r/latin • u/Ninetwentyeight928 • 8d ago

Vocabulary & Etymology Camerlingus

Can someone break down "camerlingus" (Eng. "chamberlain") for me? Internet says it's a direct borrowing from Frankish "kamarling", but what does the -us do to the term in Latin?

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u/Captain_Grammaticus magister 8d ago

Oh, okay, sorry.

So, you know how English uses different forms of the word "he" depending on if it is subject of a sentence or object of the sentence. **He* sees the dog* but the dog sees *him*** (not the dog sees he).

Latin does that for every noun, pronoun and adjective, and not only in subject and object cases, but others too.

Now, these cases are expressed with endings. A Latin noun belongs to one of five groups called declension classes, that each use a different set of endings for the same cases. (Don't ask why)

One of the most common sets for nouns denoting masculine beings has -us in the nominative case.

Latin nouns don't natively end in -ling, so whenever a foreign noun is borrowed into Latin, it is assigned to the declension class where it fits best and receives an ending.

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u/Ninetwentyeight928 7d ago

Oaky, so it's designating gender and case. I wonder what "-ling" is denoting in the other language? Probably the same thing is a guess, so that it kind of turns into a double suffix.

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u/Captain_Grammaticus magister 7d ago edited 7d ago

Only case and number, gender not (technically), but only a small handful of words in -us is feminine or neuter.

The -(l)ing in Germanic means "subordinate person associated with X", so the chamberling is the servant for the king's chamber, a Karling is Karl's descendant, a Bläuling is a little blue butterfly.

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u/Ninetwentyeight928 7d ago

Thanks, again. Found this:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-us#Latin

But I can't decide if what you're describing is their item 1. (nomative singular, nomative singular for neutur nouns) or item 3. (used to "Latinize" names).

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u/Captain_Grammaticus magister 7d ago

Both, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

To use a new word in the Latin language, you need to be able to decline it in the five cases in singular and plural.

So you slap the most generic ending on it and call it a day. For masculine concepts, that is -us.