La formazione dei suffissi andronimici -αινα e -ίνα in greco: percorsi semantici e dinamiche del mutamento

This paper reconstructs the historical paths and semantic principles that guided the formation of the andronymic suffixes -αινα and -ίνα (etymologically independent, the former Greek, the latter a borrowing from Latin) in the Greek linguistic domain, through various stages, from Antiquity to the Modern Age. According to the Greek onomastic custom, the married woman is given a name derived from her husband’s first name or surname with the addition of -αινα or -ίνα (e.g. η Παύλαινα “the wife of Παύλoς”; η Πλατίνα “the wife of Πλατής”), the selection of which is nowadays conditioned by prosodic factors. This current pattern is the final outcome of two different, albeit specular, semantic paths and dynamics of change: reduction on the one hand and the creation of functional domains on the other. In fact, -αινα has a history entirely internal to Greek and, from Antiquity to the Modern Age, has narrowed its domains of application until specialising, especially since the Middle Ages, in the andronymic function alone; instead, -ίνα (spread into Greek through Latin proper names and, progressively overlapping the semantic spaces of -αινα especially between the Medieval and Modern Ages) has undergone a process of functional expansion.