anyway.
What Dollfuß had fought Austria’s civil mini-war against was Social Democracy.
Known in fact as der kleine Diktator, probably even before Chaplin was the great one.
Roberto Batisti:
Thanks for the correction. I think I may have merged Padua and Pavia into one city in my mind.
They should be merged officially to avoid all this unnecessary confusion, just as those Southeast European capitals starting with B,
Reminds me of the hoary story (probably apocryohal??) about an American travel guide statingng that because Switzerland is multilingual, cities have different names in the main languages, quoting as an example “Luzern in German, Lausanne in French, Locarno in Italian”.
Bring back Tully! –and all this time I thought Tully was a Welsh surname, nothing more…
“Luzern in German, Lausanne in French, Locarno in Italian”
No, no, it’s Livorno in Italian!
I just learned that the grandfather of Mark Felt (“Deep Throat”) was named Marcus Brutus Felt. That couldn’t have been very common. Even in France.
There was an I Love Lucy where, traveling in Europe, the Ricardos and Mertzes arrived in Lucerne while (due to a mistake on Fred’s part) their luggage went to Locarno.
And speaking of Livorno, I may have asked this before, but where on earth did English get “Leghorn” for that?
As far as I can tell, Leghorn < Genoese Ligorno < Late Latin Ligurnum, and beyond that I haven’t figured it out. Maybe a folk etymology based on Liguria?
Really, I think all foreign placenames should have cute eggcorn English versions.
For similar reasons I’ll never share the classicists’ distaste for those fun pseudo-hellenizations like coelum, foetus, stylus and sylva. I don’t care if they’re etymologically bunk, they’re more interesting!
Really, I think all foreign placenames should have cute eggcorn English versions.
Me too, and I cherish them when I find them.
Luzern in German, Lausanne in French, Locarno in Italian
Isle of Man in English, Ynys Môn in Welsh.
One German one remains active: Mailand – Milan being, of course, in the land where they have spring ( = May) instead of winter.
Like Dick and Peter and John Thomas in English, ‘Titus’ also meant penis.
Evidence discussed here (quoting from Robert E.A. Palmer, “On Mutinus Titinus: A Study in Etruscan-Roman Religion and Topography”: “ingentes Titos dicit Romanos senatores aut a Tito Tatio rege Sabinorum aut certe a membri virilis magnitudine dicti titi”).
Dollfuss and his successor Chancelor Schuschnigg were anti-Anschluss Austrian nationalists, whose desire for an independent Austria would not have faded away if the then-current regime in Berlin had been less odious
What David said. But also Dollfuss saw his task as creating an “alternative Germany” not a new Austria. His ideal Germany was Catholic, anti-semitic and anti-socialist but not on any mission to absorb other Germans outside Austria’s borders or try to become a world power. I assume that had the opportunity presented itself to peacefully incorporate Bavaria or Southern Bohemia and Moravia into Dolffuss’ ideal “Austro-Germany” he would have gladly done it.
Arguably there was no true “Austrian” nationalism prior to 1938, when the Reichdeutsche carpetbaggers inadvertently made the Viennese realize they were destined to be second class citizens in “Grossdeutschland” so maybe they weren’t so “German” after all. There was a lot of nostalgia for the Habsburgs, but that was not nationalism, even if it sometimes looked that way.
@Vanya: But a hypothetical Austro-Bavarian confederation was not an option on the table. The primary point is that the leaders and ideologues of the Ständestaat regime came out of the more illiberal factions of the Christian Social Party, and favored a political regime that presupposed an explicitly (you might say “integrally”) Catholic society. This was, as they recognized, fundamentally incompatible with a Grossdeutschland that as a matter of raw demographic fact was chock-full of Protestants, and thus given the choice between a sectarian (“confessional” might be politer) politics and volkische Pan-Germanist politics, they favored the former over the latter. Maybe “Austrian nationalism” is an imprecise or anachronistic label for “affirmatively opposing Pan-Germanism” in that particular historical context, so I am open to other labels for contextual anti-Anschlussismus.
Now, the fact that any potential Anschluss appeared to be a practical non-starter during the 1920’s due to treaty-restriction issues was probably very convenient for the Christian Socials, because it made it easier for them to hold together an anti-socialist coalition during the First Republic with the more pro-Anschluss right-of-center parties like the Großdeutsche Volkspartei, because the disagreement seemed abstract and theoretical. It also perhaps made it easier for the Christian Socials to get support from voters who might be more pro-Anschluss in the abstract but agreed with them on more immediately salient policy issues. But when you got deeper into the 1930’s and it began to appear less clear that the UK/France would actually go to war to enforce the anti-Anschluss restrictions if they were defied, the theoretical disagreements started to have more practical implications.
This reminds me that I recently read that “Suisse-romande” as an endonym for the Francophone part of Switzerland and/or its inhabitants really only became popular/dominant in the early 20th century, prior to which the usual endonym was “Suisse française.” I wonder if there’s an interesting story there. Not that there had necessarily been much of a Parisian irredentist claim to Geneva in the post-Napoleonic era but I wonder if there was a motivation that arose in a particular era for a clearer distinction from those Paris-ruled Francophones across the border.
It’s true that Dollfuss had the luxury in the 1920s of never having to take a serious position on Anschluss, but I am not sure he was necessarily principally opposed to his chunk of the old Habsburg Monarchy joining a larger Catholic state. A lot of Austrians were opposed to joining a country that they perceived as really being more “Großspreußen“ than „Großdeutschland“.
But when you got deeper into the 1930’s and it began to appear less clear that the UK/France would actually go to war to enforce the anti-Anschluss restrictions if they were defied, the theoretical disagreements started to have more practical implications
Fair enough, but from Austria’s point of view it was Mussolini‘s volte-face in 1936 that made Anschluss a salient issue. Italy was the post WWI guarantor of Austrian sovereignty, odd as that may sound now.
One of the readings at church this morning was a bit from 1 Corinthians where St. Paul happens to mention St. Barnabas and that caused me to think of how the semi-common Anglicized form “Barnaby” from “Barnabas” looks to be a similar pattern to Tully-from-Tullius and Livy-from-Livius. Jeremy and Zachary look to be other instances, especially given that they arose early enough that they were coming from the Vulgate’s Ieremias and Zacharias rather than from the more Hebraic-looking forms ending -iah that were innovated (in English) after the Reformation. (Wycliffe, who was translating from the Vulgate, has those prophets as Jeremye and Zacharie/Sacharie – I guess I’m not sure if the e’s were silent back then?) All three of these instances are more commonly used in more recent times as boys’ names as an alternative to giving the boy the full “Bible” form of the name rather than in direct reference to the Biblical personalities but in earlier centuries you can find plenty of references to “Jeremy the prophet” or e.g. the feast day of “S. Barnaby the Apostle.”
Wouldn’t the original need to be Barnabius or Barnabias to be parallel? The “y” in the other cases seems to come from the “i” in the original. There’s no Jony for Jonas, or Thomy for Thomas. Something else must have been going on.
@Keith I.: I think you usually need at least three syllables in the Latin original for this pattern to work, which would account for why “Jonas” doesn’t do it. Not a proper name originally, but I think “barbary” as in “Barbary Coast” comes (maybe via French) from Latin “barbarus” (not “barbarius”). Further candidates with an English -y replacing a Latin -us that wasn’t an -ius are welcome.
I’d guess the “-y” in Barnaby is from French Barnabé; this would then be similar to cases like liberty and army.
As for the Barbary coast, Spanish has Berbería, so it looks like this could be a normal case of (Neo-)Latin -ia becoming English .