Johnson means “son of John”; is there a “daughter of John” equivalent (in any language that uses this alphabet)?
Johnsdottir? (Icelandic)
I don’t know their counterpart for John, but the -dottir suffix in Icelandic means “daughter.”
In Czech, women have a suffix of -ova on their names which indicates belonging to the family of a husband or a father. Martina Navratilova’s father’s last name is Navratil.
Ah yes, the Icelandic “dottir”! I knew there was something like that out there, I just couldn’t think of it! Thanks to both Myglaren and Zeldar. But would it be “Johnsdottir” or “Johndottir”?
Pravnik, wouldn’t the “-ova” only be appended to a family name? So it would be, for example, “Smithova,” not “Johnova”?
Based on tracing my family tree, Swedish at least used to use -dotter. I don’t know if that’s true any more.
I think it is Johansdottir in Icelandic.
All I know is the -dottir part, with nothing else to help you. Maybe looking up some Icelandic news sites or such would provide clues. I suspect the John part would be more Scandinavian sounding than John. Just which version, I’m less sure. Jans, Jan, Johann, Ian, perhaps even Ivan.
That’s right, more or less “belonging to Smith.” It attaches to the surname to make it into a possessive adjective…unless the name is already an adjective, in which case it just changes to the feminine, e.g. Mr. Novy (new) is married to Mrs. Nova. Clear as mud, no?
(Also, no means yes. :D)
Just to muddy it further: -ova or -ov would be used in a first name if you were talking about something belonging to that person. “Pravnikov” describes something belonging to pravnik.
This sort of thing is called a “patronymic” (and “matronymic” for the female equivalent, which is unsurprisingly much rarer). Wikipedia has a summary of the more common international variants.
My girlfriend just calls it her “MaryAnn”.
We have new tenants from Iceland. It’s a family of four, and everyone has a different last name! There are (and first part of their names are made up by me to preserve their privacy and are *not *our actual tenants’ first names):
Einar Gunnarsson (husband, whose father was Gunnar)
Hilda Karlsdottir (wife, and whose father was Karl)
Bjork Einarssdottir (daughter, daughter of Einar)
Hinrik Einarsson (son, son of Einar)
I thought it was pretty interesting, though it made typing up the tenancy agreement more complex than usual.
No, we don’t use that anymore. We don’t use -son either, in the way it was originally meant. So, for example, my fathers last name is Larsson, and so is mine, even though neither of us is named Lars.
The normal Icelandic equivalent of John is Jón (pronounced Yone to rhyme with bone). His daughter would have the patronymic Jónsdóttir. Jóhann and Jóhannes are also found.
Here’s a question I have about Norwegian names: Does the suffix -rude mean “daughter of”? I was always told that one of my ancestors from Norway was named Gunderrude (spelling approximate), changed to Gunderson upon emigration to America, and that it meant “daughter of Gunder”. Looking online, though, I can only find the -dottir suffix and Googling for a foreign suffix that is also a word in English is not very fruitful.
Thai ladies will often call it their “little sister.”
“Oyster” is another term, which leads to all sorts of jokes about “eating oysters.”
Now that we’ve gotten the Johnson out of the way, what’s the feminine version of Long Dong Silver?
Yes, this practice was very common in Sweden. Common people would normally have a first name and a patronymic second name, that was constructed by the form: father’s name + genitive (s) + son/dotter, and no actual surname. So for example when Johan and Gunilla had children, these would have had names in the form of Axel Johansson and Lisa Johansdotter. These mean literally “Johan’s son” and “Johan’s daughter”, obviously. Similarly children of Karl were named Karlsson and Karlsdotter and children of Anders were Andersson and Andersdotter. However, when everybody finally needed to take a real family name, this practice had to end. Many people simply passed their then current male patronymic on, while patronymic female names pretty much vanished. Today, 18 most common Swedish family names end with -son: Family names in Sweden
This practice was of course widely followed in Finland. In Finnish, son (and boy) is “poika” and daughter is “tytär”. Because the language of administration was Swedish, it was typical that the mostly Finnish-speaking common folk had their names officially in Swedish but used the Finnish equivalents. So in legal documents there was for example Anders Nilsson, who would in everyday speech be Antti Niilonpoika, similarly Lisa Olofsdotter would be Liisa Olavintytär. Later on these patronymics were usually second names between first name and a last name. This last name was in Western Finland normally the name of residence while in many parts of Eastern Finland it was already an actual family name. Then the patronymics fell almost completely out of use, while those last names became actual family names everywhere.
Another example is Russian, where middle names are patronymics. Using English translitteration, Ivan, son of Ivan is Ivan Ivanovich while Anna, daughter of Ivan is Anna Ivanovna. For example Putin is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and the gymnast who was recently rumoured to marry him is Alina Maratovna Kabaeva. Russian uses Cyrillic alphabet though, while I don’t see why OP is interested only in Latin alphabet using languages.
In Irish, the feminie is “Ni”, versus “O” or “Mac” or “Mc”.
McConnell in the Irish language would be “Mac Chonaill” for a man, or “Ni Chonaill” for a woman.