The family name “SyCip” seems to be fairly common; there’s a guy in our company named Abraham SyCip, and I am vaguely aware of a few famous SyCips, such as Albino SyCip and Washington SyCip. According to Google there are lots more, including a SyCip bicycle company.
I’m curious about the mixed case, which I’ve previously seen only in Gaelic names such as McLachlan and MacDonald. Why is SyCip often capitalized that way? Does “Sy” mean “son of” or “from” in some language? Are there other Sy- names with similar capitalization conventions?
Google searching seems to suggest that it’s largely a Filipino surname, and one associated with ethnic Fujian Chinese at that. Is your coworker Chinese?
According to this list of non-Spanish Filipino surnames (look at the second list, the Filipino Chinese surnames), “Sy” appears in several other Chinese Filipino family names, as well. That page suggests that a lot of those Chinese Filipino surnames come from the family founder’s name compressed into a single word. Most are trisyllabic, but some (such as SyCip) are only bisyllabic. Could “Sy” be the beginning of the first word in the founder’s name and “Cip” the beginning of the second?
That, I have no clue about. The mystery is heightened by the fact that the Latin alphabet isn’t the native orthography for those names. Or at least, it wasn’t until relatively recently, historically speaking. They would have been written in the Chinese writing system until the Spanish colonized in 1565 (at the earliest) and introduced the Latin alphabet.
A conscious decision was probably made to multi-capitalize. The only real reason I can think of to do that would be to separate the individual words in the name, if it’s correct that the name is derived from the founder’s full Chinese (Fujian) name.