‘Love’-ly Names for Valentine’s Day

Today is an good excuse to take a tour through names in the Dictionary that derive from words related to love.

Latin

Latin amo “I love” gives us a wealth of names, both masculine and feminine. The participle amandus/amanda ‘meant to be loved’ becomes Amant and Amanda, and the adjective amatus/amata ‘loved, beloved’ gives rise to Amat and Amata. On the active side of things, amator ‘lover’ turns into the name Amadore. From the Old French development of the Latin root, we have Ami and Amy, and then finally there are the compounds: Amadeus ‘beloved by God’ is wholly Latin, while the lovely Amadilde displays the unusual combination of a Latin prototheme with a Germanic deuterotheme.

Latin carus/cara ‘dear, beloved, loved’ was popular in Italian developments, including Caro and Cara simpliciter, and the compounds Bellacara, Carabella, Caradonna, and Deocar. The superlative form of the adjective is found in Carissima.

Finally, the Latin goddess name Venus is the root of the name Venerio (and also the word ‘venereal’, so we wouldn’t recommend this option to anyone seeking a name for their baby.)

Celtic

The root of the romantic Welsh name Angharad is a Proto-Celtic word for ‘love’.

The Old Breton word cum can mean both ‘gentle’ and ‘beloved’, and appears in the name Iarncum.

Hebrew

In rare cases, the name Dodo can derive from a Hebrew word meaning ‘beloved’. A more well-known Hebrew name with this meaning is David.

Slavic

The Slavic element drag, drog, drah ‘precious, beloved’ is a popular theme, found in Dragoslav.

Germanic

Old English is where we must turn for names of deriving from a Germanic element meaning love, specifically, lēof ‘dear, loved’. Here on the feminine side we have Loveday as well as, possibly, Lovewell, though the origin of the latter is uncertain, and on the masculine side Lefchild, Lefsy, Lefward, and Lefwin.

Greek

Finally, we have two names incorporating Greek φίλος ‘dear, loved, loving’: Philip and Theophilus.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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An onomastic calendar: January

• January 1: Albert II was crowned king of Hungary and Croatia in 1438.
• January 2: Italian painter Piero di Cosimo was born in 1462.
• January 3: Martin Luther was excommunicated in 1521.
• January 4: Amadeus VI of Savoy was born in 1334.
• January 5: Croatian poet Marko Marulić died in 1524.
• January 6: Philip of Swabia was crowned king of the Romans in 1205.
• January 7: Saint Lucian of Antioch was martyred in 312.
• January 8: Saint Severinus of Noricum died in 482.
• January 9: Marco Polo, Italian explorer, died in 1324.
• January 10: Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy, was born in 1480.
• January 11: Michelle of Valois, duchess of Burgundy, was born in 1395.
• January 12: Marie of Brabant, queen of France, died in 1322.
• January 13: St. Remy died in 533.
• January 14: Andrew III of Hungary died in 1301.
• January 15: Elizabeth I of England was crowned in 1559.
• January 16: Isaac Komnenos, son of a Byzantine Emperor, was born in 1093.
• January 17: Alfonso III of Aragon invaded Majorca in 1287.
• January 18: Tamar of Georgia died in 1213.
• January 19: Sten Sure the Younger, regent of Sweden, was mortally wounded in 1520.
• January 20: Byzantine emperor Theophilos died in 842.
• January 21: Pope Paschal II died in 1118.
• January 22h: Walter Raleigh was born in 1552 or 1554.
• January 23: St. Vincent Ferrar was born in 1350.
• January 24: Emperor Hadrian was born in 76.
• January 25: Lucas Cranach the Younger, German painter, died in 1586.
• January 26: Eadgyth of England, queen consort of Otto I, died in 946.
• January 27: Dante Alighieri was exiled from Florence in 1302.
• January 28: Henry VIII died in 1547.
• January 29: German composer Elias Ammerbach died in 1597.
• January 30: Roman empress Livia was born in 56BC.
• January 31: St Máedóc of Ferns died in 632.

Protestant names: New Testament influences on men’s names (part 2)

We’re in the home stretch with the Biblical names! In this our final post on this sub-topic of our monthly topic, we look at the New Testament men’s names of Greek and Roman origin.

Names of Greek origin

The first batch we can set aside as being unable to tell us anything unique about Protestant naming practices for the same reason we set aside the names of the four evangelists in the previous post: The names of the apostles. Among the apostle names of Greek origin we have we have Andrew, Peter, Philip, and Simon, all of which were popular throughout the Middle Ages across Europe; for similar reasons, the name of the first martyr, Stephen, was also a continual favorite.

So, what New Testament names of Greek origin seem to have gained a new popularity in the 16th C?

Cleopas: The name of the disciple who encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus, this name was rarely used in England in the 16th C.

Epaphras (entry still being written): The name of a disciple from Colossae, we have one example of this name from the Protestant Church at Caen in the 16th C.

Theophilus: The name of the person to whom the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts were addressed, we also have a single example of the name from Caen in the 16th C.

Timothy: The name of the recipient of two epistles by Paul, Withycombe and Bardsley differ on the use of this name in England; Withycombe notes that the name didn’t come into use until after the Reformation, while Bardsley includes Timothy in the list of Biblical names in use before the Reformation (p. 36). Further research will allow us to arbitrate this question, but in the meantime, we certainly have clear evidence for the use of the name in 16th C England and 16th C French.

Curiously, we don’t (yet) have examples of any of these four names in Dutch Protestant contexts.

Names of Roman origin

In this class of names we have Paul, which like the names of the disciples and Stephen, was used throughout medieval Europe. It was never as popular, though, in England, until the 16th C, though it doesn’t show us quite the same spike in usage that some of the other names we’ve discussed have had.

Which leaves us with Crescent, the name of a minor character, of which we one example from 16th C England.

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From this we can see that, yes, amongst the Biblical names that first came into use among Protestants in the second half of the 16th C, there was a special predilection for names of Hebrew origin, but the fad for Biblical names was not exclusive to the Hebraic ones, especially amongst the women’s names. Any minor character was fair game — and we have no doubt that as we continue to collect data, we’ll find both more examples of the names we’ve covered in this series, and new examples of obscure Biblical names.

Though we’ve come to the end of the Biblical names, we are not quite done with this series. There is one final class of names which have a right to be called distinctly Protestant names, which we will devote our final postin this series to: Virtue names!