Foreign morphology

[pne]

Today I got a postcard with Ferapontov Monastery on it.

I looked it up on Wikipedia and had a look at the Interwiki links, and saw that the Romance languages (Spanish, French, and Italian) called it “Monastery of Ferapontov”.

But AFAIK, the -ov ending in the original is simply a bit of derivational morphology that turns a noun into a possessive

Comments

[muckefuck]

Georgian compounds the error by adding its own possessive suffix (i.e. P’erapontovis monasteri), as does Finnish (Ferapontovin luostari).

Furthermore, the original Greek form of the saint's name is Θεράπων (in full, Θεράπων της Λευκής Λίμνης), so arguably they should be going back to that for equivalents. In Polish, for instance, where Greek theta yields /t/ rather than /f/, it's Monaster Terapontowski.

[pne]

I didn’t know that about Georgian, and hadn’t caught the Finnish-good point!

And yes, Therapon Monastery might be a better English name.

(And shouldn’t the Polish be Monaster Terapontski without the -ow-? Though I don’t know enough Polish to say for sure.)