Many famous persons in history have had their names “Latinized” by having “us” added. CopernicUS, ColumbUS, AfricanUS, StradiviriUS, NostradomUS, etc. There seems to be no real pattern to it. How does one get his name so suffexed?
JesUS???
Zymurgist
That’s easy, Carl. You just do it.
Peace,
mangeorgeus
I only know two things;
I know what I need to know
And
I know what I want to know
Mangeorge, 2000
Write about yourself or something else in Latin, then sign it.
Like:
Baconis (Sir Francis)
And the other trend, “Greekification”, like:
Maimonides, Herodis, etc.
In fact words coming into English are almost often Anglified to a horrble degree. Most English speakers are mono-lingual so we just don’t notice it as much.
Actually, the absolutely easiest way to do this is to become internationally famous during a period when Latin is the scholarly lingua franca in which your exploits will be recorded.
Copernicus, Columbus, and Nostradamus lived during the Renaissance. Stradivarius died during the Age of Enlightenment. (Scipio Africanus and S. Julius Africanus were both Roman and would have had a hard time keeping their names from being Latinized.)
Tom~
As far as I know the first three famous persons you named actually SPELLED their names that way. However, Antonio Stradivari did not.
Before we answer the O.P., we all have to know- how DID Copernicus, Columbus, and Nostradamus spell their names? ( No smarmy original language spellings, please. You know what I’m asking here).
Cartooniverse
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
This is without looking things up, so I may well be wrong, but I believe the first two spelled their names thusly:
Nicolaus Kopernik (Polish)
Cristoforo Colombo (Genoese, I think)
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
Actually it’s Mikolaj Kopernik. (with a little dash thru the l)
From what I’ve heard the latin name was the name that was written on the university diploma.
Cartooniverse: So you want to know how they actually spelled their name but not in their original languauge? So… you’d like to know how they’d spell their name in English or what? I don’t get it.
Just to finish off the set, those pseudo-prophetic quatrains were done by Michel de Notredame. (Insert diacritical marks ad lib.)
Then there’s some of us who use Greek instead of Latin.
– Polycarpos
Reminds of my college roommate. He loftily corrected my use of “octopuses” and informed me that it was “octopi.”
I informed him he was an idiot.
octopodes?
“The octopodes were eaten with gusto by the rhinocerotes” 
Wasn’t most scholarly discourse of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including lectures, examinations and papers, conducted in Latin? Names then would be Latinized just to keep everything in Latin.
But where were the Spiders?
One (or maybe more) of my ancestors removed a letter (vowel) from the last syllable of my last name, in order to make that syllable more phonetic in English no doubt (alongside the original spelling, which still persists), but he probably didn’t do it until the vowel had already shifted anyhow – but it sort of made the name less (Old) French.
And what about Sibelius? Is that Finnish Latin? And Amadeus Mozart?
And don’t get tangled up in octopussies again. I know we did all of that before, and it came right back to ‘octopuses’ as the correct plural in English. However, I can’t find the thread with the SDMB search engine.
Ray (Don’t askus; don’t tellus.)
Heh.
Octopoda, I think, when referring to more than one species of octopus.
Octopuses when referring to multiple creatures swimming around the boat.
And I forgot Maud Adams.
