Re: R: Re: R: Re: Relay time! Beethoven's Ninth

On Sat, 12 Aug 2000, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> > Date:         Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:28:02 +0200
> > From:         Mangiat <mangiat@...>
>
> > AFAIK, there's a quite a large amount of Finnish (proper?) names ending
> > in -us. I.e. Linus Torvald. Are they all latinized versions of local names?
>
> Surnames, for sure. But it seems that Linus is swedish, and first
> names in -us aren't common in Finnish. URLs:
>
> http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~larson/finnames.html
> http://www.eponym.org/swedish.html
> http://www.eponym.org/scandpage.html
> (and www.eponym.org in general).
>
> And actually, the Linux guy is Linus Torvalds. I'm more interested in
> knowing where that last name came from --- it reminds me of the
> Latvian practice of tacking -s on all foreign male names that don't
> fit into any common masculine noun class. (And -e for the girls). For
> instance the Danish author Hans Christians Andersens.
My grandmother's friend in Berlin was Frau Thorvald.  It seems German to me,
though I suppose it could be Norse.

> Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)
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