LINNAEUS.

November 23, 2002 by 4 Comments

I have just discovered that “Linnaeus” was not a latinized version of Carl von Linné’s last name, as I had always supposed and as Webster’s Biographical Dictionary seemed to confirm; his father’s name was Nils Linnaeus, and he took the name “von Linné” when he was admitted to the aristocracy; see the biography here. You just never know. (Thanks, Nick!)

Comments

  1. David Marjanović says
    August 19, 2023 at 3:16 pm

    …and that shows up as a Linné in his later Latin works (like the 12th Edition of Caroli a Linné […] Systema Naturæ […]), his Latin being far too classical to admit de as “from/of” (as in one of his successors, Fischer de Waldheim).

    Nils got his last name when he entered university, taking it from the linden tree at the ancestral farm or something.

  2. languagehat says
    May 29, 2025 at 9:27 am

    I just learned that Anton Edvard Pratté (1796-1875) “was born Georg Anton Brát in Haida, Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), into a large German-speaking family of marionette/ puppet-masters. […] It was during such a tour in Sweden while still a teenager that he decided to run away from a brutal father and harsh lifestyle. Changing his name to Anton Edvard Pratté, he embraced an international solo career, mostly playing his own compositions.”

  3. John Cowan says
    June 3, 2025 at 7:18 pm

    So what’s with the devoicing?

  4. languagehat says
    June 3, 2025 at 7:47 pm

    And why the extra syllable? So many questions!

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