While working on an article about the Ottoman Empire for Popular Anthropology Magazine, I became fascinated with by the creativity of the various Sultans' titles and appellations. There's Selim the Grim, Suleiman the Magnificent, Mehmet the Conqueror, and Beyazit the Lightning-bolt. It's either the most colorfully named royal dynasty or the greatest Wrestlemania card ever.
I wonder then, if it was boredom or megalomania that left European history full of “so-and-so the Greats.” Or if the long lines of Kings with the same name came from handing the kingdom off to the firstborn son over and over. I mean, after the 17th or 18th Louis, I can't keep any of them straight. I'll bet the historians have some explanation for this, but at the moment I don't know any to ask.
What is interesting to me is the orderof names and titles. Or, to be more specific, whether or not the order of a name and title matches up with the order of anything else in the language.
| Direct object Verb | Verb Direct object |
| Turkish Mehmet Bey Japanese Kitagawa San | English Mr. Smith Spanish Señor Lopez |
I have no doubt that there are counter examples (in Turkish, for instance, political titles like "Prime minister" precede the name instead of following them), and I wouldn't expect anything other than a statistical correlation, if that.
That there should be some correspondences between these two seemingly unrelated aspects of language is not as surprising as you might think. Linguists have found correspondences between the verb-object order of a language and many other aspects of grammar. (Which, for those of you who remember our LiCTLe of the Month for Hixkaryana, explains the obsession that many linguists have developed for the Basic Word Order of sentences).
Titles, however, are more culturally conditioned than things like verb-object or noun-adjective order and probably more likely to be influenced by whatever the head honcho a few kingdoms over decided to call himself. Still, if one wanted to look into this... I would probably head over to the world atlas of linguistic features and cross index verb-object order and the name-title order for a very large number of languages, adjusting for areal effects. Does anyone out there know any place to find data about name-title order?
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