We were watching 1 vs. 100, recently, and there was a question regarding salads, to wit,
Which of the following salads is not named after a person?
Nicoise
Cobb
and I don’t remember this one but it sounded like it, too, could have been a person’s name.
I guessed number 1, Nicoise, and it turned out to be correct. I based my guess on the fact that, in two years of high school and college French, and among all the French people I had ever met or heard of, I had not once come across a civic adjective being used as a surname. There are apparently no people with names like “Parisien” or “Lyonnais”–or are there?
I wonder why some languages have worked differently in this regard. German seems to have city-based surnames, like Koellner and Hamburger, but English doesn’t as far as I know.
French does have these names. “Bourguignon” is an example. I’m also under the impression that Pariseau and its variants signify “Parisian,” which is a way of saying that there are probably lots of French names that don’t read on first impression as references to a town, but which on deeper inspection turn out to be. I have a book on the subject at home. I’ll have a look into it later.
Parise, Parize, Parisy, Parizy, Parisel, Parisel, Pariset, Parizet, Parisot, Parizot.
That’s only for Paris. French surnames from localities are many. Just search Dictionnaire étymologique des noms de famille by Marie-Thérèse Morlet
I think the problem here is that in general place name surnames tend to come from smaller places so outsiders are less likely to recognise them as such.
English surnames from my home county - Mansfield, Hucknall & Sutton
Of French surnames I drove past recently Chirac is probably the only one you’d recognise.
Any chance that the English surname Parish/Parrish is associated with the city of Paris? The obvious link would be to church parishes … but maybe it could be the city?
I went home and looked at the book I have on the subject (Les noms de familles et leurs secrets, by Jean-Louis Beaucarnot), and he says this is not the case. He says these names (Parisot and variants) are all derived from and are deformations of the given name Patrice. His argument is that during the period when surnames were being adopted, many people came to Paris, but few left. So “Parisian” as a distinguisher left something to be desired, since in Paris everyone was a Parisian, and few from Paris left for another city, still less for the countryside.
This argument may seem implausible, but there’s a very definite tendency for French surnames to be derived from or identical to given or saints’ names. Beaucarnot gives a list of the 100 most common surnames in France, and in the top 10, there’s only one name (Petit) that isn’t also a given name. You’ll see names like Martin, Thomas, Bernard, etc. I’m going from memory here, but it looks like the four big categories are: 1) given names, as above; 2) descriptors (Petit, Larousse, Brunet, Leblanc); 3) occupations (Fournier, Lefebvre); and names of foreign derivation (Garcia, Lopez, Meyer).
The OP is wrong in an absolute sense, in that adjectival references to place names do exist as French surnames – but it has to be said that these names are not particularly common. In the top 100, I saw (on a somewhat cursory examination) only one: Picard, and it was in the 80-something place. There may be one or two other non-adjectival place references (for instance, Fontaine), but again, as a category, it’s a small one.
