Latinisation (or Latinization)[1] of names, also known as onomastic Latinisation, is the practice of rendering a non-Latin name in a modern Latin style.[1] It is commonly found with historical proper names, including personal names and toponyms, and in the standard binomial nomenclature of the life sciences. It goes further than romanisation, which is the transliteration of a word to the Latin alphabet from another script (e.g. Cyrillic). For authors writing in Latin, this change allows the name to function grammatically in a sentence through declension.
In a scientific context, the main purpose of Latinisation may be to produce a name which is internationally consistent.
Latinisation may be carried out by:
- transforming the name into Latin sounds (e.g. Geber for Jabir), or
- adding Latinate suffixes to the end of a name (e.g. Meibomius for Meibom), or
- translating a name with a specific meaning into Latin (e.g. Venator for Italian Cacciatore; both mean 'hunter'), or
- choosing a new name based on some attribute of the person (e.g. Daniel Santbech became Noviomagus, possibly from the Latin (actually Latinised Gaulish) name for the town of Nijmegen, and meaning 'new field').
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Transcription
When we talk about English, we often think of it as a single language but what do the dialects spoken in dozens of countries around the world have in common with each other, or with the writings of Chaucer? And how are any of them related to the strange words in Beowulf? The answer is that like most languages, English has evolved through generations of speakers, undergoing major changes over time. By undoing these changes, we can trace the language from the present day back to its ancient roots. While modern English shares many similar words with Latin-derived romance languages, like French and Spanish, most of those words were not originally part of it. Instead, they started coming into the language with the Norman invasion of England in 1066. When the French-speaking Normans conquered England and became its ruling class, they brought their speech with them, adding a massive amount of French and Latin vocabulary to the English language previously spoken there. Today, we call that language Old English. This is the language of Beowulf. It probably doesn't look very familiar, but it might be more recognizable if you know some German. That's because Old English belongs to the Germanic language family, first brought to the British Isles in the 5th and 6th centuries by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The Germanic dialects they spoke would become known as Anglo-Saxon. Viking invaders in the 8th to 11th centuries added more borrowings from Old Norse into the mix. It may be hard to see the roots of modern English underneath all the words borrowed from French, Latin, Old Norse and other languages. But comparative linguistics can help us by focusing on grammatical structure, patterns of sound changes, and certain core vocabulary. For example, after the 6th century, German words starting with "p," systematically shifted to a "pf" sound while their Old English counterparts kept the "p" unchanged. In another split, words that have "sk" sounds in Swedish developed an "sh" sound in English. There are still some English words with "sk," like "skirt," and "skull," but they're direct borrowings from Old Norse that came after the "sk" to "sh" shift. These examples show us that just as the various Romance languages descended from Latin, English, Swedish, German, and many other languages descended from their own common ancestor known as Proto-Germanic spoken around 500 B.C.E. Because this historical language was never written down, we can only reconstruct it by comparing its descendants, which is possible thanks to the consistency of the changes. We can even use the same process to go back one step further, and trace the origins of Proto-Germanic to a language called Proto-Indo-European, spoken about 6000 years ago on the Pontic steppe in modern day Ukraine and Russia. This is the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European family that includes nearly all languages historically spoken in Europe, as well as large parts of Southern and Western Asia. And though it requires a bit more work, we can find the same systematic similarities, or correspondences, between related words in different Indo-European branches. Comparing English with Latin, we see that English has "t" where Latin has "d", and "f" where latin has "p" at the start of words. Some of English's more distant relatives include Hindi, Persian and the Celtic languages it displaced in what is now Britain. Proto-Indo-European itself descended from an even more ancient language, but unfortunately, this is as far back as historical and archeological evidence will allow us to go. Many mysteries remain just out of reach, such as whether there might be a link between Indo-European and other major language families, and the nature of the languages spoken in Europe prior to its arrival. But the amazing fact remains that nearly 3 billion people around the world, many of whom cannot understand each other, are nevertheless speaking the same words shaped by 6000 years of history.
Personal names
Humanist names, assumed by Renaissance humanists, were largely Latinised names, though in some cases (e.g. Melanchthon) they invoked Ancient Greek. Latinisation in humanist names may consist of translation from vernacular European languages, sometimes involving a playful element of punning. Such names could be a cover for humble social origins.[2]
The title of the "Wilhelmus", national anthem of the Netherlands, preserves a Latinised form of the name of William the Silent.[3]
Place names
In English, place names often appear in Latinised form. This is a result of many early text books mentioning the places being written in Latin. Because of this, the English language often uses Latinised forms of foreign place names instead of anglicised forms or the original names.
Examples of Latinised names for countries or regions are:
- Estonia (Estonian name Eesti, Dutch/German/Scandinavian name Estland, i.e. 'land of the Aesti')
- Ingria (Finnish Inkerinmaa, German/Scandinavian Ingermanland, i.e. 'land of the Ingermans', the local tribe)
- Livonia (German/Scandinavian name Livland', i.e. 'land of the Livs', the local tribe)
- Eboracum was the Latinised name for the modern English city York. It is a Latinised form of the Brittonic name *Eburākon which means 'place of (the) yew trees'. The Common Brittonic language was spoken by the indigenous people of Britain and evolved into modern Welsh, Cornish, and Breton (Brezhoneg).
Scientific names
Latinisation is a common practice for scientific names. For example, Livistona, the name of a genus of palm trees, is a Latinisation of Livingstone.
Historical background
During the age of the Roman Empire, translation of names into Latin (in the West) or Greek (in the East) was common. Additionally, Latinised versions of Greek substantives, particularly proper nouns, could easily be declined by Latin speakers with minimal modification of the original word.[4]
During the medieval period, after the Empire collapsed in Western Europe, the main bastion of scholarship was the Roman Catholic Church, for which Latin was the primary written language. In the early medieval period, most European scholars were priests and most educated people spoke Latin, and as a result, Latin became firmly established as the scholarly language for the West.
By the early 19th century, Europe had largely abandoned Latin as a scholarly language (most scientific studies and scholarly publications are printed in English), but a variety of fields still use Latin terminology as the norm. By tradition, it is still common in some fields to name new discoveries in Latin. And because Western science became dominant during the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of Latin names in many scholarly fields has gained worldwide acceptance, at least when European languages are being used for communication.
References
- ^ a b "Latinize – definition of Latinize in English | Oxford Dictionaries". Oxforddictionaries.com. Archived from the original on October 27, 2017.
- ^ "Group Identity Formation in the German Renaissance Humanists: The Function of Latin". Institute for Renaissance Intellectual History and Renaissance Philosophy, University of Munich. Retrieved 2013-03-21.
- ^ national-anthems.org – facts National Anthems facts
- ^ "Declension of Greek Substantives in Latin". Retrieved 2015-07-14.
Sources
- Nicolson, Dan H. (1974). "Orthography of Names and Epithets: Latinization of Personal Names". Taxon. 23 (4). International Association for Plant Taxonomy: 549–561. doi:10.2307/1218779. JSTOR 1218779.
This page was last edited on 20 November 2023, at 09:25