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It's fine. John Smith once meant the John who works as a blacksmith etc. Whatever the original meaning we now widely take da Vinci to be the last name if we don
by cma 1y ago
It's fine. John Smith once meant the John who works as a blacksmith etc. Whatever the original meaning we now widely take da Vinci to be the last name if we don't speak Italian.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> John Smith once meant the John who works as a blacksmith etc. Yes, modern surnames largely evolved from descriptive epithets added to distinguish different people of the same given name, but that doesn't retroactively transform the descriptive epithets of commonly applied to people who lived in the past into surnames for those people.
- kragen 1y agoI agree that the error is common. Try to make new errors instead of repeating common errors.
- cma 1y agoDescriptive linguistics, how stuff is actually used, is a lot more useful in practical real-life communication vs prescriptive. Da Vinci is a shorthand that everyone will understand vs just calling him Leonardo. Writing Leonardo da Vinci will be more explicit but will come off much more formal and stilted.
- kragen 1y agoNobody who knew Leonardo called him "da Vinci", any more than you would call Jessica "from church" ("Hey, is From Church coming over tonight?") or Venezuelans would call Hugo Chávez Frias "Mr. Frias". "Descriptive linguistics" is not a magic trump password that makes all erroneous utterances correct. If you haven't studied 16th-century Italian, you're going to make errors when you name 16th-century Italians.
- cma 1y ago> any more than you would call Jessica "from church" ("Hey, is From Church coming over tonight?") That's not in common use, so wouldn't fall under descriptive linguistics. No English speaker was puzzled at whether Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was about someone else from Vinci's code. It's an established convention at this point.
- kragen 1y agoThe established convention is to use the given name "Leonardo", just as with Raphael, Michelangelo, and little Donato ("Donatello"). Dan Brown is also not an authority on the descriptive linguistics of 16th-century Italian.
- cma 1y agoThe Dan Brown mention was about descriptive, showing it's popularly understood using a popular book, not prescriptive.
- card_zero 1y agoDoes this also apply to DiCaprio? His name seems to translate as "the deer's Leonardo", or maybe "the goat's Leonardo". Possibly "son of a goat". Wikipedia says that Leonardo da Vinci was properly Leonardo son of Piero from Vinci son of Antonio son of another Piero son of Guido. I'm not sure that moving to surnames was a mistake, you know.
- kragen 1y agoNope, that's his actual surname. He wasn't born in the 16th century.
- card_zero 1y agoBut at some point back in time, when an ancestral DiCaprio was first referred to as just "DiCaprio", that was an error, right? He should properly be called Quello Figlio di Caprio, that son of a goat. It's not too late.
- kragen 1y agoProbably not, no, and AFAIK Leo is a nice guy who doesn't deserve to be deprecated in that way.