Chapter VI: Modern Names From the Latin

There still remain a class of names derived from the Latin, being chiefly Latin words formed into names. Some of them answer to the class that we have called Christian Greek, being compound words assumed as befitting names by early Roman Christians, such as Deusvult.

There are fewer of these than of the like Greek designations, both from the hereditary system of nomenclature, and from the language being less suitable for such formations than the Greek, which was so well known to all educated Romans that a Greek appellation would convey as much meaning as a Latin one, and in that partially veiled form that always seems to have been preferred in nomenclature in the later ages of nations. Some, however, either from sound, sense, or association, have become permanent Christian names in one or more nations; and with these, for the sake of convenience, have been classed those formed from Latin roots, and which, though coined when their ancestral language was not only dead but corrupt, are too universal to be classed as belonging to any single country of modern Europe, though sometimes the product of a Romance tongue rather than of genuine Latin, or appearing in cognate languages in different forms; cousins, in fact, not brethren, and sometimes related to uncles sprung from the elder tongue.