You probably know this guy as Michelangelo (unless you think he painted the Sixtine chapel) but Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson (to name two famous authors I dug up in a few moments with Google) were pleased to style him Michael Angelo Buonarotti. Why did they feel compelled to split up what is now regarded as his first name (singular) and when did the current spelling gain currency?
(According to Wikipedia, his full name is Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. Why did Twain and Emerson pick Buonarroti as his ‘last name’ when Lodovico and Simoni were also readily to hand?)
Seeing as how there have been over a hundred views and nary a respone I’ll give you some anecdotal food for thought.
In Milan there is a metro station called Buonarotti - Italian friends of mine were shocked that I had not heard of this famous painter. I’m guessing Buonarotti was the surname he used most often, (Potuguese/Brazilians for example don’t always use all their surnames on a daily basis).
I have a Colombian friend called Miguel Angel XXXX, not sure if there is a hyphen or not. To all intents and purposes he is just Miguel, unless his wife is being serious of his parents are around.
Doing a Google search in French for “Michelange” as a single word you get 18 500 hits; “Michel Ange” 940 000 hits. The top site starts helpfully with this phrase (my translation) “Sculptor, painter, architect, Michelangelo Buonarotti, known as Michel-Ange …”
In Italian “Michel Angelo” 94 400 hits; “Michelangelo” 799 000.
Make of this what you will, it seems to vary according to language. ‘We’ were more willing to ‘translate’ names in the past, thus King John of England was known as Jean in France. Although today we are more likely to respect the ‘original’ pronunciation and there are still variations and some people think it better to ‘go back to the original’ version rather than perpetuate a cultural bias. Think how spelling of Chinese leaders changes - Mao Tse Dung or Mao Zedung ? or composer Tschaikovsky, Tchaikowski, Chaikovsky. I’m sure Dopers could argue forever as to which one was preferable.
The original Michael, after whom the name Michael was coined, was an archangel mentioned in the Bible. Ergo, Michael-the-Angel Buonarroti. The “Michel-ange” is the French variation on the erstwhile Romance-language custom of translating names (German did it too at one point: Neander/Neumann). “di Lodovico” is presumably a patronymic; Simoni may have been a matrilineal surname, similar to the Hispanic custom.
These don’t help your point that I can see. ‘Mao’ and ‘Tschaikovsky’ are both transliterations from non-Roman writing systems, and it’s often fiendishly hard to get transliterations right if the source language and the target language don’t have the same phonemes. We go back and forth on “Col. Gadafy” for the same reason.
But Michelangelo’s name has always been rendered in the Roman alphabet. There just doesn’t seem to be as much room for disagreement, unless you do as those former authors have apparently done and translate the name.
So, to be clear, you’re apparently right (along with Many-fish, er… Polycarp ;)) but those examples don’t bolster your case.
Picasso was actually formally Pablo Ruiz Picasso, with Ruiz his “true” (father’s) surname. But he was illegitimate and disliked his father, and used his matronymic – like most Hispanic names, his formal name combined both father’s and mother’s surname, as in Miguel Cervantez Saavedra, Cervantez being his father’s surname and the one by which he was and is usually known. But to honor his mother and reject his father, Picasso used her name rather than his father’s.
I know Derleth I know. It was late, we don’t often ‘translate’ names in Latin script now so I was a bit stuck. At some stage I’d also put in the late Pope - Jean-Paul, John Paul, Jan Pawel, Gianni Paolo etc. much better but it seems he got dropped for more exotic examples - I dunno, it made sense last night
