Disputatio:Martha Washington

Washingtonius, Washingtonia, Washington

Washingtonius with its masculine ending seems a bit strange to me, but perhaps I am overreacting. Unfortunately, Glass's Life of George Washington seems to call her only uxor and vidua Custis. This brings up the general question of how our norms work with the names of spouses. Lesgles (disputatio) 16:31, 18 Maii 2015 (UTC)

This is a rare problem: it can only happen to us when one spouse is notable enough to have been fully named in Latin sources, and the other not as notable as that, but still notable enough to have an article.

If we don't have a source for "Martha Washingtonius", we have to change it, because (a) it's ungrammatical: Latin personal names don't work this way, (b) our strict rule is only to acccept a modern Latinized surname for the person to whom a reliable source has applied it. OK, if we change it, we change to "Martha Washington". Now, curiously, one of our early Latin sources for her husband's name makes it "Washington -is" -- so we could decide to change him to match. I just throw that in as a thought. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:16, 18 Maii 2015 (UTC)

In Russian—not that it's really relevant—the rule is that if a foreign name looks like a second declension noun (ends in a consonant), it declines in the masculine but is indeclinable in the feminine. So George is is nom. Dzhordzh Vashington, gen. Dzhordzha Vashingtona, but Martha is nom. Marta Vashington, gen. Marty Vashington. Lesgles (disputatio) 18:54, 18 Maii 2015 (UTC)