Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[hwhatting]

I'd just note that if learned Latin is involved, medicī doesn't help at all: it's both singular genitive and plural nominative. This is pretty common in Latin. But if you're naming a family, wouldn't you use the plural genitive medicōrum?

In my experience, it's not unusual for family names derived from patronymics or occupations to be formally singular, and when you can pluralize them, they often follow specific family name patterns instead of the pluralisation pattern of the underlying noun (e.g. German Schmidt / Schmitt / Schmied "smith"; if you talk about the family, you don't use the regular plural die Schmiede, but the family name plural die Schmidts / Schmitts / Schmieds). To take a patronymic as an example, the family name is Mendelsohn, not *Mendelsöhne, and if you refer to the family you pluralise the singular-based last name as die Mendelsohns (using German and not English examples here, because English has the same issue as Latin that the genitive singular is identical to the nominative plural).
Russian avoids the problem by using possessive adjective based surnames for patronymics.

Concerning the Italian names, in my copy of Lausberg's "Romanische Sprachwissenschaft" they are not listed as remnants of the old genitive, so he seems to agree that they are nominative plurals in origin.

[WeepingElf]

Thank you for your replies. Yes, I think those Italian surnames in -i are from plurals, not genitives.

[keenir]

An inherited genitive is unlikely; Italian dialects lost the morphological genitive very early on.

One theory I read, which makes sense, is that it's a reborrowed genitive.
As in, clerks would write down Marco, son of Antonio in Latin: Marco (filius) Antoni.
Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

I was curious about the Medici... they apparently traced their ancestry to a dude named Medico di Potrone, born in 1046. He's said to have had healing abilities, thus the name. The story seems fishy to me: if medico was a nickname, why wasn't his real name remembered?

my hunch would be that nicknames are easier to remember,

I'd just note that if learned Latin is involved, medicī doesn't help at all: it's both singular genitive and plural nominative. This is pretty common in Latin. But if you're naming a family, wouldn't you use the plural genitive medicōrum?

maybe they opted to avoid that, so as to emphasize the di Potrone one?

[bradrn]

Something interesting I just realised after writing in another thread:

Speaking of which, ‘mysterious stranger’ strikes me as being rather clichéd.

‘Clichéd’ is a weird word when you think about it. The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’, from which is derived the past participle cliché ‘stereotyped’, or as a noun ‘a stereotype’. This was then borrowed into English as the noun ‘cliché’, which was then verbed, making the past participle ‘clichéd’. So ‘clichéd’ really has two past participle suffixes in a row! Loanwords are fun…

(Apparently ‘cliché’ also exists as an adjective, but Wiktionary marks it ‘sometimes proscribed’. Which is interesting in and of itself, since it means that the more French usage is less favoured — the reverse of the usual situation for prescriptivist advice.)

[Ares Land]

The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’,

That's funny because I didn't know there was a verb in the first place (though of course it makes sense, given the final -é!)
It's specialized vocabulary and rather uncommon.

[bradrn]

The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’,

That's funny because I didn't know there was a verb in the first place (though of course it makes sense, given the final -é!)
It's specialized vocabulary and rather uncommon.

Huh, interesting! To me as a learner it seemed immediately obvious — are there any words at all which end in -é but are not past participles?

[Ares Land]

The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’,

That's funny because I didn't know there was a verb in the first place (though of course it makes sense, given the final -é!)
It's specialized vocabulary and rather uncommon.

Huh, interesting! To me as a learner it seemed immediately obvious — are there any words at all which end in -é but are not past participles?

One example that comes to mind is reflexes of Latin -as: été, santé, qualité, etc...

I think it's not unusual to have nouns that do derive from past participles, but where the original verb is uncommon. Examples that come to mind are décolleté, culotté

Then there are cases like effronté; the TLFi has an Old French verb esfronter ('to hit in the forehead', apparently). So a past participle at one point, but the original verb has been lost in Modern French.

[bradrn]

That's funny because I didn't know there was a verb in the first place (though of course it makes sense, given the final -é!)
It's specialized vocabulary and rather uncommon.

Huh, interesting! To me as a learner it seemed immediately obvious — are there any words at all which end in -é but are not past participles?

One example that comes to mind is reflexes of Latin -as: été, santé, qualité, etc...

Aargh, of course. I didn’t think. (Though I didn’t know they all had the same Latin origin!)

I think it's not unusual to have nouns that do derive from past participles, but where the original verb is uncommon. Examples that come to mind are décolleté, culotté

Then there are cases like effronté; the TLFi has an Old French verb esfronter ('to hit in the forehead', apparently). So a past participle at one point, but the original verb has been lost in Modern French.

Interesting, thanks!