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The Latinizing of Names
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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I never claimed it was specific to Latin? You can see it with the example of Copernicus that it was Latinized, Polonized (?) and Modern-Standard-Germanized.
Franz Liszt is called Liszt Ferenc in Hungarian. That's because Ferenc is the Hungarian variant of Franz and Hungarian names are spelled backwards for some reason.
I could provide so many more options where people were given several names because they did not live in a monolingual region.
In Czech, women's last names take on the -ová suffix. Even if they aren't Czech, didn't speak Czech or never set a foot into Czechia. For example: Hillary Clintonová
I frankly don't care enough about what languages do to names. If the intent is to wipe out other cultures then it's obviously bad. Like colonizing Brits did with native landmarks (e.g. Uluru -> Ayer's Rock). If the intent is to adjust the name to a cultures grammar, pronunciation or similar, I couldn't care less.
Except the intent is very much likely to wipe out other cultures here and not just to match grammar or pronunciation.
Franz -> Ferenc isn't as drastic a change as Ibn Sina -> Avicenna
The former retains similarity to the original whereas the latter makes it completely unclear the origin was Arab.
Ibn Sina -> Avicenna seems to sound similar though, but I can't speak Latin or Arabic.
At least the cenna and Sina part, you can see they're related. The people Latinizing the name did not just roll a die I presume and had respect for the people who came up with something. It's why algorithm and algebra are both directly from Arabic, algorithm from the guy who wrote this book:
Al-Jabr
At least in my opinion the Latinization does not seek to hide the fact it's Arabic. In fact, it just takes (directly) untranslatable Arabic terms and puts them into Latin.
No idea how "Ibn -> Avi" makes sense though, I'd be surprised if it was done with any hostile intent though.
It doesn't come off as Arabic and for a long time I myself, despite having known the Arab name, thought it was a different western guy.
This is is a largely unpopular take if you look into criticisms of how the west names things, provided one has a radicalization towards seeing things such as whitewashing etc.