Talk:Brutus (cognomen)

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Other uses
Re this sentence


 * The House of Brutii is a playable faction in the video game Rome:Total War.

Unless Brutii should have one i, then this should not be on the disambig page.--TimothyJacobson (talk) 20:00, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Disagree. Disambigs often take considerable leeway with variant forms of the word - plurals, different cases, etc. Maybe you should take it up with the disambig committee. But anyway I have never played the game so I don't know what it is called; if Brutii, not correctly from Brutus, as its plural is Bruti. That is irrelevant to the disambig argument however; I think spelling variants are fair game for disambigs and if there are different pages they should be cross-linked.Dave (talk) 00:46, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Cognomen vs agnomen
The article incorrectly does not distinguish cognomen from agnomen. See Roman naming conventions. One Junius might have a cognomen of Brutus but if his son has it then it has become an agnomen not a cognomen. Here it must be an agnomen; we cannot suppose all those Bruti to merit the nickname "stupid." I'd tend to this but it is likely to be a lot of work and I'm on another run.Dave (talk) 00:51, 12 September 2009 (UTC)


 * It is sometimes hard (or even not useful) to distinguish between cognomen and agnomen; you're right. But sometimes in jokes or for rhetorical purposes, the original meaning of the "nickname" preserved in the cognomen is activated. Cicero does this to mock people or to make jokes. ng that aristocratic Romans liked such slangy and even self-mocking names to distinguish them; by comparison, to take an example from a neighboring culture, aristocratic Celtic names tend to be based on elements predictably meaning 'great,' 'ruler,' 'high' and so on. So articles like this should have a section on etymology, but make clear after the original bearer of the name, a cognomen is not necessarily felt as a true nickname. Cynwolfe (talk) 20:21, 4 November 2009 (UTC)