Latin feminine cognomina of Greek origin.
The distribution of -enis and -etis in the oblique forms of hypocoristic feminine (mostly Greek) cognomina in private Latin inscriptions at the time of the Roman empire.
The study describes an area of Latin grammar, where it can be proved statistically, that - in situations with optionality - repetitive sequences occur less frequent than do others with no or little repetition. The issue treated is the distribution of some nominal derivations on hypocoristic feminine (mostly Greek) cognomina in Latin. It is concluded, that in the Latin language is active an overall tendency to avoid non-functional repetition.
Our corpus consists in 497 different forms of names (examples: Crestenis, Irenetis) with 871 occurrences. The forms with suffixes -etis, -atis are 17,5% of the total, in general, while the forms with suffixes -enis, -inis are 82,5 %. After a -t- in the base, the portion of suffixes -etis, -atisfalls from 17,5% to 2,9%, and after an -n- in the base the portion of suffixes -enis, -inis falls from 82,5% to 56,8 %.
The feminine personal names were chosen by people following a number of social and historical criteria, fashion trends and still more. Through the present study it becomes clear that, besides these criteria, there is another active way of choosing the form of the name, in particular the hypocoristic extensions, a phonotactic rule of non-repetition: There is a tendency to avoid consonantic circumvocalic repetition (and, at the same time, in the same words, a tendency to avoid vocalic repetition).
This basic condition of the Latin language cannot be only a Latin phenomenon, and it is in fact the result of a series of previous reports of mine (see bibliography), dealing with Italian, Spanish, Rumanian, French and Etruscan that it is possible to demonstrate exactly corresponding phenomena in these languages. Consequently we have identified a LINGUISTIC UNIVERSAL.
The materials are found in Albert Hehl, Die Formen der lateinischen Ersten Deklination in den Inschriften (diss. ), Tübingen, 1912.