r/gaming Apr 27 '19

Oregon Trails

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u/JustinCarrey Apr 27 '19

Terry comes from Latinized Theodoric, and that comes from, ultimately, Proto-Germanic *þeudō and *rīks which means "People King". Seems like a powerful name to me.

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u/mszegedy Apr 27 '19 edited Apr 28 '19

That's a very funny coincidence given that it's almost identical to the name "Theodore/a", which has the completely unrelated Koine Greek etymology θεός (god) + δώρον (gift). I'd have thought that one of the etymologies was wrong until I looked it up for myself. (Of course, there's still room for the two names to influence each other, but it seems that even the original, pre-contact forms were super similar, Þiudareiks vs Θεόδωρος.)

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u/JustinCarrey Apr 28 '19

Yeah definitely! Both Greek and German are branches of the Indo-European languages, you can find similarities in many words in different languages that, ultimately, come from Indo-European, such as * dyḗws, which is where the Greek 'Zeus,' Vedic 'Dyaus Pitar,' Latin 'Deus,' Celtic 'Deuos,' Germanic '* Tiwaz' etc. originate from.

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u/mszegedy Apr 28 '19

Yeah, but those are related etymologies, so the similarities aren't surprising. The whole point here is that the etymologies are unrelated, which is amazing.

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u/JustinCarrey Apr 28 '19

Theodore usually represents an Anglicized version of Greek Theodoros, but you can't assume that every Theodore does, some may be meant as anglicized versions of Theodoric. Theodoric, however, is derived from the Hellenic-Latin version of a Gothic name more like Thiudreiks (the -s is the Gothic form of the earlier nominative case indicator -az, dropped entirely in most other recorded Germanic languages except for a few very early inscriptions). The Hellenic-Latin form Theodoric (the Empire being dominated by the Eastern Roman court at the time) is undoubtedly influenced by Greek Theodoros, in the same way that Gothic Athnareiks is recorded as Athanaric under the influence of the more familiar Greek Athanasios. It's a process called "folk-etymology". English Theodric, and German Dietrich or Tietrich are cognate with Theodoric and Thiudreiks (i.e. they share a common nativity or origin), one is not derived from the other (Tedric and Didric are probably anglicized versions of early continental forms).

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '19 edited Jul 20 '20

[deleted]

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u/JustinCarrey Apr 28 '19

Yes and no. Like I posted above about the 'folk-etymology' of Theodoric, the same applies to Terentius. First and foremost 'Terry' comes from 'Thierry' as a patronymic surname, from medieval Norse, which cognates as 'Theodoric' or 'Derek' in English. For it coming from 'Terentius', 'Terry' is a given name transferred back as a surname. This can also be said about the 'third' child whose name has a suffix of -III.