Cultures and last-naming

Factual Questions
21

Jorge: I think you might know what I’m about to describe for the Philippines, but for the rest of you you may find it interesting.

In the Philippines, the second name a person took was their last name(I think the last name first tradition in mainland Asia was due to Chinese cultural influence).

Often, the last name someone took was the first name of one of their children. So, Timbô who had a son named Pitík was known as Timbô, amá ni Pitík (Timbô, father of Pitík). Sometimes, a physical feature was used to describe a person. Also children took whatever surname they pleased.

When the Spanish arrived, this changed. With the introduction of Christianity, Filipinos took the names of Saints and Spanish surnames (like my last name, Garcia. My grandfather’s mother had the last name “Santa Maria”).

Another problem for the Spanish was, so many people were using the same last names, that it was inefficient for tax collection. So, in 1849, General Narciso Clavería ordered an alphabetic list of surnames for the natives to use.

I hear the distribution by civil servants was so systematic, that they just went down the list alphabetically, and some small villages had all of the families with names starting with the same letter.

Anyway, there are some native names that Modern Filipinos (Even Christianized Filipinos) have. One of my neighbors across the street have the name “Gatdula”. The "Gat- " prefix meant “lord”.

Anyway, there is a website with a list of native Filipino names here: Katálogo ng mga Apelyidong Pilipino (i got most of my info there, BTW)

It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…

22

Huh, I have a special interest in last names.

  1. Sikhs, all male Sikhs are last named Singh, all women Kaur. This happened a few hundred years (700 yrs ago?) ago when Sikhism started. In case you don’t know who Sikhs are, they’re Indians from the Punjab area, you can recognize them by their turbans. Good luck looking up the phone book there!

  2. Armenians. All end in “ian” or “yan”. A lot of them came to the US. Dukmejian was a CA governor. Some of them changed to the Russian form of “ov” as in Tarkisian to Tarkisov. Other famous ones, the UNLV coach and Cher.

  3. Jews. About the 1400’s Austria suddenly decided everyone had to have last names. A lot of Jews took their names from place names or professions. Cohen is a religious type last name. Anything ending in “man” is probably E. European Jewish. “mann” is German. Some names are not exclusively Jewish or German.

  4. Chinese. Last name doesn’t have to have meaning but some do. You can tell if they are from Taiwan, HK or China by spellings. Eg. Wang (Taiwan) and Wong (HK) are different forms of the same name. Anything that has Z and X in it are from China. There is one last name and two given names. The second name in an entire generation are usually the same, e.g. LAM HOI KEUNG, then all the cousins in that generation will be LAM HOI xxxxxx. Similarly sometimes American parents or British parents will name their kids Jxxxxx Smith where all the kids have the first name begin with J. Anglos are also fond of naming kids after themselves, like Bill Gates II, etc. and Chinese abhor this because different generations cannot have same names.

  5. All Germans with “itz” in their last name were originally from Poland, but still Teutonic as opposed to Slavic.

  6. Germans with “von” are from the nobility, and still are around, though a lot perished in WWII.

  7. You almost only see double "k"s in their last name i.e. “kk”. Though many Americans view Finns as Scandinavians, they actually are not.

  8. We seldom see Russians with “off” endings like “Ostrakoff”, but these stand for Russians with a Germanic ancestry.

  9. Arabic “al”. All that means is they are from a certain “tribe”. Kind of like the old Roman “gens”.

Last names are very interesting indeed.

23

Oh, and:

  1. Ukrainians last names mostly end in “ko” as in Kosaranko.

  2. Sometimes you can directly see Russians of Eastern origin as in Tartarov, someone who was descended from Tartars.

  3. And of course, anyone who watches skating knows that all Russian womens’ last name end in “ova” as in Simenova.

  4. Koreans don’t have a lot of last names it seems, some are similar to Chinese last names, but Park and Kim are almost exclusively Korean, but Chung, Lee, and Chun amongst others are shared with Chinese. Japanese last names are very different from the other two, but they are very different themselves too, can be very short like Ono or very long like Takahashi.

  5. Yul Brynner was from Kamchatka.

  6. Mongolians have very unusual last names very different from the Chinese.

  7. All Nepalese last names from one tribe are the same.

  8. You can sometimes by the last name, what cast an (East) Indian is from.

  9. In Pakistan, your name does not have to be the same as your fathers. You can name your kid anything you want. i.e James Brown can name his kid Michael Hetherington.

24

Sorry, #9 should read:

  1. You can sometimes tell by the last name what caste an (East) Indian is.
25

Yeah, you throw ‘Moon’ in there with ‘Park’, ‘Kim’, ‘Lee’ and one or two others (I never heard of ‘Buyn’, or even ‘Shin’, before.) and you just about have it for Korean names.

My mother’s maiden name was ‘Latta’, which apparently traces back to Scotland but seems strange for a Scottish name. One rumor I read on a genealogical Web page was that some sailors from Spain jumped ship up there. I dunno, ‘lata’ in Spanish, of course, means ‘tin’ or ‘can’, but I don’t know if ‘Latta’ comes from that. It’s then claimed that ‘Latta’ comes from Arabic, but I don’t recall an explanation of how it fits in in that cultural slot.

As for funny last names, you see a lot in the US and wonder why anyone would keep some that would seem quite problematic. I doubt they all came from the Netherlands. You’d maybe even figure the Chinese name, ‘Hu’ would cause problems.

Ray Naw-no-Bite

26

  1. Yup, it seems like 95% of Koreans have 10 names, must be heck looking up the phone book too. Apart from the Rev S.Y.Moon, I’ve never met any other Korean Moons.

  2. That’s the story of the Spanish Armada which went all around the British Isles being hounded by a storm and Drake. Supposedly a lot of shipwrecked Spanish left their genes behind, especially in Ireland where they are supposed to be the ancestors of the Dark Irish. Latta does not indeed sound Gaelic. It sounds Spanish or Indian (the double t).

  3. That’s not the worse Chinese last name. The worst one I know of is “Dong” which can also be “Dung”. There is a Vietnamese market here called “My Dung Market”. The worst (or best) Chinese name I’ve encountered is “Hung Low”.

  4. And of course there is my name. I’ve seen a Dr. Feelgood in the phone book. And there are many instances of Major Paynes in the military. And Dr. Bonecracks, Dr. Doctor, but we digress…

27

Well Mr Feelgood, the way Chinese, Vietnamese pronounce there names is now how we who speak English say it ;). Anyway, on a mailing list I am on, one of the people was discussing Chinese names, and he said the last name doesn’t need to mean anything, but the first name usually does (and should).

It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…

28

Re: Latta - These days, outside of the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland, most names of Gaelic origin have been anglicized in some way. (For example MacKenzie, unquestionably a Gaelic name although there are no k’s or z’s in Gaelic!)

I would not be surprised for this to be the case with Latta, although I can’t off the top of my head think what it might be an anglicization of. There is actually an Irish word, lata - I don’t find it in my Scots Gaelic dictionaries, though. (Also it means “slat” so it strikes me as an unlikely source.) The anglicized names are often quite different in both spelling and pronunciation from the Gaelic names - MacKenzie, again, was originally MacCoinneach, which is pronounced more like “McKinnick” - a similar thing could have happened with Latta. You’ll probably never know for sure though.

29

The Arabic al does indeed mean “the”, as in Alhasan = The handsome.

I am not a linguist, so I may be a bit off (at least that’s what my family says), but Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages, and I have noticed several words that are very similar between the two languages (i.e. Shalom and Salaam).

30

Something I’ve heard about Russian names: women get the appellation “ova” while men get “ov”. Thus a brother and sister, one will be named Simonov and the other Simonova. (Can anybody confirm this?)

31

Still hasen’t nailed down the source of al- in Arabic - “the” is indeed the meaning. Arabic and Hebrew are very closely related languages. Hebrew was first, then Aramaic and Arabic.

Names are similar in these languages for several reasons, same language group, also many are biblical, and have importance to both groups.

Siddique=Zadok
Ibrahim=Abraham

32

:slight_smile:
Park, Kim and Lee are the “Smith”, “Jones” and “Johnson” of Korea!
Hell, it wasn’t until a few years ago that Parks could inter-marry…it was theorized that they were all related to eachother (I think the same goes for “Kim”)

33

It’s not that men and women in Russian have different names, it’s that the last names (and the patronyms) have masculine and feminine forms, just like adjectives. (Compare “beau” and “belle” in French.)

To take an example from Babylon 5, Cdr. Ivanova’s father’s name was “Andrey [something] Ivanov.” Her full name is Susan Andreyevna Ivanova. Her brother’s full name was Ganya Andreyev Ivanov. (“Susan” is not a Russian name today, but who knows about the 23rd century? And I think “Ganya” is actually a nickname, but I don’t know what for.)

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

34

Let me expand a little on Chinese names…

I believe the Chinese actually started out with patronymic names a long time ago, at least as far as the first written records, and probably quite a bit earlier than that too. The first family names were generally descriptive ones (e.g. farmer, worker, king, etc.), but most of these have since been replaced by more complicated (lineage wise) family names. The name Huang (Hwang), for example, translates directly to English as the color yellow, which was * the * royal color. The first emperor of China was literally called “Yellow Emperor”, Huang Di. Other names, such as Chen, Wang, or Li, all have their respective meanings, though they aren’t as obvious as Huang. In rare cases, some last names will contain two Chinese characters instead of one. An example of this would be Chu-Ko, made famous by Chu-Ko Liang, a legendary military strategist.

When it comes to first names, things start to get complicated. The format of a Chinese name is with a single character last name is:

1st Character - 2nd Character - 3rd Character

Last Name - First Name - First Name (not required)

(All Chinese characters have one syllable)

Most Chinese names have three characters today, but two were in fact quite prevalent in the early times. Anyway, traditional Chinese families will always maintain a family album (can’t find a better word), passed down from generation to generation. Whoever created that album will also write a poem in it, whereby all future generations will consult it for naming purposes. Say your family name is Li, and your ancestor had the wisdom to put the ABC song in it :D, then the names of your family members, by generation, will be:

1st Generation - Li A X
2nd Generation - Li B X
3rd Generation - Li C X
4th Generation - Li D X
5th Generation - Li E X
6th Generation - Li F X
…
…
…
…
.

Where “X” is an optional character, and often times the only way to distinguish between names of the same generation. If you and your siblings only have two characters for your first name, then, the first-born son gets the proper name, while the others are a toss up. These name poems are of course, much longer than your ABC song, and tend to carry some moral message. In cases where all the characters in the poem are used up, you just start from the beginning again. If you happen to be a brilliant scholar, you can even plug your own poem in there.

Also, Chinese women generally did not have first names until China was westernized. Each woman in the Li family, for example, would simply be addressed as “Li Woman”(not a direction translation). Yes, if you happen to be female, you’d have the same name as your sister, mother, and grandmother.

Hrm… seems like all for now…

35

Orignial quote by Irishman:

Also, I recall hearing that the Netherlands (I think?) that didn’t have last names. At some point when they were under another country’s (Britain?) control, last names were imposed. The Dutch didn’t really care and didn’t think it meant anything, so they gave themselves lots of silly names, similar to Harry The-guy-down-the-street. The names stuck, so now there are lots of funny names. Similar to the Afrikaans name above.
Actually it was the French (Napoleon) who forced us Dutch to choose last names. Contrary to the remarks above, most people chose sensible names, including a lot of patronyms like Jansen and Pietersen (-sen being the shortened form of the original -zoon = son). Many others named themselves after their village of birth (hence many Dutch names starting with ‘van’ = from) or their profession. Schaper is actually an old Dutch word for sheperd, which is curuously appropriate as I am married to a Chinese lady called Yang Lu, where the family name Yang means sheep…
By the way, I did not see any remarks on German patronyms. I have the feeling they are extremely rare, and wonder why, given the closeness of the countries and languages in West-Europe.

The early bird catches the wurm, but the second mouse takes the cheese (Steven Wright)

36

Jews in Germany (well before WWII) took Gemanified names, choosing pretty words and thoughts, such as Rosenbaum (Rose-tree), Morgenstern (Morning star), etc.

They sharply contrast Hebrew based names.