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New Evidence on Indo-European Names

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Ernst Pulgram
Ernst Pulgram*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Several years ago I published in this journal an article concerning the form of Indo-European personal names. Were they typically dithematic, like Greek Aristo-bulos, Sanskrit Agni-datta, Iranian Ana-phes, Keltic Cingeto-rix, Old High German Fridu-berht, and hundreds of others in the onomastica of the various, especially the older Indo-European languages? Or were dithematic names only a special shape, disproportionately emphasized in the frequency of occurrence by the tradition and the kind of text at our disposal, at the expense of the much less recorded monothematic names? No doubt some monothematic names are hypocoristic abbreviations of dithematic ones; they are generally recognizable by either their stem or their ending. But a large number of available monothematic names are certainly original. Are they just as typically Indo-European, or less so, or more so?

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 36 , Issue 2-Part1: April-June , June 1960, pp. 198 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © 1960 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 See Ernst Pulgram, Indo-European personal names, Lg. 23.189–206 (1947). The striking exception presented by the Latin onomasticon is briefly considered on pages 189–90 and 202, and at length in a separate article, The origin of the Latin nomen gentilicium, Harvard studies in classical philology 58/59.163–87 (1948).

2 Pulgram 1947, 206.

3 I suggested (Pulgram 1948, passim) that in Latin the nomen gentilicium served a similar aristocratic function, at least at the time of its origin and early use, and in my article Historisch-soziologische Betrachtung des modernen Familiennamens, Beiträge zur Namenforschung 2.131–65 (1951/52), I proposed to regard a similar sociological desire to express excellence of person or of family as one of the causes for the origin of family names in modern societies. See also the end of the present article.

4 Oscar Landau, Mykenisch-griechische Personennamen, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia 7 (Göteborg, 1958).

5 Landau 240. (This and later translations from the original are mine.) Cf. also 239: among 956 personal names, 707 are simple, 258 compounded, with equal percentages at all sites.

6 See August Fick, Die griechischen Personennamen (Göttingen, 1874); A. Fick and A. Bechtel, Die griechischen Personennamen nach ihrer Bildung erklärt und systematisch geordnet (Göttingen, 1894).

7 Felix Solmsen, ed. Ernst Fraenkel, Indogermanische Eigennamen als Spiegel der Kulturgeschichte 134 (Heidelberg, 1922).

8 See Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge, 1956).

9 Landau 257.

10 For details, see Pulgram 1948 and 1951/52. To give an example from the present time, the American custom of giving a child as its middle name the family name of the mother was, in origin and intent, a device for emphasizing excellence of family connections, and prevalent in the ‘good’ families only. Now everyone does it. Thus the coin is debased, and the good families have turned to new designs—such as adding II or III, a truly regal scheme, to names. The artifice is new: the Ill's are just cropping up, and I have not yet seen a IV. But in the kind of society now existing in America, and in other parts of the world, where the common man is economically and socially of unprecedented mobility, self-styled and bona-fide aristocrats will find it increasingly difficult to stay a step ahead of hoi polloi in something so easily imitated as names.