The original meaning of persona in Latin is “mask” [1]. From that sense, that of “character” was easily derived; hence “dramatis personae”. Already in Latin a more general sense was developing: it also meant “a human being who performs any function” [1]. That’s the origin of Portuguese pessoa, French personne, English person. The etymology of persona is disputed, but it could be a loanword from an Etruscan phersu “mask” [2, 3] (it’s certainly a big coincidence), which could in turn have been borrowed from Greek πρόσωπον (πρός, ὤψ), which originally meant “face”, then later “mask” and “person” too; Modern Greek πρόσωπο means both “face” and “person”, but not “mask”.

Russian лицó means “face”, but also “person” in certain contexts, such as legal and grammatical [4].

Portuguese rosto “face” has its origins in Latin rostrum, “the bill or beak of a bird; the snout, muzzle, mouth of animals” [5]. Russian мо́рда means “snout” and, in a rude manner, “face of a person”.

  • [1] http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/dict?name=ls&lang=la&word=persona&filter=CUTF8
  • [2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/person
  • [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/persona#Latin
  • [4] https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%BE
  • [5] http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/dict?name=ls&lang=la&word=rostrum&filter=CUTF8
  • [6] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B0