Now that it’s back-to-school time, let’s rev up our intellects with a fun quest.
Everybody’s heard of the Mercator Projection. How Mercator got that name: When Western Europeans revived Classical learning in the Renaissance, many humanists in the north liked to demonstrate their erudition by translating their Germanic names into Greek or Latin. For example:
I’d like to illustrate with my own name, except my Sicilian surname is already Greek, so there’s nothing to translate. Instead, I have to go back over 200 years to find my only ancestors with a German name, the Wagners.
Wagner means a wagon maker or wheelwright. Greek for wagon is ἅμαξα hamaxa, and maker/worker/fabricator is -urge, as in “dramaturge.” So if I’d been descended from old Wagner’s son instead of his daughter, my Renaissance humanist name might have been Ἁμαξουργή Hamaxurge.
Our family name doesn’t come up in Wiktionary. It means a farmer who works with horse teams, or more briefly perhaps, a horse farmer, and that would be equus agricola in Latin. That should really be combined into one word. Maybe equicola would do. Sounds like an equal opportunity soft drink.
Wiktionary derives Susan from words meaning “sesame” (though Susan and Suzanne currently mean “lily” and as I understand it derive from a Semitic flower name meaning “rose”–I suppose the origin of “sesame” may be a cognate or the source for several plant names). My surname has an unknown meaning, but historically I wouldn’t have had a family name anyway. So Σουσάμι Εβραίος (Susan the Jew, probably needs the feminine suffix) or Σουσάμι daughter of somebody, or Σουσάμι The Righteous/Beautiful/Goatherd, etc.
Carolus Lignumlata or latasilva depending on if I capitolize it in english according to google translate for latin
Karolos Fardyxylo for the greek
I couldn’t get any of the links provided to work, the first three just returned no results, not sure what I was doing wrong and the last one seems to want me to download and install something first.
My surname is distinctly of Anglo-Saxon origin, and just a locational name. Means “small glade”, basically, so Parvum Saltus, or possibly Parvum Nemus? I could go with just Nemus, that sounds okay to me.
Georgius Mercator. I didn’t have to look it up, I knew that my first name is a Northern variant of the old Greek name that means “farmer”, and my last name I found in the OP because it’s a variant of “Kremer” (or “Krämer”). This thread is fun, and if I’ll ever write a book, I’ll take that as my pseudonym.
If I look up my dopername, it’s Charoúmenos in Greek and Hilaris in Latin. I think it would be more natural to go for Hilaris, if I were publishing back then.
And I just want to say that the internet is full of bilge about name meanings. Total rotting bilge.
That’s beautiful; it harks back to ancient Hellenization of Jews in places like Alexandria. Renaissance humanists considered Hebrew a Classical language alongside Greek and Latin, and if anything would have been inclined to translate their names into Hebrew.
Ancient Greek for rabbit is λεβηρίς lebēris and home is οἶκος oikos. Compounding them we get Leberoikos or in Latinized spelling Leberoecus.
On second thought, the noun stem (based on the genitive case) is probably leberid-, which would produce Leberidoikos/Leberidoecus.