Thursday, 16 August 2012

pne: A picture of a plush toy, halfway between a duck and a platypus, with a green body and a yellow bill and feet. (Default)

Today I got a postcard with Ferapontov Monastery on it.

I looked it up on Wikipedia and had a look at the Interwiki links, and saw that the Romance languages (Spanish, French, and Italian) called it “Monastery of Ferapontov”.

But AFAIK, the -ov ending in the original is simply a bit of derivational morphology that turns a noun into a possessive adjective, so it’s “Ferapont’s Monastery” or “The Monastery of Ferapont”.

On the other hand, not everyone can be expected to know that and to undo the possessive derivation when applying their own language’s :-)

Profile

pne: A picture of a plush toy, halfway between a duck and a platypus, with a green body and a yellow bill and feet. (Default)
Philip Newton

June 2015

S M T W T F S
 12 3456
78910111213
14151617181920
2122232425 2627
282930    

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Saturday, 3 January 2026 14:02
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios