I’ve never heard that theory (but then, I’m American).
I always thought the names Black, Brown, and White originated with the person’s hair color, and Green was the name of someone who lived by the village green. What other colors get used as names?
For Mandarin Chinese names, they’re restricted to the syllables that are allowed by the language, and there are 100 or so surnames that will show up most of the time. Some of the most popular (from my experience) include:
Chen, Zhang, Wang, Li, Yao, Ma, Jiang, Hu
You can find a good list here.
As noted above, different scandinavian languages use -son and -sen as patronymics, but, as far as I know, only Icelandic still uses the patronymic -dottir for girls. I grew up with a friend, Elin Arnesdottir, who had a hell of a time registering in California schools (this was in the 1960’s). Eventually, around fifth grade, they just capitulated, and she changed her name to Elin Olson, to match her father’s surname.
Oh I forgot to mention (for Mandarin Chinese names) that all surnames are a single syllable, since they are represented by a single character. So if you see an Asian-looking name that’s 2 or more syllables, you know it’s not Chinese.
Then, there’s Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca–early explorer of Texas & “proto-anthropologist.”
Names ending in -stra or in -sma, like Dijkstra or Ritsma, originate from Friesland.
anything-sky (or is it -ski?) usually means Russian or Polish, right? usually Polish, I think.
Actually, there are a few Chinese surnames with two syllables. Cite:
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pdt2.0/doc/manuals/en/m-layer/html/ch03s01s02.html
Of these, the only one I’ve ever seen is Ouyang/Owyang. But your rule of thumb is not really correct.
Nguyễn (help·info) (IPA:/ŋwiɜn˧˩˥/ in Vietnamese; English approximation: win) is the most common Vietnamese family name. By some estimates, approximately 40 percent of Vietnamese people have this surname.
In Thailand, surnames date back only about 90 years. Really. King Rama VI (reigned 1910-25) decreed that Thais adopt them. Anytime you see a Thai surname that is very long, that is almost always a dead giveaway that the person is of Chinese ethnicity. Ethnic Thai surnames tend not be more than one or two syllables long. Indeed, the Thai language itself tends to be very monosyllabic. Words of several syllables are actually compounds usually.
Why the ethnic Chinese here have longer surnames than they probably would in China, I don’t know.
Besides the few that are on Wikipedia, there are a ton of other name patterns that pop up in Japan, but most of them have nothing to do with actual ancestry. If you were from one of the notable families in Japanese history, you had a family name, but most names in Japan originated from the Meiji era, when the Emperor decreed that all commoners would also have surnames. That’s part of why there are so many prosaic names like ~hashi/bashi (bridge); ~mura (village); ~kawa/gawa (river). The vast majority of Japanese who have the “same name” are probably not actually related.
Way more than you probably want to know about Japanese names.
The surname ‘Naidoo/u’ probably means you can trace your ancestry back to Tamil Nadu- a south Indian state. Ethnically it used to mean the people were from the Telugu tribe (not sure if that’s the right word…) but now it’s more likely to be generically Tamil.
It’s very common amongst African Asians and i don’t have a clue why.
Turkish family names were required by law only in 1936, in the late Atatürk era.
Iranian family names were decreed by Reza Shah about the same time. So people in those countries got busy making up names.
A lot of the Ashkenazi surnames followed a similar process of origination in the late Middle Ages or early modern era when Jews who had traditionally not used family names began to be required to take them by European officialdom–which explains how names like Silverman, Goldberg, Feinstein, etc. were made up, often to express concepts of prosperity and beauty.
In the Arab world, family names are optional - some families, especially noble or prominent ones, have always had them, others have gotten by fine without them. But they are becoming more common nowadays.
Likewise, Tamils sometimes have family names, but traditionally get by without them. Tamil surnames are likely to be derived from a caste or ethnos as in Sri Theo’s example, just as Arab surnames were originally mostly tribal names.
Malay people still do not use family names at all. Arabs and Malays who don’t use family names use patronymics instead, like in Iceland. (But to be feminist I made my Arabic name a matronymic–sorry, Dad, I still love you)
Jóhanna Annasdóttir
Back to Andhra Pradesh, sometimes by way of Tamil Nadu.
“Telegu” is a language, not the name of a tribe. The ethnic group (again, not a tribe) that speaks Telegu is called “Andhra.” And Andhra is a completely separate ethnicity from Tamil. (Tamils rarely use family names.) Note that the Wikipedia article you linked states that “Naidu” is used in Tamil Nadu, but not by Tamils. It’s an Andhra name.
Well, probably because a lot of the Indians who settled in Africa were Telegu-speaking Andhras.
Added:
Actually, the Wikipedia article answers your question –
Herrero, actually… the architect was Juan de Herrera and that “de” changes the meaning, as does the “-a” at the end.
Cabeza de Vaca is not Vaca (Cowshead vs Cow). Again, not the same.
Sastre is a real lastname, yes. Google Ines Sastre.
Spanish surnames, compared to English/German/French, seem to trend numerically away from the trade-based surnames and towards patronymics (e.g. Gomez, Gonzalez, Guitierrez, etc.).
“Sastre” seems to me to be decidedly uncommon. Are there many other Spanish surnames in the same category as “Herrero” and “Sastre”?
What ancestry is Morris? What about Fennell? I would think Irish, as I am mostly Irish and full Irish on my mother’s side and Fennell is my mother’s maiden name.
Morris is English, from the given name.
I knew a guy from India. His ethnic group didn’t have surnames until recently, and his grandfather was an engineer, so his last name was “Engineer”. Kinda cool, really.
Engineer, Pilot, Shipchandler, Computerwallah, …