Foreign morphology

[pne]

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 :-)

Comments

[pauamma]

That's also why English has blonde men, some of which may be someone's fiancee. :-)

[pne]

Arghh!

That’s one of my biggest pet peeves on the "Not Always Romantic" feed; there’s very little context to the quotes and if someone says fiancé when they mean fiancée (or vice versa, though that’s less common, or so it seems to me), it confuses me.