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

> 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.

Back when the Baltic states were declaring their independence, there
was a fair bit of subtitled news footage from there --- and I noticed
surnames that seemed to have gone Latvian -> Russian -> Latvian; I
didn't write down any, but something like Algirtsovs. I assume the
story is that someone with a Latvian patronymic (based on Algirts)
Russianized his surname to Algirtsov --- which then has to take an
extra -s when used in Latvian.

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