@
Mamapolo2016 My hobbies are largely nerdy! So, I decided to pursue this further to try to figure out the story behind the single n and the double n. According to my Latin dictionary, the word for curly hair in Latin is cincinnus. The word cincinnatus is an adjective meaning "having curly hair". (A lot of Roman family names came from a specific trait of an ancestor. )
So why are the n's in cincinnus the way they are? Well, the word comes from a Greek word. The letter "c" is was originally the Greek "chi", and transcribing the other letters into our Roman alphabet, the Greek word for curly hair was cicinnos.
The Romans pronounced the letter c as a hard sound (similar to the Greek chi). I am guessing that ki-kinnus eventually got pronounced kin-kinnus, and so the official spelling became cincinnus. The adjective cincinnatus would follow from that.
Hopefully this amuses @
Sirsnowman as well!
