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Does that- vich ending in Russian generally mean "son of" whatever came before the -vich suffix?

Generally, yes. -ovich. Not as literally as Scandinavian -son though, more like just indicating a relation. But used this way mostly.

For example, if Donald Trump gets deported to Russia and has a son here named Vladimir, he will be recorded as Vladimir Donaldovich Trump.

However, it also can be a family name, too.
 
Generally, yes. -ovich. Not as literally as Scandinavian -son though, more like just indicating a relation. But used this way mostly.

For example, if Donald Trump gets deported to Russia and has a son here named Vladimir, he will be recorded as Vladimir Donaldovich Trump.

However, it also can be a family name, too.
I always found the Russian habbit to place an -a- after the womens familyname quite attractive.
 
Try: 'Son of the Romans'

Then add century after century of language evolution to the term.

It is obviously a link to Rome, not some guy named for Rome.

During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the former family became known as Yakovlev (Alexander Herzen among them), whereas grandchildren of Roman Yurievich Zakharyin-Yuriev (ru) changed their name to "Romanov".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Romanov#Surname_usage

So they were the descendants of a person named Roman.
The source is Almanach de Gotha. Gotha, Germany: Justus Perthes. 1944. pp. 103–106.
 
I always found the Russian habbit to place an -a- after the womens familyname quite attractive.

That's just a common feminine gender ending for most words, -a and -ya. Like German -e. And family names with ending -ov are in the essence just words that answer the question "whose", so the common rules apply.

It makes it weird though when used in English. It sounds like female first name + male last name.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Romanov#Surname_usage

So they were the descendants of a person named Roman.
The source is Almanach de Gotha. Gotha, Germany: Justus Perthes. 1944. pp. 103–106.

Yes. I saw that yesterday when I followed up on Konairos post.

It is just seems logical to me that naming children after Rome, marrying into Roman nobility to break with the Golden Horde, using the honorific Caesar, shows a consistent desire to link back to Rome itself and to tap into the link of divinity which is forever wielded by using Julius’ name.
 
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Yes. I saw that yesterday when I followed up on Konairos post.

It is just seems logical to me that naming children after Rome, marrying into Roman nobility to break with the Golden Horde, using the honorific Caesar, shows a consistent desire to link back to Rome itself.

Roman was a pretty popular name, and it was brought by Greeks along with Christianity. There were princes with this name, there were even Orthodox saints with this name, back when the (Eastern) Roman Empire itself was alive and well.

And the whole Rome connection was always pretty superficial. People seriously overhype its importance.
 
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It's the same with polish. Brits are always confused why my daughter has slightly different surname ;)
I think among Slavic names, Czech surnames would be the weirdest.

If in Russian and Polish the masculine and feminine surnames are basically the same word, only in different gender, in Czech these can be different words - the masculine surname is a noun, and the feminine surname is an adjective based on this noun.
 
It's the same with polish. Brits are always confused why my daughter has slightly different surname ;)
Ah, didnt knew that.
 
I think among Slavic names, Czech surnames would be the weirdest.

If in Russian and Polish the masculine and feminine surnames are basically the same word, only in different gender, in Czech these can be different words - the masculine surname is a noun, and the feminine surname is an adjective based on this noun.

Believe me, for us all Czech language is weird. It works both ways. Can have a lot of fun with it ;)
 
After discussing it with a friend of mine, my understanding of it is this:

There was really no officiall title at all, and emperors chosed the name they preffered and implemented it into their name, and not a title. These names include : Augustus, Caesar & Imperator. Because the first emperor known as "Augustus" changed his name several times from:

Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (Adopted by Julius Caesar, but kept his last family name)
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus (He was given the title Augustus)
Gaius Caesar Divi Filius Augustus (Son of God aka Son of Julius Caesar - he was seen as a god?)
Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus (Added Imperator to his name, meaning "Commander" of sorts)

And later emperors, both inside the Roman Empire and outside of it (Russian, HRE etc) chosed the names they liked the most, or the ones they thought was the most "right". Therefore we see all of them at different time periods, until one ultimately won and become an official title. Other empires also chosed what they preffered when they become an empire:

Russian = Tsar (From Caesar)
German = Kaiser (From Caesar)
French = Empereur (From Imperator, idk if it was early Franks or later French aka Napoleon?)
English = Emperor (From Empereur, which is from Emperator.)

In the Roman Empire we could see some emperors using 2, if not all 3 titles at the same time, as at this time, it was just names, not titles.

Can I assume all of this is correct?

"Caesar" was originally just a family name, the nomen of a patrician family of Rome belonging to the gens Iulia, known as the Iulii Caesares.

When Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BCE he was childless, and he left in his will as his universal heir his grandnephew Gaius Octavius Thurinus, a member of an equestrian branch of the plebeian gens Octavia (Octavian's mother Atia was Caesar's nephew). The will also stated that Octavius had to become his uncle's adopted son as well as hir heir, so he (as was customary in Roman society) took the full name of his new "father", Gaius Iulius Caesar Octavianus, although later he dropped the Octavianus from his official name in order to distance himself even further from his origins.

With the acceptance of Caesar's will and his posthumous adoption, Octavian won a large amount of power, because he inherited not only Caesar's enormous fortune, but especially his immense political clientele, which included not only a large part of Rome's populace and ruling class, but most importantly the soldiers of Caesar's legions, who were related to Caesar by clientelar links as it was common in Roman society. Thus, it was key for Octavian's political ambitions to be seen as Caesar's rightful and legitimate heir as much as possible.

As all subsequent Roman rulers were either born of became "adopted" (in many cases posthumously) into the imperial house, all of them became Caesares, either gaining that name by right of birth or adopting it after their "adoption" into the ruling family. Even emperors who rose to power by military force and who had no link whatsoecer with the previous ruler (like Vespasian) also played this charade by adopting the name Caesar into their official imperial name. And in time, this name became the one by which foreign peoples came to refer to the Roman ruler. In the Gospels, the Roman emperor is referred to as "Caesar", and in the III century Middle Persian inscription of Shapur I at Fars, the Roman emperors are also named as "Caesars".

In 38 BCE, Octavian changed his name again and became Imperator Caesar Divi Filius. He only retained the word Caesar from his previous name (as it was its most important part, and still useful) and chose all the other words to further aggrandize his status in front of the Roman society. Imperator was a title the Roman armies bestowed by acclamatio onto a victorious commander, and Divi Filius means literally "son of a/the god" or "son of a/the divinity"; by that time, Octavian had forced the Senate to deify his adoptive father Julius Caesar, and he immediately moved to exploit this action by calling himself "son of a god" in his new official name, copying a practice that had a long history in the eastern Hellenistic kingdoms. Thus, his third full officlal name could be translated as "The victorious commander Caesar, the son of a god".

And finally, in 41 BCE, after the victory at Actium, Octavian changed once more his full official name into its final form, and it became Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus, adding the adjective augustus to it. In Latin, augustus (augustus, augusti) was originally an adjective meaning "majestic" or "venerable" and it was used traditionally to refer to the gods and their actions (its Greek equivalent was sebastos). By adding it to his full official name, he emphasized even more his "sacred" aura, because from then on, he would be referred to with a term originally reserved to the gods.

The term mutated from an adjective into a name, and immediately augustus became the equivalent of our modern title of "emperor"; the Roman emperor was always the augustus, while there could be several caesares (essentially, all the immediate family of the ruler). For an emperor to rise anybody else to the rank of augustus, meant that he was sharing his power, and it was usually done by emperors with male sons, who wanted to ensure a smooth power transition after their death, although it could also be a political measure imposed by circumstances or random causes (Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, Septimius Severus and Clodius Albinus or Pupienus and Balbinus).

The traditional way by which an usurpation attempt was launched in the Roman empire took place when gathered soldiers acclaimed their commander as augustus, and the usurper minted coins calling himself augustus.
 
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"Caesar" was originally just a family name, the nomen of a patrician family of Rome belonging to the gens Iulia, known as the Iulii Caesares.

When Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BCE he was childless, and he left in his will as his universal heir his grandnephew Gaius Octavius Thurinus, a member of an equestrian branch of the plebeian gens Octavia (Octavian's mother Atia was Caesar's nephew). The will also stated that Octavius had to become his uncle's adopted son as well as hir heir, so he (as was customary in Roman society) took the full name of his new "father", Gaius Iulius Caesar Octavianus, although later he dropped the Octavianus from his official name in order to distance himself even further from his origins.

With the acceptance of Caesar's will and his posthumous adoption, Octavian won a large amount of power, because he inherited not only Caesar's enormous fortune, but especially his immense political clientele, which included not only a large part of Rome's populace and ruling class, but most importantly the soldiers of Caesar's legions, who were related to Caesar by clientelar links as it was common in Roman society. Thus, it was key for Octavian's political ambitions to be seen as Caesar's rightful and legitimate heir as much as possible.

As all subsequent Roman rulers were either born of became "adopted" (in many cases posthumously) into the imperial house, all of them became Caesares, either gaining that name by right of birth or adopting it after their "adoption" into the ruling family. Even emperors who rose to power by military force and who had no link whatsoecer with the previous ruler (like Vespasian) also played this charade by adopting the name Caesar into their official imperial name. And in time, this name became the one by which foreign peoples came to refer to the Roman ruler. In the Gospels, the Roman emperor is referred to as "Caesar", and in the III century Middle Persian inscription of Shapur I at Fars, the Roman emperors are also named as "Caesars".

In 38 BCE, Octavian changed his name again and became Imperator Caesar Divi Filius. He only retained the word Caesar from his previous name (as it was its most important part, and still useful) and chose all the other words to further aggrandize his status in front of the Roman society. Imperator was a title the Roman armies bestowed by acclamatio onto a victorious commander, and Divi Filius means literally "son of a/the god" or "son of a/the divinity"; by that time, Octavian had forced the Senate to deify his adoptive father Julius Caesar, and he immediately moved to exploit this action by calling himself "son of a god" in his new official name, copying a practice that had a long history in the eastern Hellenistic kingdoms. Thus, his third full officlal name could be translated as "The victorious commander Caesar, the son of a god".

And finally, in 41 BCE, after the victory at Actium, Octavian changed once more his full official name into its final form, and it became Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus, adding the adjective augustus to it. In Latin, augustus (augustus, augusti) was originally an adjective meaning "majestic" or "venerable" and it was used traditionally to refer to the gods and their actions (its Greek equivalent was sebastos). By adding it to his full official name, he emphasized even more his "sacred" aura, because from then on, he would be referred to with a term originally reserved to the gods.

The term mutated from an adjective into a name, and immediately augustus became the equivalent of our modern title of "emperor"; the Roman emperor was always the augustus, while there could be several caesares (essentially, all the immediate family of the ruler). For an emperor to rise anybody else to the rank of augustus, meant that he was sharing his power, and it was usually done by emperors with male sons, who wanted to ensure a smooth power transition after their death, although it could also be a political measure imposed by circumstances or random causes (Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, Septimius Severus and Clodius Albinus or Pupienus and Balbinus).

The traditional way by which an usurpation attempt was launched in the Roman empire took place when gathered soldiers acclaimed their commander as augustus, and the usurper minted coins calling himself augustus.

An informative post as always, thank you. It almost makes one wish you'd provide more updates for your Sassanian thread *cough*
 
Thank you all! This was very informative (also the slavic languages haha). I do feel a little brighter on the subject :)
I also noticed "Flavius" came in many roman emperor's names, and I thought maybe Flavius developed or could develop into a title as well? When I read Flavius, I don't see Caesar anywhere in their names, while Augustus is at the end.
 
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Thank you all! This was very informative (also the slavic languages haha). I do feel a little brighter on the subject :)
I also noticed "Flavius" came in many roman emperor's names, and I thought maybe Flavius developed or could develop into a title as well? When I read Flavius, I don't see Caesar anywhere in their names, while Augustus is at the end.

Presumably they were trying to borrow glory from the Flavian dynasty.

. During the later period of the Empire, the name Flavius frequently descended from one emperor to another, beginning with Constantius, the father of Constantine the Great.[1] The name became so ubiquitous that it was sometimes treated as a praenomen, to the extent of being regularly abbreviated Fl., and it is even described as a praenomen in some sources, although it was never truly used as a personal name. The last emperor to take the name was eastern emperor Constantine IV, during the seventh century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavia_(gens)
 
An informative post as always, thank you. It almost makes one wish you'd provide more updates for your Sassanian thread *cough*

Yes, I know that I've been negcting that thread. But these last months have been busy for me, I underwent some surgery and later I had to make up for the lost time at work, plus right now I'm not in the city and so I have no access to all the sources I've been using to write it. I'm afraid it'll have to wait until the second half of september or the first week of October.