Talk:Romilia gens

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@P Aculeius: What is the book you refer to by someone by the name of Chase? I'm writing the German equivalent and would like to know. Also, it should be added here in the article. Best, Tolanor (talk) 02:16, 20 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's this: George Davis Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897). It was inadvertently omitted from the bibliography, but I've added it now. It's the only widely-available study of its kind in English; the other major studies contemporary with Chase were mostly in German, so you might want to find those. I believe the most important is Wilhelm Schulze, Zur Geschichte lateinischer Eigennamen. Unfortunately I'm unable to consult that, since I don't speak German, it's much too big to translate, and machine translation would probably not be very reliable. There's also a more recent study by Olli Salomies, but unfortunately it's in Finnish, and virtually unobtainable for me (even if there were the slightest chance of my being able to read it, which there isn't).

However, from what I understand, Chase is still regarded as a reasonably good source for most of his catalogues of names and their meanings. Some of the article is outdated, particularly when it comes to listing and identifying old and non-Latin names as either praenomina or cognomina, and there is some uncertainty regarding specific issues (for instance, a sharp divergence of opinion among scholars about the origin of numerical praenomina, or whether certain non-Latin names should be regarded as Oscan or Umbrian, and how to classify the Sabines or the Picentes linguistically), but for most purposes it holds up fairly well. Certainly Chase is a good source for classifying groups of names by morphology or ethnic origin—as long as he's not contradicted by other, probably reliable sources, which on a few occasions, he is—or the etymology of surnames, or the relationship between surnames and gentilicia. As long as you're aware of the possible pitfalls, it's a good source to cite. P Aculeius (talk) 03:46, 20 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for this very helpful comment, P Aculeius! --Tolanor (talk) 17:26, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]