Occasionally, one reads about people whose names are idiomatically connected to that of a country, region or continent where they did the things they were famous for. This seems to be old-fashioned usage (i.e., not done anymore, though still used for people for which it has been introduced in the past), mostly British, and related to people involved in the expansion of the Empire through conquest or exploration. The best-known example is surely Lawrence of Arabia, but others include Clive of India, Rhodes of Africa, and Scott of the Antarctic (the last of these also being a Monty Python sketch).
Are these instances frequent enough to establish a name for this particular function of the genitive? It can’t be a possessive (because the people in question were not owned by the respective countries), but I’m wondering if grammarians have identified this as a particular category and given it a name, analogous to possessive, partitives and the like.
This what a surname actually is—a name added on top of your already existing name, usually a descriptor. Today, surname is used in Commonwealth English to mean family name, but to me it’s useful to distinguish between the two concepts.
It’s also a type of nickname (from Old English ekename, or extra name).
Really this isn’t much different in essential character from something like Alfred the Great or Richard the Lionheart. And it’s way older than Colonial Britain: See, for example, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus or Germanicus Julius Caesar. The Romans called it an agnomen if not inheritable or cognomen if inheritable.
Leonardo da Vinci is kind of related, maybe. He is not da Vinci, despite what a stupid best seller might imply. He is Leonardo, and he was born in Vinci. He didn’t get the add-on later as a result of famous events or achievements, but the syntax is similar.
Another case of confusion- Jeanne d’Arc was not from someplace named Arc - Darc is apparently her father’s name and it was mis-parsed as D’arc and then misunderstood as “of Arc”
I’d try locative, see if it sticks. Locative genitive. Sounds good, about time someone came up with it. Se no è vero, è ben trovato, if I may say so myself.
And here’s where the modern Commonwealth usage of surname confuses the matter. Da Vinci was actually a surname; Leonardo himself used it as such. That matter is incontrovertible.
But it was not his family name as used in the modern Euro-American manner. Family names were still being developed during Leonardo’s time. It could have become a family name, but he didn’t have any children, so that question is moot. It was not his family name.
Then the separate question is whether we correctly refer to him in the short form sense as Leonardo or as da Vinci. Given that it was a surname and not a family name, it would be like referring to King Alfred on second reference only as “the Great.” That’s my position, anyway.
I’m seeing it called “appositive genitive” in older grammars for things like “city of London.” One might argue that Clive is not India, so it doesn’t apply, so maybe “genitive of specification” ?
The OED lists 60 main defintions of the word “of”, with many sub-definitions. The OP’s examples are probably definition 34.a: “Belonging to a place, as deriving a title from it, or as its lord, ruler, owner, etc.” with examples like “Godfrey of Boleyn”, “Don Quixote of the Mancha”, and “Baron Herbert of Cherbury”. However no specific name is given to this usage.
Both “of” and the actual possessive case (indicated by a change of the form of a pronoun or the clitic 's on a noun) don’t always express actual possession; in fact possession is probably less common than other uses. Both “of” and the possessive case are used to express a vast variety of relationships, the exact nature of which is supposed to be implicitly understood. There is no actual possession implied in forms like “his mother”, “his education”, “his location”, “his childhood”, “his crime”, “his journey”, “his death”, etc.
“An appositive is a noun or phrase that renames or describes the noun .”
So “of India” is an appositive for Clive. The rightness or wrongness of the description is not involved. You can call him “Clive the sheep” … you used an appositive, even though its wrong.
The appositive location “of India” doesn’t mean “Clive is India”, it just has to describe Clive, rightly or wrongly.
Manchester (for bed sheets, quilt covers, that sort of thing) is a toponym, using it as an appositive would be unlikely, Would a department store have the section labelled “Bed Sheets of Manchester” ??
Except that the evidence is that the father of the famous painter, at least once, introduced himself as just “da Vinci”. Leonardo might not have had any children, but he still had a family, and that family used “da Vinci” as their family name.
Isn’t association with place of origin exactly what we see in a lot of those middle Eastern names starting with “al”? (Basically, something like Abdul from Baghdad ?) Or in the English example, “Lawrence who was famous from being in Arabia”?
I recall a CBC program about the quaint social habits of Maritime Canadians; because so many shared the same last name (typically something Scots like “MacDonald”) and common first names, that for example, one fellow mentioned there were a few people on his area with the same name - let’s say “John MacDonald”. He mentioned one fellow who was forever distinguished from the herd as “Yankee John MacDonald” because he’d spent a few weeks in Boston as a young man. That was the extent of his travels, but the name stuck - because they needed a way to describe him. (“Silver John MacDonald” was the guy who went grey early in life.)
There are plenty of (English) people whose surname matches some geography, and I presume it came about because of an association early in their family tree with that locale. Particularly it would stick if you’re new to a different locale, “that’s Jack from London” or “Michael York”. (Bradford, Chesterfield, Burgess, Kent, Crawley, Sutton, Windsor, Lincoln, Trent, Bourne, Poole, Blackburn, Preston, Carlisle, Mann, … I guess the only question is what came first, the person’s name or the location name…?) Perhaps the only competition for this form of name is people whose family name derives from an ancestor’s trade.
Carl - Just as or more likely to be son of Charles, thus a patronymic King, Lord - Very unlikely to be an actual king or a lord, but rather merely an employee or retainer of a king or a lord, thus an occupation
No idea about the grammar question, but here is a contemporary example of the “X of Y” formation: Gurdeep of Yukon, who does Bhangra dancing in the snow. https://gurdeep.ca/
“Abdul” is not a complete name, of course—you would obviously ask, “Abdul what?” (Abd ur-Rahman, Abd al-Aziz, etc.)
Now, in Arabic, distinguishing someone by specifying his or her place of origin would be a type of “nisbah” (attribution). (E.g., as-Sulami, al-Baghdadi)
