Re: Translation question

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Patrick Dunn tleiceiç:
> > Being something of a Rome buff, I actually know this.  A cognomen was
> > essentially a personal nickname used to distinguish a person from the many
> > other people in his or her gens named the exact same thing (Romans were
> > notoriously uncreative at naming, even resorting to numbers quite
> > frequently).
>
> So, could you explain the three names.  Which one referred to the gens?
> How was the cognomen given?
The middle name refered to the gens, which when used alone was given in
the feminine gender but in a name is given the gender of the person named.
The first name is chosen from, oh, about thirty names, so there's lots of
overlap.  Usually a tradition -- "every male heir has been named Marcus,
so my first son is Marcus, then I'll just number them Secundus, Tertius,
etc."

The cognomen, apparently, was given in pretty much the same way we get
nicknames.  I might be called "Ratface" because of my goatee (actually, in
an attempt to assign myself a cognomen, I searched high and low for a
Latin word for "rat," but sadly couldn't find one except in Medieval
Latin).

>
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