Hyphenated Names??

That's good! :-)

In England in the inner city a hyphenated name tends to mean your parents weren't married...

Your surname is your family name. It marks your place in history, in a particular line of people. That's part of what makes it so difficult to give up a maiden name. It feels as though you're denying your personal history, cutting yourself off from your original family.

That said, the issue becomes much more complicated when children arrive. Then hyphenation gets messy. Let's say Joseph Richards and Mary Singleton get married. Before children, Mary Singleton-Richards and Joseph Singleton-Richards are cumbersome enough names, but what happens when little Emily Singleton-Richards grows up and marries the boy next door, Thomas Carpenter-Meyers? They become Emily Singleton-Richards-Carpenter-Meyers and Thomas Singleton-Richards-Carpenter-Meyers? And what about the generation after that? It's unwieldy. For simplicity's sake, decide on one family name, will you? Either the husband's or the wife's, I don't care, just decide.

Visitor, I would guess that the progeny of hyphenated parents somehow figure it out when they themselves get married, but you raise an interesting predicament. Can anyone speak to Visitor's concern?

Names can be pretty damned silly: Louis Joseph Marie Antoine, Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon de Saint-Ve'ran. Now i ask you, ain't "Hey Louie, c'm'ere." a good deal more sensible?

I like the Spanish last name system.

In most Spanish speaking countries, if your father's last name is García and your mother's last name is Márquez, then your last name is García Márquez. You have both your father's and your mother's last name. Your children will only get the García, though.

In Spain they have gone one step further. Upon the birth of the first child, they decide whether it will be the man's or the woman's last name to come first. After that, all the siblings must have the last name in the same order. (Every child would be Márquez García, in case Sr. García and Sra. Márquez chose to have her last name first... and the Márquez last name is the one to be inherited).

Yeah, that system is very elegant. I'd thought it was still ultimately patrilineal -- the mother's name is gone in a couple of generations -- not that the mother's name could be the one inherited. Cool.

Last names are a fairly recent innovation for most speakers of English, and only become required in the mid-eighteenth. Customarily, manor courts would record what was more accurately a decription--so the brewer becomes Hannah Alewife, and the man who makes the carts becomes Willem Wainwright, and the one who prepares the wool for spinning and weaving becomes Maud Fuller--in the museum at Wilmington, North Carolina, it tells of how a group of carpenters were brought out North America (the assumption, apparently, who better to clear the woods for other settlers) with their wives and families, and the entire roster is Wrights--William Wright, James Wright, David Wright--because that was the word for carpenter. Family names, and familial connections and geneologies were considered properly to be the concern of the aristocracy, who had property rights to consider, and the serfs were, of course chattel. One doesn't give one's dog a last name, why would one do so for one's peasant? And anyway, John's the miller, if i send my reeve out to find him, i tell him i want John Miller, and everyone understands one another.

A great deal of bother, i can assure you . . .

I do like the tradition preserved in Iceland: Helga, the daughter of Thor, becomes Helga Thorsdottir (if she chooses to name herself after her father), whereas her son Sven can choose to call himself Sven Helgesen . . . i always thought that was neat . . .

That is nice! Didn't know that one. How does the "if she chooses" part work? What is the name on her birth certificate?

Helga . . . actually, i don't know how they work that part, likely the "certificate" is an entry in the parish registry, which would translate to something like: BORN: to Thor and Brigitta, of this parish, a daughter, Helga . . .

I have been informed by a lady of Icelandic descent that one chooses how to name one's self . . .

Nice. I guess that's what my parents did, by not giving me a middle name. Certainly came in handy. (Said earlier on this thread that my maiden name is now my middle name, took hubby's surname.)

Setanta, you are a fount of information today! I especially enjoyed the explanation of how certain common names arose: Miller, Reeve, Brewer.

I'd opt to have my surname be Scribbler if I could...

D'art, when, pray tell, is Setanta NOT a fount of information?

(((((Setanta)))))

I have read that an Icelandic family of four normally has four different last names. Dad is Olafsen, Mom is Vinbogadottir, Sonny is Thorsen and Sis is Helgadottir.

Yeah, but you'd have to honor tradition, in which case, your name would be Clark or Scrivner (clark is the modern English corruption of clerk, which is in turn, a corruption of cleric--i.e., men in religious orders were often the only literate people available to record something).

Names like Smith, Potter and Miller are obvious, but others, not so, and this habit of naming serfs in this manner held throughout Europe--in German, combining the words for knife and smith, produces Messerschmidt--a knife maker.

Some common English language names:

Wainwright--a maker of two-wheeled carts (a "wain")
Cartwright--a make of four-wheeled carts
Fuller--someone who removes the oil from the wool before spinning
Bailey--the old French term for the gate house of a castle or fortified camp is baille, which originally meant the grilled gate itself--so, to the Anglo-Saxon, a bailey, the man responsible is the bailiff, and this area of responsibility is his bailiwick. To try to secure the release of an imprisoned family member involved going to gate to plead his case, literally, going "bail" for him.
Reeve--the agent of a member of the aristocracy--England had been divided into shires, and the Shire Reeve was the agent of the ruling Earl (from old norse Jarl), or of the King--hence, sheriff.
HOWEVER--Reeves, from a corruption of "to reave" which means to pass a rope through a block and tackle, the block and tackle man was commonly referred to as "Old Reaves."
Pickett--someone who stands sentry to a property, with a reference to the stakes driven in the ground to protect him from the sudden charge of a horseman--the pickets.

Anglo-Saxon and Danish combine to produce more strange (to our modern ear) place and given names. Churl is a corrupted form of karl--a body servant or armed man in the household--but which survives in names including -karl. A boor (same origin as the Dutch boer) is a smallholding farmer, hence the idea of "booring" conversation, and also of names like Boreman or Boorman, meaning a farmer's hired hand. Tun, also twn (welsh spelling) means a fortified settlement, and is the origin of town; worthing or worthy means a fortified manor house--hence, Worthington means the fortified town of the fortified manor house. (Fortification was much on the mind of settlers in those days.) Holm comes from the Danish, and means a free-holding. So, as in the English actor Denholm Elliot--denholm means the Danish free-holding. A similar term from Erse and Gaelic is croft, a small holding, so Bancroft means the small holding, or farm, on the river Ban.

This kinda stuff just fascinates me, ya know?

Me too! I like the -wallah suffixes in Indian surnames, too. Chaiwallah, or whatever. ("The guy who sells chai.") Also straight-up descriptives -- Merchant et al.

Interesting site:

http://www.gaminggeeks.org/Resources/KateMonk/India/Hindu-Names/Surnames.htm

I, too, find it fascinating, even though I don't hail from Anglo Saxon stock!

Well, it's just that Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Germanic names are easier to trace in that manner. My own ancestors were Irish, and they were matrilinear. In a society in which women went to war, went about armed, and had the full civil rights of men, one would not inquire too closely into the parentage of any child a woman bore. Therefore, the only certain blood-line was that of the mother. Men commonly showed far more interest in their "sisters-son" than in those boys who were their putative sons. Additionally, both Erse and Gaelic have more than one way of indicating descent. The O' in O'Hara, for example, means the descendants of (the male) Hara. M', Mc and Mac have a similar meaning, although it is more proximate, meaning the son or granson of a man still living. N' an Na means the descendants of such and such a woman. The final wave of Keltic invasion into Ireland were the Milesians, that is, the sons and followers of Mil. But Mil died in Spain before the emmigration, and his wife, Scota took over the tribe. To the inhabitants of Ireland and of southern Scotland, where the Milesians set up the colony of the Dalriada, they were the sons of Scota--the N'Scota or Nascota. When the Romans encountered them, they called them the Ascotti, and the land where they met them has been called Scotland ever since the Anglo-Saxons began to arrive. Most Irish family names are created from a welter of given names combined over the ages, and corruptions of cognomens.

Huh!

(Hubby is largely Irish, and we are going to a family gathering of the Irish side this weekend, 75th annual, with lots of geneological info, so this is actually quite pertinent as well as interesting. He has a weird name, if I PMed it to you would you be interested in commenting?)