Conrad and Cnut --or is that, Konrad and Knut?

Thanks, Edwin! Good to see your Gandalfian return to the forum. I recall your mention of the one with the ship motif, the (ahem) last time I posted it, not (cough) long enough ago to look that good on another thread.
It's one of the more common issues of the reign, and shows up periodically. ...Right, seldom much better struck than that. Equal parts 'sorry to report' and 'to wallow in the obvious.' But the ones I've seen recently online run to having at least that much of the ship; sometimes more.

 

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Wonderful coins and write-up, @+VGO.DVCKS ! As you know, these are right down my alley of interest.

As stated above, I think that very much depends on where you live. Growing up at the German-Danish border, there were three boys names Knut in my highschool year. We had to distinguish them by calling them "small Knut" (he was small), "football Knut" (he was a gifted athlete), and "brown Knut" (he had brown hair). My own real name is equally regional – when I introduce myself to Americans, they typically answer with "what?", followed by series of references to the TV series Vikings and a famous tennis player.

Two friends of mine just got a son and named him Arkadiusz. The mother is Polish. I think that's as beautiful a name as it gets.

In Germany, the "medieval" baby names Friedrich/Frieda, Karl/Karla, Arthur, Oskar, Henrike/Heinrich, Mathilda, Emma and Otto currently experience a sort of renaissance. Two other friends even named their daughter Theophanu...

When it comes to Roman emperors, Anton, Markus, Maximian, Maximilian, and Konstantin never fell out of fashion, I guess. The names Emil and Emilia, deriving from Aemilius/a, are also popular.

I don't have a Cnut, but here is another, later Conrad:

Kingdom of Sicily, under Konrad IV of Hohenstaufen, AE denaro, 1250–1254 AD, struck at Messina. Obv: + CON[R]ADVS, cross with two diamonds in fields. Rev: + IER[L E]T SICI, RX with omega-stroke above. 15mm, 0.68g. Ref: Spahr 155, MEC XIV, p. 133, no. 3.

 

Many thanks on all counts, @Orielensis. ...Surely there's a whole academic discipline just for the study of given names. If not, as you eloquently demonstrate, there Should be!
Your Konrad IV is considerably better than most of the ones I'v ever run across. Nice one!

 

The study of names (particularly given names) is known as onomastics, and there have been quite a few historical onomastic studies that have been extremely useful in tracing the migrations of various ethnic groups and peoples, since names and naming patterns tend to persist longer, especially in endogamous groups, than the use of the particular languages from which such names originate. For example, the tracing of the immediate antecedents of the earliest Ashkenazi Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, in the late 9th and the 10th century, to Northern France (in the Carolingian era) rather than directly to Italy.

 

Many thanks for this, @donna ML! This sounds almost like the linguistic equivalent of paleogenetics! Very, Very cool. ...On a much more anecdotal level, and for obvious reasons, naming patterns can also be of some help in genealogy (although caution is advised where assumptions are concerned).

 

Yes, especially in groups like mine, in which one always named one's first male and female child (and usually subsequent children) after direct ancestors, but never after a living one. And with the husband and wife usually taking turns on which side the ancestor whose name was being used came from. I have, more than once, been able to apply those rules to make educated guesses -- which later proved correct -- about the otherwise unknown names of particular ancestors of mine, particularly women, whose given names were recorded much less frequently then men's. For example, once I discovered that one of my 3rd-great-grandmothers and her two siblings all named their first daughters "Hina," it wasn't hard to figure out that that must have been the first name of their deceased mother, my 4th great-grandmother -- who, I already knew, was deceased before any of those daughters were born. Years later, I found a document with her name on it, and it turned out that my guess was correct.

 

That's Terrific @DonnaML!!! I'm loving this!