As a incredibly generic-sounding, common seeming name, I mean.
Yoshiaki Kobayashi
Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov
In France, the “regular guy” would be called Mr Dupont (no particular first name attached, but Jean Dupont would be a good bet).
However, Dupont isn’t actually the most common name, it’s only ranks 5th or so. The actual most common name is :
-either the variants of “Lefevre” (Lefebure, Lefebvre, Le Febvre, etc…) if you count all variants as only one name. It means…Smith, in old French (*).
-or Martin if you allow only one spelling.
(*) Or rather Thesmith, since an article is generally part of a French name while it’s English equivalent wouldn’t have one. For instance, the French equivalent of Blake would be “Lenoir” (Theblak) and the equivalent of Wood would be “Dubois” (Fromwood)
Muhammed is probably the most common name in the Muslim world. Muhammed bin Muhammed?
There tends to be lots of Wangs in China.
[Jon Arbuckle]I wouldn’t say you’re fat, Garfield, but you have more chins than the Hong Kong phone directory.[/JA]
Hymie Goldberg is probably the most common name in Israel.
Guiseppe Verdi is Joseph Green.
Are you asking the most popular names, or “generic person” names like “John Doe” or “John Q. Public”?
Brian
I’ve noticed that there seem to be a very limited pool of family names in China. Am I mistaken?
Tyrone Washington?
In Afrikaans you have “van der Merwe”, which is a pretty common and generic Afrikaans surname. It can be used slightly differently than “John Smith” though: you can use it to represent the Afrikaans ethnicity in jokes, as in “An Irishman, an Englishman and van der Merwe walk into a bar …”.
More Wangs than Beavers at any rate.
Germany: Hans Schmidt?
ISTR reading that 12% of the Korean population has the family name Kim.
Not really. The common expression for “everyman” in Chinese is lao bai xing (the “X” is pronounced as a “sh” sound), which literally means “Old Hundred-Names”, a reference to the idea that there are 100 standard family names among the ethnic Han. There are well over a hundred in reality, but less than a thousand, which when you divide by the 1B+ ethnic Chinese (Han) in China alone, gives you a lot of namespace collisions.
There’s actually a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_family_names]Wikipedia article* on this. Huh!
One assumes that the Vietnamese everyman is a Nguyen, but I don’t know that for sure.
Well… I would say that less than a thousand names is indeed, “a very limited pool”. The article you linked to mention some names being used by around 10% of the population, for instance.
Actually, when I said " a very limited pool" I believed it was less limited than that, not more.
Well, the LITERAL counterparts to “John Smith” are
Spanish: Juan Ferrer or Juan Herrera
German: Johannes Schmidt
Italian: Giovanni Ferrari or Ferraro (think about it- “Ferrari,” the most prestigious sports car on Earth, means “Smith”)
Polish: Jan Kowalski
Hungarian (Magya): Jan Kovacs
French: Jean Lefebvre
Scotland: Ian McGowan
Egypt: Yahya Haddad
No. No, it isn’t.
(Seriously… Hymie? What is that, Welsh? I’ve never met a Hymie in my life).
There’s no stereotypical Israeli name, but if there were one, it would probably be something like Avi Cohen or Yossi Levi.