I wouldn’t regard those as conceptual pairs. Any words involving relationships between people - as the examples you gave all do - are going to have a much more complicated history than words that describe descriptive terms like big and small, tall and short, left and right, east and west. These are all pairs of words that are based on the idea that an item can be described as having one of two possible states - having the state or not having the state; having more of a state or having less of a state; having the state or having the opposite of the state.
There’s no similar polarization between pairs like master and servant, for example. You can’t divide a group of people into those who are masters and those who are servants; some might be one or the other but some will be both and some will be neither. And you can’t describe a person you’ve just met in terms of being your master or your servant - even if he has those relationships to someone else, he doesn’t have them with you.
Looking at the stats for the UK, the effect seems to be nowhere near as large:
West - 57,780
North - 12,877
East - 10,658
South - 4,925
Similar pattern in Aus (I couldn’t find a surname-popularity site - best I could do was immigration records from Ancestry.com, which give about 100k Wests, 29k Norths, 11k Easts, 8k Souths)
It looks like just random variation, where the disparity in the US just built on a disparity which was already building up when the colonists started coming.
In France, although the compass-names all seem extraordinarily unpopular, Nord (211) outstrips Sud(51) and Est(34) by a decent margin - Ouest(1!) barely exists.
I don’t know that a 5:1 or greater disparity can be the result of random variation. And it’s probably significant that West is still the most common of the four (in the UK).
[QUOTE=Blake]
Do you also find it believe that English would invent the husband before the word for wife?
[/QUOTE]
Husband did not take on its present meaning until fairly late in the game. Until the 13th century it meant a householder or head of household. Its current significance is merely a side effect of England’s patriarchal society. Wife also appears first in Old English and actually appears to predate husband in the sense of a male marriage partner.
That can’t be right. The UK has three times the population of Aus. Unless we’re saying people with names by compass point were more likely to be petty criminals.
Well, having a name that means “dude that lives over there” at a time when everyone else was getting names like Smith and Miller and Potter perhaps implies something about the respectability of one’s ancestors’ line of work.
In my circle of friends and colleagues, there is a Greedy, a Swindler, and a Crook. (Which, of course, leads to the obvious joke about them becoming partners in a law firm together.)
Pretty sure Norman is more common than Eastman. But that’s because of the Normans, whose name comes from “north man” but had taken on a new meaning by the time it was used to refer to them.
Is it possible that the founding West family or families (which probably just numbered a handful of people at some point) simply had more children at an early stage; this effect is greatly magnified after as many as 50 generations?
This is one of my favorite SD columns:not sure if it is relevant.
Perhaps at one point, there were simply 6-7 West families as opposed to 4-5 Norths and 2-3 Easts and Souths.
I have thought the same about colors, some are common surnames: White, Black, Brown, Gray, and variants of Red like Reed. However, I have never met a Mr. and Mrs. Blue! (Of course, these probably had more to do with hair and complexion than any other factor).
Yes you could, IF you got the name because you represented/managed Salisbury. It’s how my family got our lastname, how the Borjas or the Bourbons got their own.
This is pretty much what I was saying in post #16. Things that occur at equal frequencies at the start can come to have large differences over time due to nothing more than random chance.
Well the frequencies weren’t established yet , as we might need to redo them with Norton, Easton and Sutton. There are a lot of Norton’s…
But oh well, they aren’t English names, they are Scottish and Irish… so I guess far fewer… So the frequencies won’t be changed so much.
And there can be a good reason that isn’t easy to see without knowledge…
The suggestion is in a previous post - the prosperous and more populated areas of south east of England would have less reasons to give anyone the name North, East or South… But lots of reasons to give someone the name “West”.
Green(e) is a fairly common surname. I doubt it has anything to do with all those people who have green hair.
Blue is fairly rare, but there was a baseball player named Vida Blue back in the day. I can’t recall ever hearing of people named with the other four basic color words (orange, pink, purple, yellow).
