-son suffix to names

[King John]

English, like many other languages, makes it easy to form "patronymic" surnames — Johnson from John, Robertson from Robert, and so on. We frequently want to translate this kind of surname from English (or Irish, or Bulgarian ...) into Talossan, and are hampered by the fact that Talossan (like most Romance languages) doesn't do this particular thing gracefully.

But ... Romanian does, with the very common -escu suffix. (Ceauşescu, Antonescu, Iliescu, Constantinescu, to pick some prominent examples.) So, how about if we decree that Talossan patronymic surnames are formed like Romanian ones? Johnson would Talossanize as Iánescu, Robertson as Rôibeardescu, and so on.

Language geeks, what say you?

— John Woolley, UrN

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

I think an -escu suffix for Talossan is well-founded. After all, according to Nicolae Densuşianu's famous Dacia Preistorică (Prehistoric Dacia), "[t]he antique Pelasgian suffix ascus, asci, which corresponds to the Romanian escu, esci, was still used during the Roman epoch by the Ligurii of upper Italy, and has been preserved to this day in a big number of localities from those lands." And according to R. Ben Madison's The Berber Project:

More research is necessary to show exactly how far-ranging our Berber ancestors were. The Pelasgians, who inhabited Greece before the arrival of the Greeks, were possibly Berbers. When Sergi proposed this in 1901, he was ridiculed. Yet the explanatory power of his hypothesis would not go away, and recently linguist Eric Hamp has produced more evidence in its favour. He says the Pelasgian language belongs in the same "aggregate" as that of the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Northern Europe (Markey and Greppin, 294). The ancient Greek historian Herodotus referred to the Pelasgians as BARBAROI, which can either mean "Barbarians" or "Berbers" (the word is ambiguous; Sergi, 167).

So I think -escu should be accepted as an option, but we should also continue to allow the more traditional Romance construction with "da." And in some cases it might be tolerable to drop the patronymic affix altogether (like how a lot of Irish names are commonly found without the original O' today). The choice of -escu or da would be influenced by aesthetics and by the etymology of the root of the surname.

[Hans-Jürgen von Knappe]

Thanks Excellence,
Thanks s:reu Sirvicül,

I agreed with you and certainly, it would be a job for a qualified linguistic team to choice the ideal sounding suffix or a “modified/adapted” aesthetic translation.