I thought up this question one day sitting around one day and ever since it has annoyed me…Ok so here it goes…When were born we are given a first name. Our last names don’t change. When we marry the girl or man whatever
takes the others last name. Or when someone dies without kids they take there name. We never assign last names and if anything they should be slowly dissapearing as far as I can see…So…Why are there so many last names. You look through the phonebook and there are TONS. If we came from a group of people in the begining of time when did different last names come in to play and when did they stop???..Lata
This is something I have wondered too. I would think that last names would continually be coming extinct since if there is no male heir then the name will usually be changed when a girl marries.
New last names are created constantly, when people move from one country to another. I’d bet that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, were created during the immigration waves through Ellis Island in the US, as non-English names were “Americanized”.
In some cultures, there aren’t very many last names- I think Korea and Vietnam are examples, although I don’t have any details.
Fortunately for us in the United States, surnames will last longer because 1) not all women change their name upon marriage and 2) not all children are given the last name of their father and 3) we are multicultural and have a lot of names to pick from.
I’ve also heard that Korea and Vietnam have sort of a last name crisis.
Perhaps we should all adopt the Icelandic tradition of using our first name and then adding “-son” or “-dottir” to it for the surname of our children.
I have a surname that was adopted by my grandfather when he came to the U.S. My distant relatives in the old country have a different surname. I know a woman whose great-grandfather had an argument with his brother, and the family split, with one branch keeping the original name, and the other dropping a letter from it to create a new name.
I’m told there about 270 korean surnames. I’m also told the 3 most common surnames take up about half the korean population, and the most common 3 being Kim, Lee/Li/Rhee/Yi, and Park/Pak.
But I know for a fact that there are clans within the surnames. I, for example, am a Lee of Kyung-Ju. But there are Lees of Juhn-Ju, Yuhn-Ahn, and a lot more.
The passing on of “family names” is a fairly recent tradition in the West. Until about five hundred years ago, a person was more likely to have a “first name” and either a description (Gum the Scrofulous) or a patronymic (Gum, Snarf’s bastard).
Surnames can still be invented today. My family name has changed greatly in just the past eleven decades, and split into at least seven different spellings. I know I have distant cousins still in Dalmatia using the original spelling, slightly less distant cousins in the Ukraine and Poland (Proud to be the descendant of eastern European migrant labour!) with local variants, and the branch of the family which went to Argentina rather than Pennsylvania have their own variations of the name.
Don’t think of this as a hijack; think of it as an OP-booster.
While I appreciate the thought that generated the OP, as others have noted there are reasons that the linear arithmetic dwindling of surnames does not occur. One factor that I know I don’t know how to fit into the equation is Latino lineage and surnames.
If a fellow is named, say, Juan Jorge Escobar de Veyna, you will know him in daily conversation as Juan Escobar, where Escobar is his father’s family name and Veyna is his mother’s family name. So if he marries a woman names Marta Maria, uh, what? What would her name be if her father’s family name was Hidalgo and her mother’s family name was Soso? Marta Maria Hidalgo de Soso?
Well, anyway, so they marry and have a kid, Juan Miguel; what’s Juan Miguel’s whole name?
In my neighborhood, when I was in high school, we had two pairs of brothers creating new last names.
One pair of brothers grew up named Bulla (pronounced BYOU-la). (One brother, either because he discovered that the name had been Bülla in the old country–and I do not know that it was–or because he did not like being hailed as BULL-a, changed the spelling to Buella.)
The other pair of brothers grew up named Kwasnicka and one brother dropped the final a for reasons I never heard.
I believe it would be Juan Miguel Escobar de Hidalgo, using the parents’ fathers’ family name names. I could be mistaken, but I think that’s how it works, with the mother’s family names droping away after a generation. So Soso was Maria’s maternal grandfather’s family name.
Juan Jorge Escobar de Veyna marries Marta Maria Hidalgo de Soso, who after the marriage becomes Marta Maria Escobar Hidalgo. Soon after, they have little Juan Miguel Escobar Hidalgo. Now, if Juan and Maria were Spanish nobility, or, for another reason Maria's family was important enough, little Juan Miguel's full name would be Juan Miguel Escobar de Veyna y Hidalgo de Soso.
When my family forebears emigrated to the U.S. in 1900-1910 they weren’t allowed to keep their names with accent marks.
They all got assigned “American” names at Ellis Island, by clerks they couldn’t converse with, and so one name became six new spellings.
Some, like me, changed again for professional purposes, since stage names (when I was starting) were always expected to be easy to spell as sounded.