Second meaning of Claudia
Most name books say Claudia is Latin meaning "lame". "Magnanimous" is another meaning,
which stemmed from the fact that emperors of the Roman gens Claudius (masculine of Claudia),
treated their captives well.This information came from Lareina Rule' book, Name Your Baby.
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Actually, both suggested meanings are wrong. I suspect the sense "lame" comes from the Emperor Claudius (Actually Tiberius, Claudius was a family name), who was known to be lame and partially deaf due to severe childhood illness. However the family name is NOT derived from Latin claudus, "lame", but from an earlier version of the family name, Clausus. In Latin this is the perfect (past) participle of claudo "(to) close" not claudo "(to) limp" (more usually claudeo, which lacks the past participle). Further, according to the family history, the first Clausus or Claudius, was NOT a Latin-speaking Roman, but an Umbrian-speaking Sabine, so the Latin cognates are only tangentially relevant. There is not really enough early textual evidence to say what the origin is (only a hundred or so Sabine words are recorded), but a link to claudo "close" through a cognate Sabine word is more probable. Purely speculative, but the related Latin Clausum "enclosed space" may better indicate what the original Umbrian-Sabine name may have meant.
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I am sorry to disappoint you, but the information in your source is just wrong.
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The Claudian emperors were not the most popular, and I greatly doubt that their name would have been used in a flattering sense at the time. After all, when Claudius himself died (was murdered, actually), a satire appeared which claimed that while other emperors had become gods on their death, he became a pumpkin.I suspect that, whoever Lareina Rule is, she was trying to put a positive spin on Claudia for the people who might worry about that kind of thing. Which doesn't include me: there have been many thousands of Claude and Claudia people down the ages, and nothing indicates that more of them were physically challenged than the rest of the population.
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