Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Classical Names
Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), Short Talks with the Dead and Others (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), pp. 42-43:
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The first thing that so arises in my mind, my ignorant mind, is the soft, suffused air of delight evoked by the word ‘Livy.’ It is one of the very few left of those idiomatic English names, transformed from the Latin, which we can still boast.Related post: Superpedants.
Our fathers used to call Cicero ‘Tully,’ and we still talk of Ovid and of Virgil and of Horace. But for the most part the Latin names have broken back upon our tradition and have re-established themselves. It is an evil and the symptom of an evil; for an idiomatic form given to classical names betrays a familiar and intimate knowledge with the work for which they stand: makes them part of the furniture of an English house.
