Zuzana Caputova has been elected as president of Slovakia (BBC story here). I’m looking at her surname, Caputova, and I immediately see the stem word caput, and thence the Latin word caput, meaning head. Is this the correct derivation?
Bonus question: is she related to the Capets of France? (Same derivation, I guess.)
Slovak is a Slavic language (unsurprisingly, really) not a Romance one, so I’d be surprised if there was that simple and obvious a connection.
The closest word in Russian (and, as it turns out, Slovak too) that I can think of that sounds like caput is ‘kapusta’. It means cabbage. I guess a cabbage looks kind of like a head…
I believe it’s pronounced Chaputova, so probably not.
By that logic, achieve, chapter, chapeau, chief, etc. are also probably not descended from caput.
The correct spelling, probably lost in most media reports is Čaputová, meaning the first letter is pronounced ‘ch’.
A Čap can be a cap, but given the tradition in Slavic languages for trade-based names is just as strong or stronger than in English my bet would be hatter or cap-maker.
Just to be clear, do you mean “ch” as in Church or “ch” as in L’chaim?
The first.
In Church Latin, c is often pronounced ch.
I’ve just checked and hat maker is klobucnik in Slovak, which is almost the same as the czech word. (Slightly different accents and pronunciation and the Czech has an extra O). I used to live near a street in Prague called kloboucnicka, which translates as street of the hat makers. Although a Russian friend tried to tell me that it translates as ‘street of head’.
The Ova ending is the female form of the surname and is often added to non Czech or Slovak names. Harry Potter translations list the author as J K Rowlingova for instance.
So it could be a foreign family name that has been Slavic-ised and therefore its origins may well be related to head in its original tongue.
I was wondering myself if it might be a form of the Italian surname Caputo. Polish does a similar thing with the ending -owa (pronounced as “ova”), so I’ll hear my dad refer to Hillary Clinton simply as Clintonova. Wouldn’t explain exactly why the “C” would have morphed to a “ch” sound, so I’m not betting on this as being the derivation, but it is a thought.
Note that it’s a “Č” not a “C”. The first is the “ch” sound.
It’s more fun if you impart a Latin meaning to both caput and ova.
Obviously she’s an egg(s)head 
That’s what was meant by my last sentence about “c” morphing into “ch.” I am aware her name is Čaputova. That said, a “k” sound shifting to a “ch” sound is not linguistically unheard of.”Kebabs” became “čevaps” when they reached the South Slavs, for instance. In this case, like I said in my initial post, though, I don’t think that is the likely situation.
Groan!
And happened in Latin.
You’re welcome!
For what it’s worth … čáp is Czech (but not Slovak) for English “stork”. Maybe the surname is something akin to English surnames like “Heron”.
What do we make of the “-uta” part of the masculine surname (Čaputa)?
It looks very like the Polish surname Czaputowicz.
It does, but I don’t get the sense Czaputowicz is a usual Polish surname, so it could have come via other Slavic countries or language sources.