[Facts] Re: Second meaning of Claudia
in reply to a message by Eternity9
Actually, both suggested meanings are wrong. I suspect the sense "lame" comes from the Emperor Claudius (Actually Tiberius, Claudius was a family name), who was known to be lame and partially deaf due to severe childhood illness. However the family name is NOT derived from Latin claudus, "lame", but from an earlier version of the family name, Clausus. In Latin this is the perfect (past) participle of claudo "(to) close" not claudo "(to) limp" (more usually claudeo, which lacks the past participle). Further, according to the family history, the first Clausus or Claudius, was NOT a Latin-speaking Roman, but an Umbrian-speaking Sabine, so the Latin cognates are only tangentially relevant. There is not really enough early textual evidence to say what the origin is (only a hundred or so Sabine words are recorded), but a link to claudo "close" through a cognate Sabine word is more probable. Purely speculative, but the related Latin Clausum "enclosed space" may better indicate what the original Umbrian-Sabine name may have meant.