Μπράβο SBE, πολύ ενδιαφέρον. Ας το βάλουμε ολόκληρο το απόσπασμα:
Her own second name, Domna, looks to anyone familiar with Latin like an abbreviated form of domina “lady”, “mistress” in Latin; so it would be equivalent to the Aramaic Martha, which means mistress, wife of a king. But that tempting and convenient etymology was false. A man who married Domna thinking that her name was an omen of his future greatness would have been deceiving himself. The origin of the name lies in the Arabic Dumayna, an archaic diminutive of dimna, and etymologically connected with the colour word for black. We do not know what Domna was called at home. Her sister Maesa’s name is also Arab, thought to be from a verb masa, “walk with a swinging gait”, and one of her daughters has the feminine version of the dynastic Sohaemus (another word connoting blackness), the second, Mamaea, presents yet another Semitic name, bearing out the view that in Syria they continued in use for the women of a family. It would have been strange if only Domna had been given a regular Latin cognomen. Nonetheless, there was a temptation, once she had become Augusta, for Latin-speaking outsiders to see her name as an honorific title, if they thought about it, and that is what has happened in some inscriptions.
Barbara Levick. Julia Domna: Syrian Empress. London: Routledge, 2007, p. 18.
