Another celebrity whose last name is also a onetime kingdom: Nobel Prize-winning novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias.
Tsar is almost always pronounced Zar or similar, yeah. And I can’t quite put my finger on it, but when I say “tsunami” and “צונאמי” in an English and Hebrew sentence, I feel like I’m saying the initial sound slightly differently. In English it’s more like a “Tsew” with a T that flows into an S.
In Hebrew it’s straight up “Tzo”, the צ sound.
If I was spelling the English way of saying Tsunami in Hebrew, I’d almost be tempted to write it “טסונאמי”.
And Jonathon India, now of the Royals.
In England, you can have Welsh/Welch and Ireland (to add to Scott, as mentioned about. But there are also lower-level placenames, like York, Lancaster, Carlisle, Newcastle, Chester (caster/chester in a placename indicates a Roman military base, so there’s a fair few of those that may have been adopted as surnames).
And I read somewhere that William Wallace was known to Gaelic-speakers as Uilleam Breatnach (William the Briton or Welshman, suggesting he came from Brythonic rather than Gaelic-speakers).
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Mark Cuban yet.
As far as czar/tsar, the former is more of an American spelling, the latter more of an British spelling.
Mark Chabenisky
When I was studying German in high school, our teacher pointed out exactly that when we were trying to learn the sound of the German Z. English speakers actually use it all the time in the middle of words like pizza and matzah, and it’s common as dirt at the end of words: meets, beats, cats, lots, and so forth.
What we don’t do is use it at the beginning of words. I don’t think there are any native English words that use that ts sound as an initial sound. English speakers have no difficulty producing the sound, but we have great difficulty saying it when there isn’t a vowel sound right before it.
As to the topic, I was going to mention the author Anatole France. But I see from wikipedia that it wasn’t his real name. He was born Francois-Anatole Thibault. I suppose the “Francois” part still counts.
The one and only Teen Steam Queen, Alyssa Milano!
Does the demonym have to be of the person’s actual origin?
We also have Basler (Basel) and Zurcher (Zurich)
I just met someone with the last name La France. I think he’s Haitian. Possibly he has ancestors from France?
The following are surnames of people in Austria whom I know either personally or because they are celebrities or were persons of historical significance:
Horvat/Horvath (meaning Croat) is a very common name in Austria.
So is Böhm/Böhme (Bohemian).
Then there was the conductor Karl Österreicher (literally meaning Austrian), but that name is extremely rare.
Deutsch/Deutscher (meaning German) is more associated with Jews.
Windisch (meaning Slovene) is very common in the South.
Reuß/Reuss (sometimes meaning Russian, but sometimes referring to the town of Reuß) exists. I think it’s associated with a certain lower aristocracy.
The name Sterrer may mean Styrian, but I’m not sure.
Schwarzenegger means person from Schwarzenegg (literally black hilltop), which is the name of several places in Austria and Switzerland.
Unger is an antiquated spelling of Ungar (meaning Hungarian). Quite common as a name.
Ceh is a peculiar spelling of Tschech (meaning Czech).
Every name with a “von” prefix, that belongs to old aristocracy (emphasis on “old”): von Starhemberg, von Habsburg, von Kielmansegg, von Schwarzenberg, von Hohenfels, von Liechtenstein etc. Those people were named after their fiefs, castles, counties, etc.
Names of “recent” aristocracy are different. They just had a “von” added to their commoners’ name: the composer Karl Maria von Weber (Weaver), the conductor Herbert von Karajan (from Greek Karayiánnis, meaning Black John), the general Michael von Melas (from Greek Melás, meaning Honeymaker)…
Note that no living Austrian is allowed to have “von” in their name. That prefix was made illegal in 1919. It is also illegal to display a coat of arms, or merely say that you own one. Any Austrians that wanted to keep their traditional name, had to obtain a foreign citizenship and renounce their Austrian one. Foreign nationals are permitted to have “von” in their names.
Everything I wrote about “von”, also applies to prefixes like “zu”, “zur”, “von und zu”, “bei der”, “an der”, “von der”, “vom”, “de”, “de la”, “dell’” and “dei”. E.g.: von der Trenck, or the impossibly colourful de la Fontaine und von Harnoncourt-Unverzagt (yes, that’s one single surname).
Every name with the “van” prefix: van der Bellen, van Beethoven… That Dutch prefix does not denote nobility, but place of origin.
Ioan Holender is an opera singer whose name means “Dutch”.
Röhm/Römer means “Roman”.
Hesse/Hess/Heß means “Hessian”.
Sachs means “Saxon”.
Bayer/Bayr/Baier/Payer/Paierl/Bayerlein/Beir may mean either Bavarian or peasant, depending on the family history.
Iberer (very rare) means Spaniard (Iberian).
Türk means Turk, though it’s more likely that the name was given to that family due to dark complexion or hair colour, rather than actual Turkish descent. The same is probably true for Iberer.
>I believe the surname Polanski and its variants means “from Poland,” and there are several Poles with that name.
Close but not exactly. “From Poland” would be (z) Polski and that’s not used as a name at all. However, Polak (Pole) is a perfectly normal and reasonably popular Polish name.
The Hebrew surname “Frank” can indicate Sephardic heritage; among Eastern European Jews, “Frank” or “Frenk” were used to refer to the Ladino-speaking Jews of the Ottoman Empire. “Frenk” is still an insult in certain circles.
Van Gogh and da Vinci. Merle Haggard comes close (he adopted the name of a city he was driving through). Many Arab names are demonyms, like Al-Baghdadi or Al-Halabi.
Tom Canada was a CFL player from the United States.
I thought that Jomo Kenyatta, first president of Kenya, was a shoo-in for this kind of thread. I knew that he changed his name to “Kenyatta”, and figured that he had done that deliberately to identify himself with the country, but there was no rule in the thread about doing that.
Alas, my assumptions were all wrong. Jomo Kenyatta changed his name multiple times during his life, but his chosen surname “Kenyatta” had nothing to do with the country.
According to his Wikipedia article he took the name sometime between 1914 and 1922:
Kenyatta did not join the armed forces, and like other Kikuyu he moved to live among the Maasai, who had refused to fight for the British.[30] Kenyatta lived with the family of an aunt who had married a Maasai chief,[31] adopting Maasai customs and wearing Maasai jewelry, including a beaded belt known as kĩnyata in the Kikuyu language. At some point, he took to calling himself “Kĩnyata” or “Kenyatta” after this garment
The country “Kenya”, on the other hand, is named after Mount Kenya, and it gets its name from a very different source. Again, citing the Wikipedia article on “Kenya”:
The Republic of Kenya is named after Mount Kenya. The earliest recorded version of the modern name was written by German explorer Johann Ludwig Krapf in the 19th century. While travelling with a Kamba caravan led by the long-distance trader Chief Kivoi, Krapf spotted the mountain peak and asked what it was called. Kivoi told him “Kĩ-Nyaa” or “Kĩlĩma- Kĩinyaa”, probably because the pattern of black rock and white snow on its peaks reminded him of the feathers of the male ostrich.[26]
Benjamin Britten. The name is derived from “Briton” and he was British.
El Masri, or something close, is a common last name in Egypt, which is Misr in Arabic.