Nicknames: The diversity of Italy

https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/nicknames-the-diversity-of-italy/

The DMNES researchers are going to investigate Italy in a different way!

While Italy may not have the highest percentage of nicknames of the geographical areas that the Dictionary currently covers, but it definitely has the most diverse. While other cultures tend to form nicknames by either truncating names into hypocoristics or by adding a diminutive suffix, both practices are mixed indiscriminately in Italian names — a name can first be truncated into a hypocoristic form, then augmented with a diminutive suffix, and then truncated again, and maybe augmented again, to the point where tracing from a nickname back to its root form is an exciting, and sometimes impossible, task. For example, take Giovanni, the standard Florentine form of John. In data from Florence and environs between 1282 and 1532 [1], more than 20 different forms of this name can be found, most of the nicknames:

• Simple hypocoristics: Nanni, Vanni
• Simple diminutives: Gianaccimo, Giovannanto, Giovannino,Giovannozzo
• Diminutives of hypocoristics/Hypocoristics of diminutives:Nozzo, Vaccino, Vaccio, Vannozzo, Vannino, Vannuccio
• Diminutives of diminutives: Giovacchino

For example, Giovanni > Giovannozzo > Vannozzo > Nozzo, takes the root name, adds a diminutive suffix, truncates it, and truncates it again. Looking at any individual step, the path is clear: But looking at the first and the last, few people who don’t know the interim would believe that Nozzo is a nickname of Giovanni!

Another name which shows similar complexity in the construction of nicknames is Iacopo or Giacomo (Jacob). From Giacomo you can get to Giacomino, and from there to Mino. From Iacopo or Giacoppo, you can get to Iacopozzo and Coppo. Puccio is a hypocoristic of Iacopuccio, a diminutive. But the strangest nickname is one that doesn’t fall neatly into the hypocoristic/diminutive distinction we’ve bee working with: Lapo. It comes from Iacopo by truncating it and then changing the initial consonant/vowel cluster. From Lapo we then getLapaccio, Lapaccino, Lapone, Lapuccio (a hypocoristic of which is again Puccio). Just as the route from Giovanni to Nozzo isn’t immediately obviously, neither is the route from Iacopo to Lapaccino!

Diminutives are generally straightforward to identify the root name of, since all they do is augment another name. Hypocoristics which are formed by cutting off the final part of the name are likewise relatively straightforward. But hypocoristics which are formed by cutting off the first syllable or two of a name often become impossible to identify the root name, for there are many possibilities. The DMNES researchers mention two examples: Rigo and Bello. Rigo or Rico can be a hypocoristic of Arrigo, F(r)ederico, Rodrigo, etc., while Bello can either be a standalone name in its own right (from Latin bellus ‘beautiful, fair’) or a nickname of any name ending in -b- or -p- augmented by the diminutive suffix -ello, such as Jacobello or Spinalbello. Similar ambiguities show up on the feminine side; Bella can be a standalone name in its own right, or a hypocoristic of Jacobella (Jacoba), Isabella, Bellaflor, or any of other various names beginning with Bella-.

The diversity of Italian nicknames is also evidenced by the variety of diminutive suffixes which are in use — but we will save them for another post as they show up in French and Spanish as well, as they are ultimately from Latin. 

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NOTES

[1] Online Tratte of Office Holders 1282-1532 (Brown University, Rhode Island),http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/tratte/.

Percentages of medieval nicknames and diminutives across different geographical areas

https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2015/12/16/you-want-nicknames-we-got-nicknames/

In dictionary entries, the DMNES researchers sort our citations by modern day country borders (because trying to ascertain which country certain towns were in at which period is quite a bit of work — especially when ‘country’ isn’t a viable geographic category for much of the Middle Ages!). One particularly interesting aspect of the multi-cultural/cross-geographic data that they have is that it allows them to trace certain patterns or trends across these boundaries, and one such pattern is the prolificness (or not) of diminutives. The DMNES researchers touched on this in the previous post when they briefly commented on the percentage of names that are diminutives in any given era. In this post, they thought they’d explore this further, with some stats and some bar graphs; it’s been too long since they’ve had a nice graph!

TABLE OF DIMINUTIVE NUMBERS AND PERCENTAGES

Country	No. of dims.	No. of non-dims.	Percentage
Austria	0	60	0%
Brabant	18	191	8.6%
Czech Republic	241	912	18.5%
England	554	15457	3.4%
Estonia	612	905	40.3%
Finland	58	205	22%
France	1181	11744	9.1%
Germany	153	3973	3.7%
Iceland	0	63	0%
Ireland	12	294	3.9%
Italy	525	2387	18%
Latvia	201	1079	15.7%
Malta	0	10	0%
The Netherlands	36	862	4%
Norway	0	3	0%
Poland	21	123	14.5%
Portugal	2	384	.5%
Scotland	47	824	5.3%
Spain	62	1556	3.8%
Sweden	27	589	4.3%
Switzerland	102	543	15.8%
Ukraine	6	82	6.8%
Wales	46	391	10.5%

In some contexts, it is clear that they don’t have enough data to draw any sort of robust conclusions — Austria, Iceland, Malta, Norway, the Ukraine. But omitting these from discussion (and also omitting England, second from the bottom, and France, no. 8, since their much larger numbers make the graph inelegant), they are left with an interesting picture of the relative percentages of nicknames and diminutives across different geographical areas:

The four outstanding areas are Estonia, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Italy. The DMNES researchers have already discussed the nicknames in Estonia and the Czech Republic when they covered German and Slavic forms; so next up, they will explore diminutive and nicknames forms in Finland and Italy.

Spätmittelalterliche Regensburger Übernamen

http://www.onomastikblog.de/neuerscheinungen/regensburger_uebernamen/

• 08.02.2015
• Neuerscheinungen
• Robin Ehrhardt
• Permalink

Wortschatz und Namengebung

Im vorliegenden Band werden die im Regensburger Urkundenbuch (a. 893–1378) enthaltenen Übernamen Regensburger Bürger und Bürgerinnen erfasst, sprachlich gedeutet und in ihrem Kontext interpretiert.

Übernamen als Untergruppe der Beinamen, Vorstufen unserer heutigen Familiennamen, zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass sie die betreffenden Namenträger charakterisieren sollten, sei es in äußerlicher, sei es in geistig-charakterlicher Hinsicht, sei es bezüglich ihres gesellschaftlichen Status oder eines besonderen Vorkommnisses.
Daher dokumentieren die Regensburger Übernamen gängiges alltagssprachliches Wortmaterial vorwiegend des 14. Jahrhunderts, das in den an Literatursprache orientierten Wörterbüchern nicht immer enthalten ist. Zwar stellt das alphabetisch angeordnete Namenbuch mit 576 Einträgen den Kern des Bandes dar, doch wird auch auf die Wortbildung, Grammatikalisierung des Diminutivsuffixes, Onymisierung des zugrunde liegenden appellativischen Wortmaterials, auf semantische und mentalitätsgeschichtliche Aspekte eingegangen.

Rosa Kohlheim, Volker Kohlheim:
Spätmittelalterliche Regensburger Übernamen. Wortschatz und Namengebung
(Germanistische Bibliothek, Bd. 53).
Geb., 177 S.
Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2014
35,00 €

Die genauen Titeldaten entnehmen Sie bitte dem Eintrag im Katalog der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek (DNB).

Eine Rezension des Werkes folgt.

(Quelle: Ankündigungstext der Verlagshomepage)

https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-6350-5/Kohlheim_ua_Spaetmittelalterl_Regensburger_Uebernamen/

English summary: This present study covers the nicknames of Regensburg citizens that are contained within the Regensburg Sourcebook (c. 893-1378) (Regensberger Urkundenbuch), linguistically rendered and interpreted within their context. Nicknames are characterized as a subgroup of surnames, precursors to our modern family names, in that they should characterize the relevant name-bearer, whether in regard to external traits or to traits associated with one's personality, or as related to their social status or some notable event. The Regensburg's nicknames document the vocabulary of daily-life in common terms, chiefly from the fourteenth-century, which is not always present in the literature-oriented dictionaries. The alphabetically organized name book with 576 entries represents the basis of this volume but the study also goes into other aspects of naming, such as word-formation, the grammar of diminutive suffixes, and the development of appellative-based word material are examined in terms of semantics and intellectual history.

https://www.isdistribution.com/BookDetail.aspx?aId=54527

Diminutive forms in 16th C England

http://dmnes.wordpress.com/2014/09/06/diminutive-forms-in-16th-c-england/

A remark in this post on an onomastics, 

that

it seems like people in the past were a lot less nickname-happy than people today. I’d be shocked to hear of, say, a Renaissance Amelia who went by Amy, or a 19th century pioneer Joshua who went by Josh

got thinking the authors of Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources. The comment surprised them because in the data they’ve worked with over the last decade and a half has included quite a few marriage and baptismal records from late 16th C English parish registers, and they’ve come across quite a few diminutive forms. They decided to cull data from an albeit very small data set (the data which is currently in the Dictionary‘s database, which is a very small excerpt of the data they’ve collected over the years), and do a bit of analysis.

Diminutive forms of names can mostly be classified into two types: Those where the radiconym was also in use, and those where it wasn’t. In the later case, by the 16th C, it may not really make sense to speak of those names being diminutives, if there no longer is, and hasn’t been for a long time, a name that they are a diminutive of.

In this category, we can class such names as Ursula, Wilmot, and Thomasine and their (very numerous) variants. These names derive from Ursa, Willelma/Williama and Thomasse/Thomasa, respectively, but these forms have historically been vanishingly rare in English. (Thomasse appears in French, Guillerma and variants in Spanish, and Ursa in Italian.) A masculine witness to this is Lancelot, and its variants; these are etymologically diminutives of Lance, but the popularity of the Arthurian character meant that the double diminutive form was far more popular than the radiconym.

Of the names where the radiconym was still in common currency, they can further divide the examples into those where the diminutive form is roughly as common as its root, and those where the nickname is substantially less common. In the former category are names such as Alison, Marian, and Isabel. The latter category are the ones that they believe the poster quoted above would find most surprising:

• Annie 1586, 1597 (from Anne)
• Beaton 1581 (from Beatrice)
• Davy 1599 (from David)
• Emot, Emet 1418, Emote 1580 (from Emma)
• Ebbot 1597, Ebbet 1597 (from Elizabeth, or possibly Isabel)
• Eliza 1567, 1581, 1582, 1584, 1594, 1595 (from Elizabeth)
• Elineta 1563 (from Ellen, or possibly Eleanor)
• Kate 1596 (from Katherine)
• Nancy 1583 (from Anne)
• Sybbie 1573 (from Sybil)

And this is only looking at examples which have 16th C citations; they omitted a number of 15th C examples.

This is but a small data set, and thus no strong conclusions should be drawn from it. But they think it’s certainly clear that nicknames were used in the Renaissance, even in as official contexts as marriage and birth records.