Names and nomina

Eugene Volokh asks about the rarity of certain personal names of ancient Roman origin nowadays, even while others enjoy great popularity.

It might indeed seem arbitrary, if parents typically named their children after ancient Romans. But most names are chosen because they have a living history behind them, whether familial, national, religious, or cultural. In the West, Judaeo-Christian names predominate; names such as Mark and Luke may have non-Christian cognates, but their popularity is entirely due to the authors of the Gospels. Many other names of ancient origin owe their popularity not to their antiquity, but rather to having been borne by popular kings, queens, heroes, or saints.

So what about names like Julius, Claudius, and Cornelius? Good classical names enjoyed a revival of popularity starting with the Renaissance; in England, the adoption of Greek and Latin names hit a high point in the 18th century, in parallel to the coining of so many of the classically-derived words we now take for granted. Since then, the usual process of sorting has occurred, just as with the contemporary neologisms: some became lastingly popular, while others fell into obscurity.

That process, incidentally, was the subject of a statistical study that I cannot locate at the moment. The mathematical model, however, demonstrated that sorting inevitably occurs, and that in the case of surnames of occupational origin, leads to the random dominance of some names and the extinction of others. For example, the large numbers of Smiths today is not indicative of a vast population of blacksmiths in times past, while one would certainly expect a lot more Farmers if there were no random selecting.

NOTE: Geitner Simmons has also posted some comments, bringing up the practice in the American South of giving slaves Roman names.

Posted by David on January 24, 2003 11:12 AM