Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more

991 pointsposted 9 days ago
by JNRowe
(blog.plover.com)

465 Comments

junto

9 days ago

Likewise there are several patronymic surnames from the Welsh “ap <father’s name> (son of) that have ended up as new surnames retained the “ap” in several cases, mainly in reduced form at the start of the surname, as in Upjohn (from ap John), Powell (from ap Hywel), Price (from ap Rhys), Pritchard (from ap Richard), and Bowen (from ab Owen).

matsemann

9 days ago

My surename is Svensson, literally "Sven's son". But patronymic surnames aren't used in Sweden/Norway anymore, so at some point we just got stuck with whatever father was the last in line, a bit weird. Maybe I should try to figure out which Sven it was.

I guess the tradition of it being the man's name passed on means that's why there is no common surnames with *dottir as it is with *son? (Not sure what the english version for a daughter is).

Had some Icelandic friends in school (which still has patronymic names, moved here after they were born), and it was for them somewhat problematic at times that the siblings had different surnames (Björnsdottir and Björnsson), as people don't assume they're family, and especially not that the parents both had different surnames again. Like school pickup with a teacher not knowing the situation.

matsemann

9 days ago

When thinking about names: in Norway it's quite common to take both parents' names now. So I'm MKS (initials), where Mats is my first name, K is my middle name being mother's surname, and S my dad's surname. I think it's great to have a connection to both families, and that my mother and dad combines instead of one having to "give up" some of their identity

But what happens next generation? When a partner named ABC with two surnames should be combined with my name. Should a kid then be named DBCKS? And then it doubles every generation? Or should both parents pick one and pass on? And then which one? The father line as always?

KPGv2

9 days ago

> But what happens next generation? When a partner named ABC with two surnames should be combined with my name

Look to Hispanic countries. They've been dealing with this for a very long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs

Generally, if a parent has two surnames, the child will take the first of them, so you normally will have two surnames, the first or only from your father, and the first or only from your mother. (Note that this algorithm does eliminate matrilineal names, because a child will effectively be receiving their two surnames from their grandfathers.

From what I understand, if the genetic lineage is particularly elite, you might keep more. My wife grew up in Latin America among the Hispanic elite, and apparently some of her friends had more than two surnames because their bloodlines were extremely blue and they wanted to preserve reference to the lineage.

This is a bit like how Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's kids have the surname Mountbatten-Windsor. The former is a cadet branch of the German House of Hesse, and the latter is a rebranding of the extremely German Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha (and of course right there is a triple-barrel name, Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha.

pgris2

9 days ago

A couple of years ago, in Argentina, my country, some idiot representative tried to create an actual law to force everyone to use the last name of both parents in strict alphabetical order.... and in the next generation, choose 2 out of 4 in strict alphabetical order, and in 10 generations everyone would have a couple of last names like aaaa aaab

mbg721

8 days ago

10 generations is plenty of time to develop a caste system that discourages intermarriage.

kubb

9 days ago

It should be randomly selected and that would solve all the issues.

f1shy

9 days ago

Kirchner?! Hehe

alricb

9 days ago

> From what I understand, if the genetic lineage is particularly elite, you might keep more.

You mean like Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

situationista

9 days ago

Ironic that for all the elite lineage captured here, the one that he ended up stuck with is a very plebeian surname of non-hispanic (Ligurian) origin.

PaulDavisThe1st

9 days ago

I would like to know more about the conditions under which Spanish family names became "X y Y" rather than "X" or "Y".

HelloNurse

9 days ago

Inheriting both surnames is traditional, picking one is nontraditional or foreign. The interesting option is between using a conjunction or not (Paul Davis Thefirst or Paul Davis y Thefirst), which seems mostly a matter of sounding better or, as Wikipedia suggests, disambiguating between first names and surnames (if it precedes the conjunction it is a surname).

narag

9 days ago

No, the surnames are Ruiz and Picasso.

The rest are given names and nobody uses more than two. It was in the baptism record where all the saints of the days used to be added. I have a similar record with a dozen names, but only two given names in the civil record, of which I only use the first.

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

Fargren

9 days ago

Yeah. I had to get a second last name when I was granted Spanish citizenship, which leads to my full name not matching my Argentinian ID. This generates (small) problems when flying between Spain and Argentina. Also partially due to my full now being too long to print on a boarding pass.

KPGv2

9 days ago

I love paperwork, so I always handle passport applications and stuff for us, and whenever I have to fill out my wife's stuff, there's that part about other last names, and I get super paranoid trying to remember which ones she's officially used (she doesn't even remember, or even have records sometimes due to the nature of immigrating), because between Latin America and the US pre- and post-citizenship plus getting married, it's kind of a nightmare to remember when there was a de something, an y something, or just one surname, or two surnames.

And then her parents are from another country with different surname rules, throwing a crazy wrench in things when she has to deal with her other citizenship documents, which adhere to that other country's rules.

vidarh

9 days ago

> trying to remember which ones she's officially used

I had an uncle who was very proud of the fact that his birth certificate, passport, and the spelling he actually used for his first name all disagreed.

pests

9 days ago

Slightly related story but, I too, found out my documents were out of wack when I applied for financial aid in college. I originally had two middle names at birth but then it was switched to only (the first) one a year or two later. My birth certificate had both names, my drivers license the first middle name, and my social security had the second middle name. It was a huge pain to get fixed, ended up just changing the two easiest to change to match the third.

freetanga

9 days ago

Two names, two ids, two countries????

“Tax Agencies hate this one trick…”

KPGv2

6 days ago

Actually a somewhat decently known way of avoiding tax on real estate transfers within the family in Japan is to move abroad, gift it, and then move back. The other way is gift it as a wedding gift, as wedding gifts (and others made out of customary social obligations) are not taxable over there.

TacticalCoder

9 days ago

> Two names, two ids, two countries????

Yup. Quite common with kids with one parent from a country using, say, the roman characters and another from an asian country (like say a France / Japanese mixed kid). If the (french) father goes to the french embassy or to France to declare the kid under one name and then the (japanese) mom goes to declare the kid with a japanese name, the kid literally has two identities. Not just two passports (which is highly common) but two identities.

In less common case it can happen with just the given name being different in two countries: I know a dude who as a Portuguese given name on his Portuguese passport and the french version of that name on his french passport. They're considered by the authorities to be two different persons and he already got into trouble (administrative stuff) so now he's careful.

Also note that it's a documented fact that for fraud there have been people caught declaring a kid that wasn't their: kid born at the hospital, quickly "rent" the kid to friends from the community, declare the kid as if he was born at home (by having a doctor come). Profit from welfare (in the EU) money due to the fact that you now "have" one more kid. One such case was uncovered when the doctor who gave birth to the kid was then sent later in the day to witness a "born at home" kid.

I'm sure there are other cases: the world is big.

dullcrisp

9 days ago

Just FYI in English doctors don’t give birth to other people’s kids.

repiret

8 days ago

More specifically, for the verb “give birth to”, the mother is the direct object and their new born child is the indirect object. The verb “deliver” can have the doctor or midwife or so on as the direct object.

I am bringing this up because I had to read your comment several times before I realized it was a comment about language use rather than about the role of doctors in England.

Finally, to be completely pandemic, doctors can give birth to other people‘s kids. My wife, a doctor, gave birth to my sons; there was another doctor there who delivered them.

pinoceros

8 days ago

I believe you meant "pedantic" rather than "pandemic".

gorkaerana

9 days ago

A cool feature of the Spanish naming custom is that it can infinitely keep track of surnames. E.g., following @alricb's comment below, let's consider Pablo Picasso, who's name was Pablo Ruiz Picasso [1], after his father José Ruiz Blasco [2] and his mother María Picasso López. Surnames in the Spanish custom are concatenated with the following algorithm: father's first surname, mother's first surname, father's second surname, mother's second surname, and so on. In Pablo Picasso's case this would result in Ruiz Picasso Blasco López.

Or in Python:

```

from itertools import chain

fathers_surnames: list[str] = ["Ruiz", "Blasco"]

mothers_surnames: list[str] = ["Picasso", "López"]

kids_surnames: list[str] = list(chain.from_iterable(zip(fathers_surname, mothers_surname)))

```

Pablo Picasso's example is also a good way to touch upon your comment on how elites have used naming customs differently (I guess to distinguish themselves): Pablo's parents are listed in Wikipedia as "José Ruiz y Blasco" and "María Picasso y López", as opposed to the standard "José Ruiz Blasco" and "María Picasso López" (which I chose above). Similarly, Pablo was given the pompous birth name "Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso", instead of the more humble one (or maybe two) names that has been custom in Spanish.

Tangentially, I would say piling up names like this is more of a Catholic tradition than a Spanish one, e.g., the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, born Maria Theresia Beatrix Gaëtane, Erzherzogin von Österreich-Este, Prinzessin von Modena [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ruiz_y_Blasco

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archduchess_Maria_Theresa_of_A...

tadfisher

9 days ago

We did this for our children as a US couple, and didn't even make the connection to Scandanavian practices (my wife's heritage, coincidentally). We likened it to the Spanish practice of having two surnames, without the confusion of having four names (due to Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [0]).

[0] "People have exactly N names, for any value of N." --https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

adrian_b

9 days ago

If everyone had two family names, one from mother and one from father, then the two names of child would be chosen one from the two names of the mother and one from the two names of the father. The choice could be random or by preference.

This would match the way how chromosomes are passed from the parents. Neglecting the crossover (whose effect is only that the sequence pairs between which a random choice is made are smaller than the chromosomes), for each pair of chromosomes one is taken from the mother and one from the father. The choice of which of the two chromosomes of the mother and of which of the two chromosomes of the mother are taken, is random.

I believe that this would be a better system for naming people. A random choice of which family name to take from each parent might be preferable, to avoid the reduction in number of the possible family names, if some would be preferred much more often than others.

abecedarius

9 days ago

There was a 70s science fiction future where customarily both parents adopted a new last name when they married. Seemed the obvious sensible policy for women's lib without a 2^N name-length scaling with the generations.

I only know one person who's done that. In some ways there's been less future shock than we expected.

kelnos

9 days ago

I know a couple who combined half each of their original surnames to create a new surname. I thought it was a cool idea, but of course won't work for everyone's names. Their "invented" name turned out to be a fairly reasonable surname that is probably in not-uncommon use in general, so that worked well for them.

I feel like that could kinda work for my wife's name and my name, but the possible new combinations still sound a little off to me. (We both kept our original surnames.)

abecedarius

9 days ago

Reminds me of the O’Whielacronxes! Though I'd be surprised if that was ever their legal name.

pempem

9 days ago

Villaraigosa did this - the former mayor of LA. He got divorced and kept the name, so hard to say what happens down the line there.

I tried supremely hard to merge my partner's last name and my own but each iteration sounded multiples worse than our own last names. We've kept our original surnames and given our kiddo a hyphenated one.

aegis4244

9 days ago

My partner and I did exactly that. She let me choose. Ended up with the surname from one of my favorite literary characters. Changed my first name to match as well. Happened to be a childhood nick name anyway, so I've always answered to it.

heyjamesknight

9 days ago

My wife and I did this. Seemed like an elegant solution to the problem.

twic

8 days ago

How come you know one person, not two?

I also know two people who have done this, but they're also not married.

abecedarius

8 days ago

They divorced before I met the one. Whatever the reason might've been, it'd be something like this, so why ask? Eh, anyway. It's cool that more of these cases have come up here.

jhrmnn

9 days ago

And so we could follow the sex chromosome and mitochondrial DNA convention—you’d inherit the grandma’s surname from your mother and the grandpa’s surname from your father.

adrian_b

9 days ago

This is indeed a possible variant of the system.

This variant could lead to a split of the set of existing family names into two disjoint subsets, one that is passed through females and one that is passed through males.

I do not think that this split could create problems, unless at the date when the system would be introduced there would happen to be a serious imbalance between the number of family names carried by females and the number of family names carried by males, which might be then preserved by the system.

PaulDavisThe1st

9 days ago

Alternatively, you can make the choice to have matrilineal, patrilineal or both lines.

My first wife and I hyphenated our names after we committed to naming any son we had with my last name and any daughter with hers. We only had 1 child (a daughter) before we divorced, but that daughter carries her mother's family name only, not mine.

tadfisher

9 days ago

Are we considering mitochondrial DNA? Because that is always passed down from the mother's line, so maybe we should always use the mother's maiden name as the "last" name to preserve this trait.

pinoceros

8 days ago

Courtney Taylor-Taylor, American songwriter and musician, hyphenated both of his parents' (married) last names as a joke on this.

hammock

9 days ago

Interesting thought , tying to chromosomal inheritance. Since one of the chief uses of surnames historically was to track family (financial) inheritance

tempestn

9 days ago

You could also pass the father's name to boys and the mother's name to girls. Or all children get the same combined name based on the father's father's name and the mother's mother's name. So both matrilineal and patrilineal lines would be propagated.

gpvos

9 days ago

I've always thought, in a single-surname system, it would be most fair to give girls their mother's surname and boys their father's (throw a dice for intersex children).

bee_rider

9 days ago

I wonder if we can invent a new convention, of compacting last names. So, if John Richards and Mary Jones have a child, they can give it the last name… Jords. Or Richnes. It only really needs to go out for four or so generations anyway, at which point the folks who have a really strong attachment to the name will be dead. Plus the middle names provides a slot to put your family tree’s most famous name anyway.

mikepurvis

9 days ago

I know some couples who have gone this route— both taking on a different name at marriage, either a combination of their names or a new one invented from whole cloth. It's definitely a workable option in terms of equalizing the "loss of identity" piece and ensuring that both parties are as all-in on the newly-created family unit.

That said, it does also feel a bit more chaotic and potentially subject to widespread adoption of surnames that are trendy in popular culture.

javawizard

9 days ago

This reminds me of Zach Weinersmith[0], of SMBC fame.

He was originally Zach Weiner, and he married Kelly Smith[1] and they concatenated both their names together and adopted that as their last name.

There's something I love about that.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Weinersmith

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Weinersmith

bjt

9 days ago

Former LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa did the same. (He was born Villar. Wife was born Raigosa.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Villaraigosa

wink

9 days ago

Depends on the jurisdiction, for example Germany is pretty strict.

If A marries B, then either both keep their names, both will be A or both will be B or one or both will be A-B or B-A. No other outcomes are possible, and if one of them was B-C before then the kids can't be A-B-C.

marcus_holmes

9 days ago

I heard the story of Mr Alcock and Miss Bulmer getting married and discussing this option. They almost went for "Bulcock" for the shits & giggles.

fy20

9 days ago

Lithuania has interesting rules about the surname, as it is gendered, and the suffix changes when the woman is married. Typically the father's surname is used, and the suffix is changed to match the rules.

For sons it's easy, as the surname doesn't change, it just ends in a masculine ending. Most commonly -as, but less common are -is, -ys or -ius.

For daughters, the masculine ending is replaced with a feminine ending such as -aitė, -ytė, -utė, or -ūtė.

I'm not aware of cases where the father and son have different endings, but technically you could.

However where it gets interesting is marriage. Typically married women take the husband's surname, but they change the ending to -ienė to indicate they are married.

So a family with a daughter would result in everyone having a different surname, for example:

Father: Tomas Žukauskas

Mother: Eglė Žukauskienė

Daughter: Gabija Žukauskaitė

Divorced women typically take their father's surname, but use the married -ienė ending as it appears more sophisticated. Well known people may keep their father's surname even when married, but change the ending.

Gendered suffixes are used for first names too (typically Lithuanian's only have two names), but they don't change for married/unmarried. For example Paulius for a man and Paulina for a woman.

Lithuanian's love diminutives though, so a parent may refer to their children as Pauliukas (the son) or Paulytė (the daughter). And to make things even more fun, the suffix of names changes depending on gramative case.

In the media foreign names are usually converted to their Lithuanian counterpart, for example Donaldas Trumpas.

bbarnett

9 days ago

Women taking men's names has another side to it.

When you think of it, women live forever, men die. 4B or whatever years ago, life arose. The cells which divided then, are the same cells as now. Women come from an egg, which divided over and over, cells specializing, including dividing and specializing as her eggs/ova which she is born with.

The end result is that those cells are a continuous line, billions of years old. Men contribute sperm, genetic material, but no living cell.

In a sense, women are immortal. Men die.

So, maybe the name change is to honour those soon dead?

(Yes, I know, weird take on it. It's Monday, I'm allowed.)

jraph

9 days ago

I don't think there's such a difference between the two kinds of gametes. Things are quite symmetrical.

- Sperm is as alive as ova: not alive. What is alive is the combination of the two, after some development.

- Both gametes contribute genetic material the same way.

- Their respective lines are as continuous.

> So, maybe the name change is to honour those soon dead?

Of course, the name change has sociological / political reasons. It cannot have such biological roots since the policies around names were there way before we discovered this stuff. I'm afraid the reasons why we keep the male name in many places are simpler and way less poetic.

bbarnett

9 days ago

I don't think there's such a difference between the two kinds of gametes

One's a full cell with mitochondria, cell wall, and so on. The other just delivers genetic information. There's no symmetry.

For example, all your mitochondria and its dna come from the female line. None from the male.

jraph

8 days ago

Yes, of course, there is a asymmetry. The shape and the material, of course. Another example is that while sperm is constantly produced, ova are all there since birth.

But this part:

> The cells which divided then, are the same cells as now

Seems quite wrong. Ova of one woman obviously contains part her DNA, not her mother's unchanged.

Now, I didn't know about the mitochondria part, interesting, thanks for teaching me!

bbarnett

8 days ago

Of course, the DNA is modified. It's a specialized cell, but cells are created by division or budding.

The sperm is absorbed, the dna integrated, but the cell itself, all of the cell aspect is from the woman.

Our DNA is certainly there, but that's not the same as a continuous line of cells.

Anyhow, it's one way to view things.

nilstycho

9 days ago

I like the idea of union names [1].

If you're AC and your partner is BD, then on marriage you choose a new name X. You become AXC and your partner BXD. Your child is EX. Then each child has equal connection to both parents. The cost is that you lose the deep history of names, but that history only existed for a single lineage anyway, so it's not as important as it seemed.

(1) https://nothingismere.com/2013/11/12/solve-surnames-with-uni...

Toutouxc

9 days ago

Adding to the list of weird traditions, I believe in Hungary the traditional way (nowadays not so popular?) was for the married woman to give up her ENTIRE identity (name AND surname), and just adopt the husband's full name with some suffix. Now that's insane.

hilux

9 days ago

> in Norway it's quite common to take both parents' names now.

What's going on in the name "Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen"?

Tor3

9 days ago

That seems to be "Sven" - first name, "Magnus" - middle name, "Øen Carlsen", a combination of two last names, "Øen" from his mother and "Carlsen" from his father.

Netcob

9 days ago

Here in Germany, you often come across surnames that end in "-ski", which I assume come from Poland. That is also an example of getting "stuck" with a specific version of a name: in Poland, that ending would indicate that the person is male, while "-ska" would be female, and there's even one when referring to the family that shares that name: "-scy".

So whenever I meet a woman with a "-ski"-name, I wonder how many generations ago that name got stuck with just the male form.

arnsholt

9 days ago

I don't know how it worked in Sweden, but in Norway I know that one of the most common conventions was for the surname to be the farm where you were born (so my great grandfather had a different surname from his younger siblings, because the family moved). But when farmers started moving into the cities, these names were looked down on so many country people took patronymics when they moved to the cities to obscure their background.

SiVal

9 days ago

The English form of daughter was also -dottir, but it was not common.

vitus

9 days ago

> it was for them somewhat problematic at times that the siblings had different surnames (Björnsdottir and Björnsson), as people don't assume they're family, and especially not that the parents both had different surnames again.

I've heard similar things with certain eastern European countries (Bulgarian has different forms for males vs females: Ivanov vs Ivanova), and also with various Indian populations where the child's last name is just the father's first name.

Meanwhile I have the more mundane option where my father's first name is just my middle name.

internet_points

9 days ago

Real patronymics were outlawed in 1923 in Norway (earlier in Denmark). Before that, naming tradition was that the given name (Erik) was the most important, and you'd add a place/farm name (Horsebay) and/or patronymic (Sigurdsson) and/or nickname (The Foot) if you needed to disambiguate. Given and patronymic were fixed, while farm names and nicknames could change over time. This works well in a local community, but made it hard for the central government to collect taxes and conscript expendables^Winfantrymen.

==See also==

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oeconym

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_modernism#Standardized_le...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_variable

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

vidarh

9 days ago

I know from genealogy when the patronymics "froze" in my ancestry, and also has a combination of farm names and patronymic surnames, and it's quite interesting to see how seemingly random the traditions were.

(Incidentally, one of my great-great grandfathers was Swedish and the last one in that branch to take his fathers name + son. All of his children kept his last name; my own last name comes from a farm in Norway)

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

cafeinux

9 days ago

Are pat/matronymic surnames still used in the Feroe Isles? As I specifically know at least one dóttir, namely Eivør Pálsdóttir (which I love listening to, especially when she sings in Faroese).

colechristensen

9 days ago

Christen's son emigrated to America several generations ago so that's when the name stuck for me.

saghm

9 days ago

> as in Upjohn (from ap John)

Having never heard this name before, I definitely would have to resist the urge to make an updog-style joke if I met something named this.

ahoka

9 days ago

The would be “ap Dagbert”.

s3krit

9 days ago

My surname is an example of this! Pugh comes from ap Hugh (though more commonly spelt in Welsh these days as Huw)

taurknaut

9 days ago

> (though more commonly spelt in Welsh these days as Huw)

Somehow this is also a saner spelling with English orthography. We should probably all use this spelling.

frandroid

9 days ago

Imagine the chaos if English had a phonetic spelling reformation like Spanish had a while ago...

Terr_

9 days ago

Tangentially, the way the leading "a" seems to fall off makes me think of Rebracketing [0].

Ex: "I found an ewt in the pocket a napron" --> "I found a newt in the pocket of an apron."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing

mananaysiempre

8 days ago

Zye! (Haitian Creole, [zjø], from French yeux [jø] “eyes”, which in French almost always occurs in liaison with a preceding [z], as in des yeux [dezjø], les yeux [lezjø], beaux yeux [bozjø], etc.)

joiojoio

9 days ago

Don't forget the infamous ap Doc.

sorokod

9 days ago

Oh nice! Does Upton follows the same pattern?

nielsbot

9 days ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Upton

wiktionary says it’s from “up” + “town”

motes

9 days ago

what's up town?

wccrawford

9 days ago

Nothing much, town. What's up with you?

plasticchris

9 days ago

https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/136933/difference-be...

bell-cot

9 days ago

Worth noting - "uptown" can also mean or imply a part of town that is upstream and/or upwind of most of the municipality.

Centuries ago - when towns were full of domestic animals, and raw sewage just ran into the local waterways - living upstream & upwind were major perks of being well-to-do.

Plausibly the ur-example of this usage is London, England.

saghm

9 days ago

I think "downtown" can also have somewhat mixed meanings depending on context as well. Growing up in smallish suburb, people used the word "downtown" there to refer to the busiest part of Main Street where a lot of businesses were, but after moving to New York, I had to get used to the fact that "downtown" was used to refer to "lower Manhattan", and what I would have expected to call "downtown" based on how I was used to it being used is referred to as "midtown".

InitialLastName

9 days ago

Part of this is that Manhattan has had a shift in focus between the two urban cores, from Lower Manhattan (where the original town was, and from which the city emanated, and still the financial and governmental core of the city) to midtown (which has become the cultural core of the city) over the last century or so. The language of geography takes some time to catch up.

kridsdale3

9 days ago

This is why the fancy shopping in the UK is on "The High Street".

graemep

9 days ago

Except the terms that took hold in London are "West End" and "East End" rather than up-town and down-town.

It may have been used historically, but I cannot recall ever reading the terms in anything historical.

So I think, same principle, but different words.

foobarchu

9 days ago

This one is fascinating, and something i'd never heard of before

AlunAlun

9 days ago

I came here to say exactly this. Delighted that it’s the top comment (or at least it was when I saw it!). Other examples are Parry (ap Harri), and Pugh (ap Huw)

I wonder if there are similar examples from our Celtic cousins? e.g. from Mac or Mc in Scotland, or the O’… in Ireland?

greggsy

9 days ago

Interesting I never knew this.

Anthony-G

9 days ago

Harris and Harrison are other examples of this kind of surname.

In Dublin, the bus routes are bilingual and a couple of years ago I noticed that the Irish translation of Harristown is Baile Anraí¹. When I first saw “Baile Anraí” as the destination for a passing bus, I wondered where Henry’s Town might be. I then figured that Henry and Harris must be variations of the same name and that Anraí is the Irish version of both names.

Sure enough, when I check this now, Wikipedia concurs². The article it cites states that Harry is the “Medieval English form of Henry. In modern times it is used as a diminutive of both Henry and names beginning with Har.”³

The surname Hanks may also derive from the use of Hank as a diminutive of Henry⁴

¹ https://www.dublinbus.ie/getmedia/947fdcee-5f28-46e0-8785-ab...

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_(given_name)

³ https://www.behindthename.com/name/harry

⁴ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Hank#Proper_noun

mjd

9 days ago

Except that Harry isn't a nickname nobody has any more.

KPGv2

9 days ago

If you read the article instead of just the headline, you will find that almost all the names discussed are names people do still have. Jack, Dick, Bob, Nick, Bill, Robin, etc. are nicknames specifically called out in the article.

The article does finish with Hob, Daw, Wat, and Gib. But most of the names highlighted are ones that are still in use. (I personally also have found that a lot of people don't realize Harry is a nickname for Henry, like anyone who wasn't alive for JFK doesn't know "Jack" is "John")

ninalanyon

9 days ago

> a lot of people don't realize Harry is a nickname

Does no one know Shakespeare any more?

  I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
  Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
  Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
  Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'

randomcarbloke

9 days ago

Familiar in his mouth as household words Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.

Anthony-G

9 days ago

I had actually read Henry IV, Part 1 in school many decades ago but in that play the young prince Henry was (mostly) called Hal – not to be confused with his opponent, Henry Percy, better known as Harry Hotspur.

Off-topic: I wonder if this the first recorded use of the phrase “the game’s afoot”?

jsnell

9 days ago

The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to claim that somebody did not read the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But if you're going to do it, the one time it's really misplaced is when you're claiming the author of the article didn't read it.

quietbritishjim

9 days ago

It's actually even more relevant here than it appears, in that the rest of the comment is true: half the article really is about nicknames that people do still use, so there was no reason for the author to object. But that point is lost thanks to the snark.

mjd

8 days ago

The first part of the article explains the pattern, where a nickname becomes a patronymic surname, using familiar examples.

This sets up the main point, which is that the pattern holds so reliably that when you meet a patronymic surname you can often infer the existence of a nickname, even when it's one you don't recongize.

Hence the title.

xp84

9 days ago

This is the best possible comment (besides perhaps the author replying that "Yes, I did read it after I wrote it")

jimmaswell

9 days ago

To be fair, I missed the double negative in "isn't a nickname nobody has any more" too until I saw this comment and looked closer.

kragen

8 days ago

You seem to be criticizing someone for not having read an article he wrote himself. Not only is this general class of complaint specifically forbidden by the site policy here, it represents a sort of combination of incompetence and malice that I find extremely distasteful. I doubt I am alone in this.

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

stevetron

9 days ago

Another example for Harry: nickname for Harcourt. Used in 2 episodes of the original Star Trek series for Harry Mudd (Harcourt Fenton Mudd).

mjd

8 days ago

"Harry" didn't actually become a common nickname for "Harcourt" until midway through the 22nd century.

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

Anthony-G

9 days ago

I was thinking along the lines that these days “Harry” is (mostly¹) a stand-alone name and no longer used as a nickname for Henry (and this was something I only realised in the past couple of years).

Anyhow, I really enjoyed the article and learning about the origins of surnames, e.g., I didn’t know that “Peters” should be understood to be in the genitive case and I’d never have associated the surname Dixon with being “Richard’s son” – even though I’m familiar with Dick as a nickname for Richard.

¹ Other commentators have pointed out that Prince Harry was actually christened as Henry.

thaumasiotes

9 days ago

I would tend to assume that "Harry" was short for "Harold", not that it was a standalone name.

timc3

9 days ago

Well I know someone that has that as a nickname.

m463

9 days ago

double negative unwinding...

caseyohara

9 days ago

Here’s another interesting connection: the Italian forename Enzo is a derivative of the German name Heinz, which is a diminutive of Heinrich and cognate of the given name Henry.

Xophmeister

9 days ago

Prince Harry’s real name is Henry.

codetrotter

9 days ago

Henry the Potter. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it heh.

Digit-Al

9 days ago

Isn't Harry short for Harold?

Digit-Al

9 days ago

I've now checked, and it was originally a form of Henry, but can now also be a diminutive form of any name beginning with Har... So we're both right : - )

amiga386

9 days ago

Another one to add is that Japanese boys names often end -rō (-郎, "nth son")... including the very plainly named 一郎 (Ichirō, "first son"), 二郎 (Jirō, "second son"), 三郎 (Saburō, "third son"), 四郎 (Shirō "fourth son"), 五郎 (Gorō, "fifth son"), 六郎 (Rokurō, "sixth son"), 七郎 (Shichirō "seventh son"), 八郎 (Hachirō, "eighth son") and 九郎 (Kurō, "ninth son")

aleksiy123

9 days ago

I believe some Ancient Roman names are also like this:

Male: Sextus, Septimus, Octavius, Nonus.

Female: Prima, Secunda, Tertia, Quarta, Quinta, Sexta, Octavia, Nona, and Decima

But on further investigation the males seem to actually be named after months https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zshd6h/when_...

and the women are unclear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praenomen

ItalianPoetry

5 days ago

I don't know about Ancient Romans, but I do know a few Italian men with numbered names. In particular a Decimo (tenth), who was indeed the tenth (and I wouldn't swear the last).

They are all, unsurprisingly, old :)

kridsdale3

9 days ago

Iron Maiden: Shichirō no Shichirō

aitchnyu

9 days ago

Is Shiro a taboo name? Seen an ad for a big corp not printing 4 out of deference to the Japanese, since its the word for death.

Or do people associate it with white?

amiga386

9 days ago

I'm not sure. 4 and death just sound the same, it's more a superstition to avoid saying those numbers, like Westerners thinking 13 is unlucky. It doesn't extend to all words beginning with or containing "shi"

Also, shiro (城 castle or 白 white) is not the same as the name Shirō (e.g. 四郎 "fourth son", 志郎 "determined son"?, 史郎 "historical son"?)

ralgozino

9 days ago

That's pretty convenient and easy to remember

gambiting

9 days ago

One other thing that has disappeared from common use(although I have seen it done among some "higher" circles still) is using the husband's full name for the wife here in the UK.

So if you have a man called "John Bridgerton", his wife would be referred to in certain circumstances as "Mrs John Bidgerton". Like you'd get an invite to the King's Ball, and it would say:

"Hereby inviting: Mr John Bridgerton and Mrs John Bridgerton"

Fuzzwah

9 days ago

Just recently I read about the etymology of the Japanese 奥さん Okusan = “your wife”

Until Japan started modernizing in the 19th century, it was considered rude to call people by their real names. If you asked your lord, “So how’s Sharon doing,” those may have been your last words.

So everyone called each other by their position names or by their nicknames if they were close, and for women in noble families or samurai families, it was usually the place they lived.

In ancient times, nobles had manors that looked like this. This is the entrance, the garden, the main building, and this building in the north of it was always the wife’s residence. So they often called her “Kita-no-kata,” the lady in the north.

Now, nobles built their houses based on a fung-shuei-like belief that Japanese shamans made everyone believe, like how rich people communities are into weird stuff, so the wife’s residence was almost always in the north.

But centuries later, in the age of samurai, priorities shifted. They were invading each other like there was nothing else to do, so they built their houses and castles with defence in mind first and foremost.

So the wife’s room wasn’t necessarily in the north anymore. So they were like, “So, how is the… umm… lady in the depths of your house?” 奥方様はいかがお過ごしですかな？

奥方様 means the lady in the depths, and it was shortened to 奥様, after the samurai age, and while 奥様 is still used now, we needed a slightly less formal version, so now if is often 奥さん. Deep-san!

source: https://www.facebook.com/metroclassicjapanese/posts/the-etym...

kevinmchugh

9 days ago

Very old Americans at least still do this as well. My 100 year old grandma insists that using the wife's first name is only appropriate when the husband is deceased.

My wife has a 100 year old grandfather and he until recently followed the rule as well. His last letter he addressed to my wife specifically using her own first name. This was a strange way to learn of my own death.

linsomniac

9 days ago

King of the Hill did it: "Hey Hank. Hey Hank's Wife."

triyambakam

9 days ago

That's funny.

My grandmother does it too to my wife. I think the fact that they write letters is also something very old Americans still do.

ziotom78

9 days ago

A memorable occurrence in this happens in "Sense and Sensibility", Part III, Chapter XII, when Elinor Dashwood learns that the man she loved and believed had just married was in fact free:

“Is Mrs. Ferrars at Longstaple?”

“At Longstaple!” he replied, with an air of surprise. “No; my mother is in town.”

“I meant,” said Elinor, taking up some work from the table, “to enquire after Mrs. Edward Ferrars.”

She dared not look up; but her mother and Marianne both turned their eyes on him. He coloured, seemed perplexed, looked doubtingly, and, after some hesitation, said,— “Perhaps you mean my brother: you mean Mrs.—Mrs. Robert Ferrars.”

stoneman24

9 days ago

A while ago, my wife and I were invited to the Royal Garden Party at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, in the presence of the late Queen. Very nice invitation in the form of Mr <me> and Mrs <me>.

As it was in recognition of my wife’s charitable works, She was not pleased at such a form of address. But we still went.

dlbucci

9 days ago

I learned about this from my mother, who, like my father, is a doctor. Invitations addressed to "Dr. and Mrs. Father Lastnames" were a source of great offense to her!

selimthegrim

9 days ago

This is done still on wedding invitations in the US

hydrogen7800

9 days ago

Many of the gift checks for my wedding were made out this way. It made it very inconvenient to cash them since there was not yet such a person by one of the names on those checks, and the bank wouldn't deposit them. They insisted the checks would have to say "Mr. OR Mrs." Who thinks of that when sending a wedding gift? Most annoying to me was that I had never heard of anyone having this difficulty before, but it must happen every day.

toast0

9 days ago

The ATM check frontend is much less picky than the teller check negotiation frontend. And the backend generally doesn't care too much either. To my recollection, I've only had one check ever refused by the ATM backend, and that was because the issuer hadn't signed it (on accident... I got the check back, took it to the issuer and they signed it on the spot, no harm done). I have had ATMs refuse a State of California Warrant (like a check, but not because it's drawn on the State's General fund), but a teller took it, no problem.

xp84

9 days ago

UGH this reminds me I have one of those fricking Warrants, for 19 cents, sitting on my desk. I finally found out that mobile deposit can't handle them because they have no account number whatsoever -- merely a routing number and a check number, so the 'check processing' system can't make any sense of them.

(I need to deposit it because I want to get my full name and address out of the unclaimed property register, for obvious privacy reasons)

toast0

9 days ago

The warrant I had trouble with was also unclaimed property.

I recall depositing a warrant at an ATM in California with no problems, so it's worth trying, but the ATM I tried in Washington didn't like it.

lkbm

9 days ago

Chase online deposit was fine with it for us. I'm pretty sure quite a few of them were "and" and some were probably "[me] and [my wife's completely made up name]". (She doesn't go by her legal name, first or last, though now that we're married she intends to go through the legal process to update.)

selimthegrim

8 days ago

I deposited a few of these in Louisiana (can't remember if it was online or not but my account was originally opened in Oregon so who knows if that part of ACH is more familiar with them)

averageRoyalty

9 days ago

I still think it's crazy a first world country is using cheques regularly.

toast0

9 days ago

No, we don't use cheques. We use checks. Much better.

xp84

9 days ago

Well, that's what happens when all the other options were invented by companies that are scheming to scam a cut of every transaction -- not to mention checks are the only way that doesn't require the receiver to give some awful private company all your information in order to get paid.

averageRoyalty

8 days ago

My bank doesn't charge any fees for transfers, and our EFTPOS fees are not allowed to be above what it costs the merchant. No private companies (beyond the bank themselves) have access to private information.

lkbm

9 days ago

Funny thing is, people think their bank account number is private, but it's printed on every check they write.

xp84

9 days ago

Btw by private info though, I just meant you need to actually create an account to use Zelle, PayPal, cash app, Apple Pay, etc. The account number isn’t as big a deal, just that it is annoying to have to make an account and agree to a 200-page EULA, with a random third party company you didn’t choose, just to receive some money you’re owed.

selimthegrim

8 days ago

This is one of those secret versus private things that pops up now and then.

xp84

9 days ago

Yeah, one of those funny legacy things from the days when convenience and cost of storing alternate identifiers dictated designs. Just like how my SSN was printed on my school ID that I presented at the library and dining hall 20 years ago. NBD!

ganoushoreilly

9 days ago

I did run into this with one teller at a bank we use. Wife showed them a copy of our marriage certificate on her phone and the teller said, congrats and that was that. We had 0 issues with online check submission though.

t-3

9 days ago

That's because online doesn't usually check the names, just the numbers. They wouldn't know unless you called in and told them, such as in case of an error.

Benanov

9 days ago

Having had a bit of it with my wife (she changed her name) my policy is to make the check out to the person who is not changing their name.

adzm

9 days ago

Oddly enough this is pretty much the only time this still seems to be encountered

pavel_lishin

9 days ago

It's only one of the few places where people send an RSVP labeled as such, and an explicit response is required.

Benanov

9 days ago

When people we know are getting married ask us for our address, I explicitly reply that we are not to be addressed in that manner (I find it somewhat insulting).

I can tell if the couple is doing addressing themselves or if they're having an older relative do it by if our instructions have been followed.

derekp7

9 days ago

I recall encountering this in the 70's, on a Flintstones episode from the 60's where a scene referenced Mrs. Fred Flintstone and Mrs. Barney Rubble. Confused the heck out of me at a young age.

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

bregma

9 days ago

In many American weddings it is still traditional for the bride's father to "give her away" to the groom, thus transferring chattel ownership.

wahern

9 days ago

I suspect that's a reductive "just-so" story that happens to fit into some popular feminist narratives, though coming on the heels of some adjacent theories popular among men in the 18th and 19th centuries that misconstrued the legal history of coverture.

It's difficult to find credible information using Google these days, but I would guess that the giving away of the bride is a custom more tied to exogamy--the practice of marrying outside one's social group (tribe, town, etc). In cultures that practice exogamy, it's typically either the young men (male exogamy) or the women (female exogamy), but not both, who would leave the group to marry. Giving away the bride seems more about relinquishing social and familial ties in the context of female exogamy. In some cultures, e.g. traditional chinese female exogamy AFAIU, the bride and her old family (or whole clan?) were strictly forbidden to communicate after marriage.

If women were just chattel (or something approximating chattel--there's a hole spectrum in-between, and overusing "chattel" this way diminishes the gravity of actual chattel slavery, IMO) then we wouldn't expect to see dowries (the bride's family giving the new couple money and gifts), but only brideprices (the groom's family giving the bride's family money and gifts). Yet AFAIU dowries were more the norm in European culture, notwithstanding there were times, places, and contexts where brideprices also existed, exclusively or in combination. And nobody says the groom is "chattel" just because the bride's family is transferring assets.

Interestingly, while I think female exogamy was historically much more common around the world, modern American culture seems to skew toward male exogamy, at least along some dimensions. It's never discussed in those terms[1], but you can arguably see it in statistics showing how the proximity and frequency of contact with extended family skews very heavily toward the wife's family.

[1] To the extent it's discussed, it's in feminist narratives and termed "emotional labor". It's not mutually exclusive with the anthropological concept. Male/female exogamy is value neutral, and feminist discourse is just slapping a value on it, in this case a negative value.

hammock

9 days ago

I enjoyed your comment

>Interestingly, while I think female exogamy was historically much more common around the world, modern American culture seems to skew toward male exogamy, at least along some dimensions. It's never discussed in those terms[1], but you can arguably see it in statistics showing how the proximity and frequency of contact with extended family skews very heavily toward the wife's family.

Why do you believe this is so?

wahern

9 days ago

On reflection, I think I'm mixing some concepts up. Regardless of the sex exogamy pattern (or related patrilocal/matrilocal pattern, where I think female exogamy correlates with patrilocal residency--living with or near the husband's family) I would think women would be doing the "emotional labor" regardless, and for the stereotypical biological predisposition reasons. As for why modern culture might be skewing matrilocal, once reason might simply be because it lessens the burden of emotional labor. In patrilocal systems the woman is dropped into an alien network of relationships, yet bears the burden of managing those relationships and adhering to any divergent customs and norms. As with the Chinese female exogamy example (patrilocal is maybe a more apt term, but I was introduced to it in terms of female exogamy) where the woman was forbidden from contact with her birth clan, patrilocal cultures might tend to impose even stricter norms and taboos to keep the woman engaged in managing her husband's family's relationships, as opposed to finding comfort in her childhood relationships. As sex and gender norms are loosening in many respects (but not all, and not as much we like to think), it might be that the pressures for marriages to fallback to matrilocal patterns are overcoming the pressures for patrilocality. But we're like hundreds, if not a thousand plus years, into major upheavals in these dynamics wrt Western European marriage dynamics in particular, so....

In the literature the motivations behind these systems is more often discussed in terms of avoiding incest, managing intergenerational wealth, exchanging labor (can cut both ways in terms of exploiting men or women) and other biological and cultural needs. The interplay between these seem pretty complex, but especially as we get further away from traditional hunter-gather, pastoral, and agricultural communities these dynamics may be weakening relative to other, more individualized factors, like convenience.

hammock

9 days ago

Couple thoughts - for your reflection - apropos of nothing:

1) On motivations/intergenerational wealth, there is the phenomenon of your father-in-law giving you a job at his big firm (or farm, or however that plays out), which is as common as it is commonly looked down upon (maybe?)

2) I wonder if the matrilocal tendency we see today was as common in the first half of the 19th cent (or earlier), or if it flipped , e.g. in the 1970s

wahern

9 days ago

I've had similar questions like yours but AFAICT there's a real dearth of data and research that goes beyond broad, general trends.

There is a lot of research (both value neutral as well as from conservative and liberal lenses) studying both the US and various other countries and communities showing correlation between (and often arguing causation of) matrilocality on the one hand and the breakdown or absence of institutional marriage and/or economic codependence. When I wrote the above I had more in mind upper middle class norms where marriage and economic codependency are still quite strong. But in many cases the most proximate cause of matrilocality is pretty obvious--lack of cultural structures/pressures to support viable alternatives.

happyopossum

9 days ago

> thus transferring chattel ownership.

That's reductive and insulting to the women who chose to maintain this tradition. In many cases it's a very moving and symbolic gesture, akin to a groom's dance with his mother.

cjs_ac

9 days ago

A real-life example of this is Princess Michael of Kent.

cvoss

9 days ago

If you go to a shop in a small town in America that sells used goods, you will almost certainly find a few editions of the local church cookbook. Depending on its age, it will likely refer to many of the women who submitted recipes in this manner. You could probably even date the cultural transition by comparing the books across a few decades.

mjd

9 days ago

I once wasted a couple of hours trying to find information about my great-grandmother, Selma Brenner Rauh. I found nothing.

... until I started looking for Mrs. Sidney Rauh ...

hilux

9 days ago

I believe the more typical reference would be: "Mr and Mrs John Bridgerton"?

serverlessmom

9 days ago

Here's an exception to these general rules (first names appearing in surnames) is Peterman: you'd think it was some kind of relation to a relative named peter, but it is actually a name for a profession. A Peterman was someone tasked with finding deposits of saltpeter for the production of fertlizer and gunpower.

A partial documentation is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltpetre_works

A better narrative of this industry is in Ed Conway's book "Material World" https://edconway.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-material-worl...

culi

8 days ago

Both 'peter' as in the name and peter as in "saltpeter" likely have the same etymological origins meaning something like "rock" or "stone".

dsego

8 days ago

Yes, petrus is old latin or greek for rock or stone, Saint Peter was given the name for "the rock" on which the church will be built.

queuebert

8 days ago

“Then in the distance, I heard the bulls. I began running as fast as I could. Fortunately, I was wearing my Italian Cap Toe Oxfords." - J. Peterman

tibbar

9 days ago

A few more I haven't seen mentioned yet:

* "Dob" is another old nickname for "Robert", giving us "Dobson";

* "Dodge" another nickname for Roger, hence Dodgson, as in Louis Carrol's real name, Charles Dodgson;

* "Tibb" is an old nickname for Theobald, giving surnames like "Tibbs" and "Tibbets";

* "Hud" for "Hugh", giving us the Hudsons.

mjd

9 days ago

Thanks, I'm going to add these to the article. I'll credit you as "Hacker News user `tibbar`" unless you'd prefer something else.

fullstop

9 days ago

You should look into Russian naming conventions. It wouldn't surprise me if some of those rules bled over into western names as well.

froddd

9 days ago

What about a surname like ‘Collinson’ — if ‘Collins’ is issued from this process already, would this be another layer of it?

mjd

7 days ago

I guess it's Collin + son. Conceivably Collin's + son.

tibbar

9 days ago

Nope, that sounds great!

soneca

9 days ago

I didn’t know English had a diminutive suffix (-kin). Is it used still in common English?

We have it Portuguese (-inho/-inha) and I find them so useful. It always seemed a missing feature of English.

Also, is there an augmentative suffix as well that I don’t know about?

lolinder

9 days ago

English has a few diminutive suffixes. Which one is used depends a lot on the shape of the word and the era, but the most common one today is -y.

So a child's toy might be Beary, and the kid might go by Johnny. We also have -ling, as in duckling, and a whole bunch of less common ones [0].

You're right, though, that we don't use our diminutives nearly as often as the Iberian languages do. If you tried to use them as much as you would in Portuguese you would definitely not sound like a native speaker, but they do exist.

Mostly they're used in the register of speech that we use when speaking to very young children (i.e. "baby talk"), in nicknames, or in older words that acquired a diminutive a long time ago and now register as just a word on their own.

[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_diminutive...

o11c

9 days ago

-ette is still productive but collides with the female sense

-kins (I've only heard it with an s) is arguably still productive, but in very limited contexts - unlike other diminutives, it seems to only be used when an actual small baby is involved, not for mere endearment, though in this context it can be used either for the baby or for the people around the baby.

-let is still productive (applet = small app; even Aplet = candied apple is only documented a century back); only takes ordinary nouns.

-ling feels still productive, but new archetypes are rare so it's mostly used with preexisting words.

-ole and variants might be productive in science but are otherwise not even recognized.

-poo is apparently productive but not something I ever reach for

-ses I'm not convinced is actually correctly analyzed; it appears to just be a redundant plural, similar to how "bestest" is a redundant superlative

-sies is actually just -s (diminutive/filler) + -ie/-y (diminutive) + -s (plural). Usually the first -s is required for a word that ends with a vowel (but also after n (including nd/nt with the d/t weakened), m, ng, r, l, p, or b; the need for disambiguation is also relevant)

But -y/-ie remains by far the dominant diminutive. It shouldn't be confused with several other uses of the suffix though (such as with the meaning of -ish).

Influence from Romance languages is strong enough that foreign diminutives are now more common than some of the traditional English diminutives.

ouchjars

9 days ago

-o is most characteristic of Australian English but English speakers over the world are familiar with "kiddo", "psycho", and now "doggo".

mjd

9 days ago

My own kiddo, at the age of two or three, decided that -o was a productive suffix and started calling me and her mother "Daddo" and "Mommo".

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

o11c

9 days ago

I don't think that's actually a diminutive (meaning shifts to add smallness or endearment), just a colloquializer (meaning doesn't change, just becomes less formal; dialects may adopt a particular informal word as standard).

wink

9 days ago

not sure psycho counts, as it works in every language that uses the greek? latin? base.

Also I kinda liked learning about smoko, even as a non-smoker.

t-3

9 days ago

> But -y/-ie remains by far the dominant diminutive. It shouldn't be confused with several other uses of the suffix though (such as with the meaning of -ish).

I think the -y meaning of ish is very closely related to if not identical to the diminutive use.

secondcoming

9 days ago

-een is there but probably more common in Ireland/Scotland than in other places.

pavel_lishin

9 days ago

Another example: "kiddie pool".

Also, I'll often refer to my child as "kidling" or "childling". English can be a fun language to play in.

dvlsg

9 days ago

One of my favorite jokes relies on this.

Q: Where does a general keep his armies?

A: In his sleevies!

mjd

9 days ago

And "-let" like in eyelet, bracelet, rivulet, etc.

Earw0rm

9 days ago

'-let' is pretty common as well. (Applet, hamlet and so on)

nicoburns

9 days ago

I think the most common diminutive in English preceding the word with the word "little". This is not a suffix but is used in much the same ways as diminutive suffixes are used in other latin languages.

"little bear" and "little johnny" would both be quite natural phrases.

jimbob45

9 days ago

The most common one might be the diminutive for a pot - potty. Potling or potlet would have been much better in my opinion.

mturmon

9 days ago

If you want to go looking,

  grep '[^s]kin$' /usr/share/dict/words
turns up a lot. You have to guess at the candidates, like:

  pipkin -- a little earthenware pot
  firkin -- a small cask
  dodkin -- a coin of little value
  ciderkin -- watered-down cider

NobodyNada

9 days ago

No, -kin is not a suffix used anymore. English does have a diminutive suffix though, it's -y/-ie: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-y#Suffix_2

For example, John -> Johnny, Tim -> Timmy, Grace -> Gracie, cat -> kitty, horse -> horsey. As far as I can think of, it can only applied to one-syllable nouns; longer words must be clipped first -- e.g. Katherine -> Kat(y|ey|ie), Tobias -> Toby, Andrew -> Andy, stomach -> tummy.

I can't think of an augmentive suffix that can be applied to names.

munificent

9 days ago

I'd expect augmentives for names to be rare because they're often pejorative and the opposite of endearing. I have occasionally known people whose nickname is something like "Big Fred".

In modern English, you could probably get away with a nickname like "Fredzilla".

rendang

9 days ago

-kin is not but via your link https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/-kins sometimes "-ikins"/"-ykins" is used, I've heard this before but can't think of any specific examples

nemomarx

9 days ago

I vaguely associate it with British writing, or at least an antiquated feeling. Reminds me of Widdershins.

DavidAdams

9 days ago

A "bodkin," an archaic word for a small knife or sharp implement, is probably a diminutive of "bod" or dagger. A "jerkin" or a tight vest, might be a diminutive of the Dutch "jerk," (dress), but all of these words are so old it's hard to nail down their etymology. As other commenters pointed out, today's diminutive suffix is -y/-ey, used mostly for childhood nicknames and baby-talk names like horsey.

saghm

9 days ago

I can't say I've ever heard "kin" used in everyday English speech. The only generally recognizable example word I can think of using it is "munchkin", which either refers to certain small residents of Oz (from "The Wizard of Oz" lore) or the name Dunkin' uses for the confection more generically known as a "doughnut hole" (which if you're not familiar with it is essentially the doughy center of the doughnut removed to make the hole and in my opinion should be called something like "inverse doughnut holes", although no one else seems to feel as strongly as me about it).

I had to Google what "augmentative suffix" was; despite having taken several years of Spanish in middle school and high school and being aware of the concept, I somehow hadn't heard that term before! I don't think there's anything common for that in English; the only thing that springs to mind for me is the prefix "big-ass", which probably isn't different enough from the typical adjective used for this purpose to qualify.

physicsguy

9 days ago

Only one I can think of these days are when kids call their parents something liked 'Daddykins'. But obviously there are words where it's now part of the word in it's own right today like 'napkin' or 'catkin'

schnable

9 days ago

We have prefixes like “mega” and “super.”

onlypassingthru

9 days ago

See also: jumbo-, hyper-, micro-, nano-, mini-, uber-.

I'm sure there are more but I haven't done enough crossword puzzles lately to be on top of my game.

phito

9 days ago

wouldn't micro-, nano-, mini- be diminutives?

Earw0rm

9 days ago

Not much, but it's an anglicisation of the German -chen, which very much is.

CamouflagedKiwi

9 days ago

I don't think there are many cases where it's used "correctly" but it does get constructed in some cases - e.g. in Harry Potter some of Ron's brothers call him "ickle Ronniekins", which is slightly nonsense but we recognise it immediately as a maximally diminutive form of his name.

I can't think of an augmentative suffix, only prefixes (super- and things like that).

quuxplusone

9 days ago

We (via French, I guess) have a mildly productive suffix "-ette" or "-et", as in cigar-ette, kitchen-ette (floret, bassinet, owlet). It doesn't imply animateness the way "-kin" does; e.g. "hotelette" or "showerette" seem like plausible coinages in a way "hotelkin" and "showerkin" don't (but I sense some cross-pollination from Japanese "-kun" messing with my interpretation of the latter). But "-ette" certainly connotes femininity: "little Ronniekins" says he's a baby, but "little Ronnette" says he's a girl.

Symbiote

9 days ago

-iekins makes sense to me as a nickname for an infant in Britain. Probably only spoken within the family.

mportela

9 days ago

"-y" is a quite common diminutive suffix in English nowadays. As a fun fact, Americans find hilarious/cute how Brazilians pronounce English words ending in consonants (e.g. WhatsApp/Facebook) adding an extra "i/ee/y" sound because it sounds like adding "-inho" to them!

nrclark

9 days ago

> I didn’t know English had a diminutive suffix (-kin). Is it used still in common English?

No, at least not in the US. In American English, you'd use a modifier instead of a suffix. We have some pre-diminutized words like "oopsie", but no general-purpose suffix that you can attach to anything.

There are some _prefixes_ that you can use though. You could prepend just about anything with "micro", and people will know you mean "a small version of X".

> Also, is there an augmentative suffix as well that I don’t know about?

Also no (at least not that I can think of). Modifiers are also more common. You can also use prefixes like "Mega" as an augmentative. Depending on the word, this can be used for comic effect.

ASUfool

9 days ago

Bumpkin?

"an awkward, simple, unsophisticated person from a rural area" (dictionary.com)

engineer_22

9 days ago

Yes, but it's archaic

Some places sell munchkins (little donuts)

and we send our 4-5 yr old children to Kindergarden

but we dont stick it to the end of words like inho/inha in portuguese or ito/ita in spanish

triyambakam

9 days ago

Kindergarten is not a diminutive but loan word from German.

leereeves

9 days ago

Kindergarden comes from German, where "kind" means child.

leereeves

9 days ago

I haven't seen -kin is used as a diminutive suffix in modern American English, in the way -ito,-ita is in Spanish (niñito, perrito). Maybe in England?

Jordan_Pelt

9 days ago

The only example I can think of is "munchkin" which was apparently coined by Frank Baum for The Wizard of Oz.

ZeWaka

9 days ago

> Is it used still in common English?

Not at all, really only in words 'munchkin', 'napkin', or 'pumpkin'.

throwaway519

9 days ago

It's suffiiently understood to be usable in th3 right context.

Ling's another. Both diminuitive but slightly differently.

stevesimmons

9 days ago

> Is it still used in common English?

pumpkin

Though now I think about it, it's very odd diminutive. Pumpkins are large rather than small.

ianburrell

9 days ago

Dictionary says that pumpkin came from French pompon (large melon) and was originally pumpion. English colonists named the orange melon they discovered in New World pumpkin.

Maybe it was joke pronunciation, calling large melon small. It could be a term of endearment for favorite melon. It could be they wanted to distinguish between all large melons and this large melon. Or it could be pronunciation drifting from use.

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

onlypassingthru

9 days ago

... or were early New World squash just of the smaller variety and only recently have we selectively bred them once that Mendel fellow started messing around with his peas?

munificent

9 days ago

I don't think pumpkin gets is name from the "-kin" diminutive.

Etymologyonline says: 1640s, "gourd-like fruit, of a deep orange-yellow color when ripe, of a coarse decumbent vine native to North America," an alteration of pompone, pumpion "melon, pumpkin" (1540s), from French pompon, from Latin peponem (nominative pepo) "melon," from Greek pepon "melon."

So the "n" has been on the end of the word for a long time.

Aloisius

9 days ago

OED says it was remodeled with the diminutive:

> Alteration of pumpion, variant of pompion n., with remodelling of the ending after words in ‑kin suffix.

Earw0rm

9 days ago

Jack o' lanterns are large, but plenty of the older varieties are softball sized.

mjw1007

9 days ago

"-let" is another one, which is sometimes used in non-childish contexts (eg in "tasklet" or "chiplet").

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

niccl

9 days ago

napkin is literally a small piece of napiery (cloth)

kr2

9 days ago

In Farsi / Persian we have "-zadeh" which means child of (born from). Last names were not instituted in Persia / Iran until early 1900s and everyone got to pick their own, so there are a lot of *zadehs as it was an easy choice. So eg Hassanzadeh is child of Hassan

aitchnyu

9 days ago

In the New Testament, the governor actually asks the crowd "do you want a pardon for Yeshua or Yeshua Bar Abbas", Bar Abbas meaning son of Abbas, a common naming convention. The text officially goes "do you want a pardon for Jesus or Barabbas?"

kr2

6 days ago

This is still used today by Jews for Hebrew names. "Bar", the Aramaic word for "son", has in Hebrew its counterpart "ben" ("bat" for women). So your Hebrew name is eg "David ben Benjamin", David son of Benjamin. This is used anywhere to address you in Hebrew, eg for bar/bat mitzvahs, calling up to give blessings in synagogue, headstones, on your ketubah (Jewish marriage license), etc

oniony

9 days ago

I imagine many ~son names are Scandinavian imports. Scandinavian surnames, until quite recently, were formed from the (usually) paternal forename. Iceland still continues this tradition to this day, e.g. Björk Guðmundsdóttir (daughter of Guðmundur).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name

asveikau

9 days ago

Scandinavians were pretty active on the British isles in prior centuries. It's a pretty influential source of English language. "Scandinavian import" sounds very modern, like you're buying a Volvo. The import would probably be more like: Britain and Scandinavia having a common ancestral source.

nkrisc

9 days ago

True, though there of course have been many different waves of Scandinavian migrants to the British Isles over the past ~2000 years or so.

In an American context, many -son surnames likely are from modern Scandinavian migrants (within the past 200 years), particularly for anyone from the Great Lakes/Midwest regions.

The site seems to have succumbed to HN traffic so I can't read it to see if it's specifically about surnames in the British Isles.

msh

9 days ago

Not until recently as such. In Denmark it became illegal to form them from the fathers name in 1828.

arrowsmith

9 days ago

Wouldn't it be -sen, not -son, if it was Danish or Norwegian? And -sson (double S) if Swedish.

I imagine the vast majority of -son Anglo surnames come directly from the English word "son", not from immigrants.

oaththrowaway

9 days ago

My surname was originally -sen, and was changed to -son when they got to America due to a typo (according to my Grandma). Name came from Denmark

pavel_lishin

9 days ago

A lot of names get transliterated and/or misspelled when people move around.

plasticchris

9 days ago

Someone with the last name Blank told me their family lore was that the (Ellis island era) immigration paperwork person just gave up.

smt88

9 days ago

“Name changed by staff at Ellis Island” is a myth. Some people, including many Eastern Europeans, did change their own names to make their ethnicity less obvious or to shorten the name (Schwarzenegger => Schwarz, Stein => Stone, etc.)

nemomarx

9 days ago

Certainly we could rule it out as a widespread normal practice, but transcription errors or spelling changes would happen, right? Especially from languages that have letters that don't exist in English.

smt88

9 days ago

> rule it out as a widespread normal practice

That's the part that's a myth: that it was widespread or normal. Of course small errors would happen.

But the main reason it didn't happen frequently is that employees at Ellis Island weren't even recording anyone's name. They were just checking them against manifests that were written elsewhere.

And when passengers were consulted about immigration-related issues, it was through an interpreter who would know the script and language of the arriving passenger.

More info: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-isla...

arrowsmith

9 days ago

I know it's a myth, but I wonder: did the myth become widespread because of the scene in The Godfather Part II where Vito changes his name to Corleone at Ellis Island? Or was the myth already widespread, and the moviemakers got the idea from the myth?

pavel_lishin

9 days ago

Yeah, I can't imagine that a lot of Russian or Polish immigrants - who wouldn't have spoken English - would have had any idea how to consistently transliterate their last names.

How do you transliterate Жижщенко? Anything with a ё in it? Or an ы, or й? Was there a policy on differentiating between "е" and "э"?

smt88

9 days ago

The transliteration was done by the passengers themselves, by the shipping company that transported the passengers, or by interpreters at Ellis Island.

While many of these immigrants wouldn't have been fluent in English, they still would have had access in their home countries or through the shipping company to someone bilingual who knew English as well. It's not like English was some incredibly inaccessible language to someone in Poland or Russia.

matsemann

9 days ago

Is there even a consistent way to do it in a language? The Russian chess player Ian Nepomniachtchi is called Jan Nepomnjasjtsjij in Norwegian for instance. Must be so many ways to do it.

arrowsmith

9 days ago

Depends. Some non-Latin scripts (eg Greek) have standardised transliteration schemes. Others (eg Arabic) have no clear standard, so the transliterations are wildly inconsistent.

pavel_lishin

9 days ago

I have a relative in the hospital with a fairly long Russian name. The staff can all be sorted into either the "not even gonna try" category, or the "let me practice my Russian pronunciation while I walk with you down this hallway" category.

dzdt

9 days ago

Literacy used to be much less common. If you don't spell your own name, what does it mean to misspell it?

arp242

9 days ago

You said your name to the civil servant, and they might "misspell" it. That is: it's recorded "correctly" somewhere (e.g. birth certificate) but somewhere along the line it becomes "wrong" (registering your child, getting new papers, etc.)

My surname is Tournoij, which I inherited from my father. him, me, and my brother have that surname: the entire rest of the family is Tournoy. Mistake during registration when he was born ("y" and "ij" are often pronounced identical in Dutch), and apparently it's nigh-impossible to correct afterwards.

As to the original of Tourno(y|ij), my guess is that it's several degrees of misspellings from Tournai, a place in French Belgium.

elliottcarlson

9 days ago

Interestingly, my paternal great-great-grandfather immigrated to the U.S. in 1868 with Carlson as his last name; later in life, my sister was born in Sweden because we happened to live there at the time, and her birth certificate was written as Carlsson - tbh I always thought my dad just didn't fill things out right and hence why she has a different spelling on her lastname.

Tor3

9 days ago

In my grandfather's and great-grandfather's time it was common to spell names in lots of different ways, at the same time. Made for interesting research for my father when he took up genealogy.

JJMcJ

9 days ago

The singer's name is Björk.

Guðmundsdóttir just tells us her father's name. It's not a family name in the sense that e.g., Swift is for Taylor Swift. If she was Icelandic, it would be Taylor Scottsdóttir.

simiones

9 days ago

Depends on how you define "family name".

In the most pragmatic sense, as in "what should you put in the family name field in legal contexts", then "Guðmundsdóttir" is her family name

E.g. her passport will have that value under "Surname".

And if she found herself in Iceland, in any paper where Björk would write down "Guðmundsdóttir", Taylor Swift would write "Swift", not "Scottsdóttir".

amiga386

9 days ago

OK, then if Taylor Swift were born in Iceland, she'd have been called Taylor Scottsdóttir, because that would be the naming tradition. And if she were a man, and her wife had children, they'd take the surname "Taylorsson" or "Taylorsdóttir". But more realisticly, if she married her current boyfriend and they moved to Iceland and followed the Icelandic tradition, their children would take the name Travisson or Travissdóttir

However, if she moved to Iceland, at a time when they still used phone books, people would look in the phonebook under "T" for "Taylor", as they'd look under "B" for "Björk", as in Icelandic society the "surname" doesn't have the same importance, given it changes every generation and isn't passed on like it is in other societies.

NoMoreNicksLeft

9 days ago

Even in Iceland, it's still used primarily in the same way that it's used everywhere else... disambiguation. Which "Taylor", which "Björk", since given names are reused so often there are typically are many Taylors and many Björks.

That their phone book chooses to use a different name for sorting doesn't change this, and given the nature of the second name, it would hardly be more efficient to use one or the other.

kridsdale3

9 days ago

At least for those two women, disambiguation is not necessary.

Checking Google.com autocomplete, Bjork is returned for the substring "bjo" and Swift is returned for the substring "t". Making her the eponymous global entity for that entire letter. Her father should renaming himself Scott Taylorsdad.

munch117

9 days ago

That says more about how Google has been personalised to you than about Icelandic phonebooks.

By the way, you are misspelling the name. The dots are not decoration, it's a different letter.

Edit: But I guess you know that, and o is just easier to type.

mr_toad

9 days ago

It’s not a different letter, it’s the same letter with a diacritic. It might be incorrect when writing in Icelandic but in English it’s no more incorrect than using cafe instead of café.

Symbiote

9 days ago

In that case, the tail on the J is just a decoration of an I, and we can write Iack Iones.

thaumasiotes

9 days ago

munch117 is right; it's a different letter.

Compare French é and è, different vowels with different spellings, to pinyin é and è, identical vowels with different diacritically-marked tones. The French vowels don't have diacritics any more than i and j do.

That's a graphemic definition of "letter". There is an alternative, collation order, but in Icelandic that will also tell you that o and ö are two different letters, and ö sorts after þ while o sorts before it.

simiones

9 days ago

The French definitely don't consider those to be different letters - they are e with an acute accent and a grave accent respectively; an accent is a type of diacritic mark. There's also a circumflex accent in French, and several other vowels can take accents. They even have two other diacritic marks, the trema (two dots) and the cedilla.

This is apparently different in Icelandic, where indeed ö is considered a separate letter, not an o with an umlaut/two dots. But this is simply a convention of Icelandic typography - German for example also uses ö in certain words, but they do consider it an o with an umlaut.

amiga386

8 days ago

It depends on the language, and is ultimately down to the language authorities/users whether diacritical letters count separately or not.

Some examples (please correct me if I've mistaken anything):

(Modern) English: 26 letters; A-Z. ÆÐÞŒǷȜſꝛ are no longer letters, replaced with alternative letters or digraphs

French: 26 letters; A-Z. ÀÂÇÉÈÊËÎÏÔÙÛÜŸ are letters with diacritics. Æ and Œ are digraphs

German: 26 letters; A-Z. ÄÖÜ are letters with diacritics. ẞ is a ligature

Dutch: 26 letters; A-Z. IJ is a digraph

Spanish: 27 letters; A-Z + Ñ. LL is a digraph

Danish, Norwegian: 29 letters: A-Z + ÆØÅ

Swedish, Finnish: 29 letters; A-Z + ÅÄÖ. Finnish Š and Ž aren't letters and are replaced with digraphs

Icelandic: 32 letters; A-Z - CQWZ + ÁÉÍÓÚÝ + ÐÞÆÖ (all letters)

Hungarian: 44 letters; A-Z + ÁÉÍÓÖŐÚÜŰ + Cs, Dz, Dzs, Gy, Ly, Ny, Sz, Ty, Zs (all letters)

kalleboo

7 days ago

Also with Swedish, until 2006, W wasn't a letter but was just a variant of V, and sorted as if it was a V (so Ws were mixed in with the Vs in an index)

thaumasiotes

8 days ago

> This is apparently different in Icelandic, where indeed ö is considered a separate letter, not an o with an umlaut/two dots. But this is simply a convention of Icelandic typography

I mentioned both phenomena. On the fundamentals, the letters are separate; that is the conclusion you'd come to, for French éè or Icelandic oö, by studying the writing system. According to formal authority, the two French letters are one and the same. This is a mistake of fact, but that happens all the time. (Compare French aà, where they're formally identical letters and the fundamentals tell us that the formal statement is correct. You might also compare 20th-century Spanish, in which "ch" and "ll" were formal letters that collated differently from the sequences "c-h" and "l-l". Again that agreed with the facts of the language; I believe the collation order was changed for the benefit of computers.)

And as I mentioned and you agreed, in the case of Icelandic the facts on the ground and the formal statement by authority are in agreement, so there isn't a case to be made that o and ö might be considered the same letter.

simiones

8 days ago

> On the fundamentals, the letters are separate; that is the conclusion you'd come to, for French éè or Icelandic oö, by studying the writing system.

This is the part we most disagree on. In my opinion, there is no fundamental definition of a letter, or at least the fundamental definition is graphical, entirely unrelated to pronunciation. By my definition, é è ö are fundamentally combinations of diacritical marks applied to a base letter (e, for the first two; o for the second).

And the reason I don't think there is any link between letters and their pronunciation is that letters are just not pronounced in a single way, regardless of any extra marks on them. In French in particular, e can be pronounced ə, such as in "sucre"; it can be pronounced œ such as in "me"; it can be pronounced "ɑ̃" such as in "Rouen"; it can be pronounced "e" such as in "chanter" (which is the same sound that é usually marks); or it can be pronounced as ɛ such as in "elle" (the first e). All of these are extremely common, not some obscure phonetics of one particular word.

Also, another reason we can see the accents are diacritical marks and not separate letters is the history of how they came about. French orthography has a bunch of rules about how different other letters modify the pronunciation of "e". The accents were added in those places where the regular rules aren't otherwise followed. So we spell the infinitive "chanter" and the second person indicative "chantez", because with the final "r" or "z" it's clear that the "e" is pronounced as "e", but we spell the participle "chanté" (pronounced identically) to distinguish it from "chante".

munch117

8 days ago

Even in German, mixing up o and ö or u and ü is still a spelling error. They sound very different, even if they are in some formal sense the same letter.

tsimionescu

8 days ago

The real question is how Germans spell in contexts where it's not easy to add those diacritical marks. Do they omit them, or take the extra effort to put them in / replace them with some digraphs?

My own language has several diacrititics that completely change the pronunciation (ă for schwa, â and î for a vowel that has no equivalent in English, ș for sh, ț for the zz from pizza), and is otherwise very phonetically written. Still, when writing in informal contexts on English keyboards, people generally just use a/i/s/t and rely on context to make it clear which word is meant. In old SMS writing, they would sometimes use sh and tz, but still a/i. So even though the diacritics fundamentally change pronunciation, and make a few words indistinguishable, they are not critical to the understanding of a text and local readers don't fully require them.

NoMoreNicksLeft

9 days ago

>At least for those two women, disambiguation is not necessary.

This seems unlikely. Taylor is a popular-enough millennial name that there must be many women (and more than a few men) named that. If we all ran around using only first/given names, we would certainly discover the need for disambiguation. Even Bjork is nowhere near unique. You didn't think they were the only people to have those names, did you? Disambiguation isn't about whether Google returns the most popular search for a given name, it's about what you need when you're not looking for the most popular target. This is plainly obvious, and a little disturbing that you could find cause to argue about it. The redditification of HN marches onward inevitably.

thaumasiotes

9 days ago

> their children would take the name Travisson or Travissdóttir

Why is it Travissdottir but not Travissson?

amiga386

8 days ago

I'm not an expert in Icelandic orthography, but the general case is "<name>'s son/daughter", e.g. "son of Fredrik" -> Fredriksson and for <name> ending in "s", I knew "son of Magnús" -> Magnússon.

But I should've checked, because I've looked it up now, and "daughter of Magnús" should be Magnúsdóttir. So we'd get Travisson / Travisdóttir.

ayewo

9 days ago

dottir = female child (daughter)

son = male child

tmtvl

9 days ago

thaumasiotes is asking about the number of 's'-es in the surname.

weinzierl

9 days ago

Family Name has a common definition. It is a type of surname passed down through generations. So Taylor Swift has a family name, Björk has not.

That is also why passports have a surname field but not a family name field. Not everyone has a surname but conventions to deal with this vary.

Similarly, passports use the terminology given name because not everyone has been christened and not everyone has a first name - for example I don't.

kgwgk

9 days ago

> not everyone has a first name - for example I don't.

> E-Mail is first name at my domain.

weinzierl

9 days ago

Good catch! Fixed it, thanks.

kgwgk

9 days ago

Or you could have "fixed" the comment.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/first-na...

the name that was given to you when you were born and that comes before your family name

weinzierl

9 days ago

I have a set of multiple given names, each of them given by a godfather. In our tradition and law they are equal because treating one of them specially is insulting to the godfathers (which you caught me guilty of).

If given name or surname comes first is regional. Where I come from (Bavaria) traditionally the surname comes first, so even by that metric I wouldn't have a first name.

Source:

Die Reihenfolge der Vornamen stellt keine Rangfolge dar. Nach höchstrichterlicher Rechtsprechung (BGH, Beschluss vom 15. April 1959 – IV ZB 286/58) steht es in Deutschland dem Namensträger frei, zwischen seinen standesamtlich eingetragenen Namen zu wählen.

[..]

Die in der Geburtsurkunde eingetragenen Vornamen dürfen von den Namensträgern im privaten Rechts- und Geschäftsverkehr nach Belieben genutzt werden und sind gleichberechtigt.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorname_(Deutschland)

kgwgk

9 days ago

> I have a set of multiple given names, each of them given by a godfather. In our tradition and law they are equal because treating one of them specially is insulting to the godfathers (which you caught me guilty of).

I don't see how changing "first" to "given" lessens the insult to those N - 1 godfathers.

And having "multiple first names" is not that rare.

kgwgk

9 days ago

> And having "multiple first names" is not that rare.

Example: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F882?la...

Can you give your child several first names?

There is no rule on the number of first names of the child.

However, the registrar may consider that the multiplicity of first names is contrary to the best interests of the child.

FYI Any first name entered in the birth certificate can be selected as common first name, whatever his order.

weinzierl

9 days ago

All the given names are equal, none of them is first or middle.

kgwgk

9 days ago

All of them are first names.

weinzierl

9 days ago

Going by the Cambridge definition you linked above[1], indeed yes. I checked other reputable dictionaries and they are mostly similar.

But by these definitions a middle would also be a first name, which is confusing.

[1] the name that was given to you when you were born and that comes before your family name

mr_toad

9 days ago

> the name that was given to you when you were born

Try telling that to Queen Victoria.

simiones

9 days ago

Both on Wikipedia and on Merriam-Webster, "family name" is given as a synonym of "last name" or "surname". In my own language as well, "family name" is simply understood as a part of your legal name with slightly different rules.

Perhaps in genealogy circles your definition applies. But it's certainly not how the word (well, expression?) is used in common language in English, and I bet in other languages either.

pavel_lishin

9 days ago

We visited Iceland recently and asked a tour guide some questions about naming conventions; apparently that's fine for visitors, but to get Icelandic citizenship, you're apparently required to have an Icelandic name.

(Granted, maybe there was a communication gap there; maybe it would only be required of any children we had there?)

arnarbi

9 days ago

You used to be required to adopt an Icelandic forename - not surname. You still kept your original name (if you wanted) and it was up to you which one you used on practice.

But as sibling comment says, that’s been dropped.

For surnames, anyone (including Icelanders) is allowed to use a family name if they have a claim to one, which is defined as having a parent or a grandparent carrying that name as a surname. So foreigners with family names can pass those to their children if they like and skip the patronym.

icepat

9 days ago

This is an old law that was changed recently. It's no longer needed that you adopt an Icelandic name to obtain citizenship.

cyberax

9 days ago

Not really. It's a patronymic. Some Slavic countries also use them, in addition to family names.

> E.g. her passport will have that value under "Surname".

Icelandic passports don't have a separate field for "Surname": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/File...

kgwgk

9 days ago

> Icelandic passports don't have a separate field for "Surname"

I may be missing your point but there is a "Surname" field in that photo, just above "Given names".

taejo

9 days ago

Moreover, in a later picture on the page you can see an example showing a -dóttir name in that field (I had wondered if perhaps it was only used for people who happened to have a "real" surname as opposed to a patronymic, e.g. foreign-born citizens) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/Fi...

cyberax

9 days ago

Facepalm. I don't know how I missed that.

troupo

9 days ago

As is "Simme" for Simon and possibly many other "nicknames" in the article which are not nicknames but versions of the name used by family, close friends, or used when calling a child.

bluejay2

9 days ago

You see this in Spanish a lot too. Diaz is son of Diego, which is still a common enough name. But there seem to be many more examples where the corresponding name is now rather uncommon from what I can tell. I am thinking of examples such as Menendez, Ortiz, Juarez, and Ordonez.

mjd

9 days ago

The examples that come to mind for me are Rodríguez, Martínez, González, Nunez, Hernández / Fernández, Sánchez.

Rodríguez, Martínez, and Hernández are the 9th, 10th, and 11th most-common surnames in the USA.

pavel_lishin

9 days ago

Both my endodontist and dentist have names ending in -ez, so I looked it up.

I wonder if this is a common pattern across all cultures and languages - if surnames share some sort of phonetic pattern, does it almost always indicate a patronymic, or (whatever the term for your profession/place of origin) is?

madcaptenor

9 days ago

López, Gómez, Gutiérrez, Suárez, ...

barreira

6 days ago

Same in Portuguese but with an -es

nkurz

9 days ago

I had a friend who's last name was Hodgeson. Until this article I'd never really considered that that it meant "son of Hodge". "Hodge" turns out to be a medieval English nickname for "Roger": https://nameberry.com/b/boy-baby-name-hodge

harry8

9 days ago

There’s an English cricketer called Ben Duckett. His nickname among Australian fans when playing for their local team appears to be “Autocorrect”

Autocorrectson sounds like a fine family name.

In England it’d be “Duckyson”

I wonder if there are real examples of more creative nicknames becoming surnames.

cjs_ac

9 days ago

Grosvenor, from gros venor, 'fat hunter'.

card_zero

9 days ago

That's excellent. I'm intrigued by Beaglehole, Clutterbuck, Cronk, Dingus, Eggink, Footlick, Gimbel, Hipkiss, Hollobone, Limp, Midgette, Mincey, Muddle, Nettleship, Noblin, Ogletree, Owl, Pardon, Pickles, Puffinburger, Riddles, Smelley, Spankie, Splatt, Thicknesse, Toadvine, Tremblay, Tubby, Twaddle, Twitt, Underdown, Whatmuff, Windy, Winker, and Wrong, but they probably mostly have mundane and logical origins. The ancestral Pickles probably just pickled things a lot, for instance.

walthamstow

9 days ago

Unsurprisingly the family behind this Norman French aristocratic name owns most of west London. The Duke of Westminster is one Hugh Grosvenor.

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

madcaptenor

9 days ago

"Autocorrect" as in "ducking autocorrect won't let me curse"?

harry8

9 days ago

Something like that I guess.

teleforce

9 days ago

When I was in school in England the most common first names for boys are exactly the first names that were given in the article namely John, Peter, James and Williams. The first three are from the Bible names and the last one is not from the Bible but from the name of Williams the Conquerer or Guillaume in French. The other most popular ones are Andrew, Philip, Matthew and Thomas. Fun facts, most of English people have middle names but it always abbreviated (e.g John F. Peterson) and apparently it's considered very rude to call someone by their middle name.

Later I've found that the typical English popular first names are mostly from the Bible, or to be exact the disciples of Jesus. In the Quran however, the names of Jesus disciples are not given but just called as Ḥawāriyyūn or the helpers/disciples. Similarly the names for friends or sahabat of Muhammad are not provided in the Quran. The ones that went to established the Rashidun Caliphates are very popular among Muslim for examples Omar/Umar, Osman/Usman and Ali. These three names are equivalent to the top three given in the article namely John, Peter and James.

physicsguy

9 days ago

It's funny picking a year on FreeBMD and seeing what names were popular then. At the moment old fashioned names are really popular - I met a little toddler called Margot last week! But I have to think that names like Sylvia, Lisa, Karen, Sharon, etc. might take quite a few generations before they come back into fashion.

In the Victorian era names were pretty creative and different! Lots of ones that haven't come through as 'classics'. My great grandmother's name was Rosina for e.g.

teleforce

9 days ago

>names like Sylvia, Lisa, Karen, Sharon, etc. might take quite a few generations before they come back into fashion.

Sylvia, Lisa, Karen, Sharon might make a comeback but not Karen due to the recent negative connotation and has been considered to be a pejorative term [1].

Similarly most of the Jesus disciples names become common place, the name Judas is avoided like a plague, since it's considered to be a pejorative term equivalent to traitor based on what he did to Jesus.

[1] Karen (slang):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)

physicsguy

9 days ago

I'm familiar with the pejorative but I reckon that'll die out, plus it's more an American thing that hasn't had that much crossover here in the UK.

bpoyner

9 days ago

Along these lines, 'Mc' and 'Mac' mean 'son of' in Scottish and Irish surnames.

psim1

9 days ago

Martin, son of Fly, the first time traveler and inventor of rock-and-roll music.

soperj

9 days ago

Technically Einstein was the first time traveler. He traveled one minute into the future.

fuzz_junket

8 days ago

Technically Doc Brown was alive in 1885, having travelled there from 1955, so he was the first time traveller by a good 100 years before Einstein.

dghf

9 days ago

And similarly 'O' for 'descendant of' in Irish surnames (e.g O'Neill).

layer8

9 days ago

Also the famous greek hunter O’Ryan. ;)

thaumasiotes

9 days ago

There is an unusual Chinese family name, 欧阳 ouyang, which is sometimes anglicized into the form O'Young.

ComputerGuru

9 days ago

In a similar vein: the origin of nicknames Junior, Chip, Trip, and Skip:

When the father and the son carry the same first name, the son can be nicknamed Junior (this is commonly known). But he can also be said to be "a chip off the old block" or "Chip" for short. When the grandfather, father, and son all have the same first name, then the grandson is the third (or triple) of the same name - ergo "Trip".

What about Skip? When the grandfather and the son have the same name, but the father is the odd one out. The grandson is now "Skip" with the name having "skipped" a generation before making a return.

ttyprintk

9 days ago

I’m not so sure about Chip. Trace and Trey are like Trip. For a while, I’ve been looking for uses of Buster where equivalent to Junior.

drivers99

9 days ago

Speaking of nicknames, "nickname" was "an eke name" (an additional name) so people thought it was "a nickname", similar to how "a napron" became "an apron". That is, it's one of the words that was "a n-" but the n moved because it sounds like "an -"

chuckadams

9 days ago

“Orange” got the same treatment, coming from “naranj”

drivers99

9 days ago

I almost put that, but I was reading the entry for that in etymonline and it didn't fit what I was saying exactly. i.e. it wasn't "a norange" at any point in English (or was it?), but the process happened in another language that we borrowed "orange" from, and it would have been too much of a tangent to get into that:

> Loss of initial n- probably is due to confusion with the definite article (as in une narange, una narancia), but also perhaps was by influence of French or "gold." https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=orange

MrVitaliy

9 days ago

The surnames with the suffix -enko are the most known and common Ukrainian surnames. Where "en" is roughly son-of or a child-of equivalent in English, and the "ko" means a smaller, baby version. For example Kovalenko where "Koval" means blacksmith, Petrenko where Petre or Petro if from a biblical name Peter.

avvt4avaw

9 days ago

Adam => Ad => Adkin/Atkin => Atkins/Atkinson

dhosek

9 days ago

It had somehow never occurred to me before reading this that Dixon = Dickson and Nixon = Nickson.

larusso

9 days ago

Reminds me of a great translation I struggled a bit at first. Gimli from Lord of the Rings is named in English: Gimli, son of Glóin. In the German translation his name is Gimli Glóinssohn. So back to English it would be Gimli Glóinson

ttepasse

9 days ago

By the way, there are two German translations. One “original” by Margaret Carroux which is closer to the English original and who collaborated with Tolkien back in his days, and a newer one from the late 90s by Wolfgang Krebe which tried to transform the text to something closer to spoken German. In the original Sam calls Frodo “Master” or, I believe sometime “Sir”, which is to be understood in the gentry commoner relationship. There is no real equivalent to “Master/Sir” in German. Carroux used “Herr” which sounds rather archaic to post-medieval Germans; Krege uses “Chef” which sounds too modern for the text.

If I remember my childhood’s Carroux translation correctly she used “Gimli, Gloins Sohn”, so not the Scandinavian construction, but a grammatically correct, but still archaic sounding, German construction which is near the original and still got the vibe of Gloinson.

Translation is tricky business.

matsemann

9 days ago

Yesterday I watched a Harry Potter movie with my GF. I was a huge Potter-head back in the days, she haven't read the books. So I tried to explain to her the huge discussions around the acronym RAB in the books, and how the Norwegian translator had guessed on RAS to match how other character names were translated. Led me down to this article which has a whole section on "difficulties in translation" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_transla...

So how the mirror of Erised had do get a proper backwards name in Norwegian, the O.W.Ls needed a fun acronym as well, Tom Marvolo Riddle is translated as Tom Dredolo Venster to make a matching sentence akin to how it in English is I am Lord Voldemort. Gotta make the songs and poems rhyme, etc.

The Norwegian translation is a work of love, and the translator Torstein Bugge Høverstad got quite famous here for his work.

quercusa

9 days ago

I have to imagine that Tolkien would have been delighted to discuss how to translate LoTR.

nicoburns

9 days ago

Some books I have read have left terms untranslated (typically rendered in italics) where the concept doesn't really translate. That might work quite well for master/sir.

russellbeattie

9 days ago

My last name - Beattie - is also in the "Bartholomew" nickname group along with Bates/Bateson.

Bartholomew means "son of Ptolemy", so the name is sort of "Ptolemy's son Bart's kid".

(Fun fact: Just to drive the Brits crazy, many families in the U.S with that surname (including mine) pronounce it "bee-AT-tee" instead of "bee-tee". God knows why. Maybe it's an attempt to get people to spell it correctly.)

madcaptenor

9 days ago

Huh... I had figured "Bartholomew" meant "son of" something, but I had no idea what Tholomew could possibly be.

fragmede

9 days ago

The other pronunciation that drives the Brits crazy is that Bucket is pronounced Boo-Kay.

AbuAssar

9 days ago

In arabic we have (bin or ibn) which means son of, and (abu) which means father of.

OkGoDoIt

9 days ago

This was so cool to read. I often think in English names are black boxes that doesn’t have deeper meaning (unlike Chinese where names often have literal meaning), so the insight here was great. And in hindsight mostly obvious, but I had never thought of them that way before. Nice find!

thrdbndndn

9 days ago

Can someone explain patronymic names to me as someone from a different culture? So you name your son with your given name + son, right?

But doesn't it mean he no longer shared the same surname with you? How does it make sense?

(Edit: I'm aware it was a practice long time ago, but still.)

thristian

9 days ago

Icelandic names follow that pattern. Björk's full name is "Björk Guðmundsdóttir" because she is the daughter of Guðmundur Gunnarsson.

English-speaking countries generally don't do that. For a long time people had only first-names, and disambiguated with nicknames or patronymic names where necessary. Eventually as society got larger and more complicated, governments started legally requiring people to have surnames, and they more or less stuck. If you meet a John Williamson today, his father probably isn't called William, but he's probably descended from a William who lived in the late medieval/early modern era.

prismatix

9 days ago

Another interesting one: Dawson is David's son.

I have a friend whose son is named Dawson and the father is David. When naming my own kid, I was curious of the origin of Dawson and finally put two and two together. Apparently it was intentional!

anoncow

9 days ago

Wholesome read. I didn't know that Robin comes from Robertson. So Robinson is Robertgrandson.

SamBam

9 days ago

It just said Robin used to be a nickname for Robert, so Robinson (or Robins) is basically the same as Robertson (or Roberts).

wrboyce

9 days ago

You know, I've always wondered what the Dickinsons were up to… I much prefer this explanation!

dghughes

9 days ago

Baxter is the female version of Baker i.e. a female baker (person who bakes for a living).

nashashmi

9 days ago

Another “son” that comes in is when put in a prefix. McDonald is son of Donald (i think this is Irish). In semitic languages, the prefix added is Ben like Benjamin means Son of Jamin. In italian, they add O’Donald (i think) for “of Donald”.

timc3

9 days ago

It has been written that the s suffix was also used by people that had a “master” and they would adopt their masters surname, trade or first name with the suffix. For example the worked for the Smith, they would become Smiths.

Trouble is I can’t remember where I read it, but I also recall at least two people that were heavily into genealogy telling me the same. It might have been

https://www.routledge.com/A-History-of-British-Surnames/Mcki...

ttyprintk

9 days ago

Look up occupational surnames, and the related possessive s. Roberts implies some servant of Robert, with Vickers being a mix.

The actors in mystery plays are interesting to me. They’d play the same character their entire career. So King, Lord, and Virgin are roles according to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname#Occupational_surnames

bilekas

9 days ago

I’ve always been fascinated by how people of generations have gotten their names, it’s usually a good story if you can trace it back enough..

I always found it uncomfortable how in the US (more so than other places) you could just change your name with a fee and a piece of paper. That said a lot of my family who emigrated had their names changed in the immigration office while moving to America, at the same time that has become an extension of ours..

If my nickname was a surname, we probably wouldn’t be allowed a passport

ttyprintk

9 days ago

There’s a flip side: in Europe many centuries ago it was best for Jewish people to change their/our names to evade cultural prejudice. Europe and Napoleon in particular mandated unambiguously Jewish names.

The privilege to change our name was liberating.

bjarneh

9 days ago

The guy has his blog going since 94. What a legend!

kgeist

9 days ago

There're also cases when a nickname stems from the full name which no one has anymore.

In Kievan Rus, the common form of Vladimir was Volodimir. Ukraine still has this form (Volodymyr Zelensky).

The diminutive of Volodimir was Vova, which makes sense. Later, in Russia, Volodimir was replaced with the Church Slavonic form, Vladimir.

So today diminutive of Vladimir is Vova (not Vlad, a common mistake in the West to call Putin Vlad).

romanhn

9 days ago

Oh that's interesting. Explains the other common diminutive of Vladimir - Volodya. And yeah, Vlad is short for Vladislav.

My favorite set of Russian diminutives that makes zero logical sense to a non-native is: Alexander (formal) = Sasha (informal) = Shura/Shurik (very informal).

kgeist

9 days ago

Alexander => Alexasha => Sasha

And then with suffix -urik: Sashurik => Shurik

acjohnson55

9 days ago

The R->H nicknames are interesting considering the northern French "r" sounds like the aspirated "h" in English. Many French would pronounce Robert as approximately "ho-beh(r)". I wonder if this is a place where idiosyncratic spelling captured differences in pronunciation of the name, but the common given name never changed its spelling.

fjjjrjj

9 days ago

My Norwegian ancestors arrived in the US as Nordhus surname, and left immigration with a completely unrelated -son surname. That happened a lot and I understand it's because they didn't speak English and the immigration officers had busy lines to process so they used a default name of sorts on the paperwork.

sparky_z

9 days ago

This is a common myth that often shows up in family lore and has bled into popular culture, but it simply isn't true. Historians are unanimous that it didn't happen (with perhaps some extraordinarily rare edge cases).

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ellis-island-isnt-...

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-isla...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island_Special

crazygringo

9 days ago

Yup. It was common in the 1800's and early 1900's for immigrants to change their last name to become more "American", to assimilate better.

I don't believe this was a common thing to do upon arrival -- it was more like, when they wanted to open a business and be perceived as more American, more established, more trustworthy. It might not even be the immigrants themselves but their second-generation children, or even third generation.

If you visit a cemetery with lots of 1800's gravestones, it's pretty wild to see crazy diversity of last names from all over Europe, that we just don't have any more. Ellis Island didn't simplify or change anything. And which shows that in many of those cases, it was indeed the children who changed their name.

FactolSarin

9 days ago

My family's last name was probably Schaefer in Germany. The earliest graves in America show them as Scheffert instead but shortly after they became "Shuford" which I guess they thought sounded more English (they were here pre-Revolution).

I always find it funny they did such a bad job of anglicizing it. Shuford doesn't really sound any more English to my ears.

anonymousDan

9 days ago

Interesting, never occurred to me so many English names are constructed in this way. In Ireland we have O' (e.g. O'Brien) that means 'descendent of' and Mac/Mc that means 'son of'. Also the female equivalents Nic and Ni (less common).

wenderen

9 days ago

Lawrence => Law => Lawson

fanf2

9 days ago

Oh yes, also => Lar => Larkin, Larkins

nailer

9 days ago

> We get Hodge / Hodges / Hodgson / Hodgkins from "Hodge", an arcahic nickname for Roger.

I wonder if the Brazil Rogers - which are pronounced Hodger - are related to this older version of the name.

m1n1

9 days ago

Some cultures had (have?) a tradition of naming each successive generation according to the next line in a poem or song.

If you ran out of verses, you'd pick a new song to start over.

ryanbigg

9 days ago

I wonder if Fitzgibbon fits this pattern? Fitz being “the bastard son of…” and Gibbon, like ape? Or perhaps Gibbon has another meaning?

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

hoseja

9 days ago

Wow that's a lot of patronymics I wasn't aware are patronymics. Way more sneaky than the scandinavian -sons.

shreddit

9 days ago

I just heard about “Dick” being a nickname for “Richard” but as a non native English speaker i can not see the reason behind that…

hennell

9 days ago

English does a lot of shorting, rhyming nicknames. We even like to lengthen the rhyming part back out to be even more confusing.

• Richard -> Rick -> Dick

• William -> Will -> Bill -> Billy

• Robert -> Rob -> Bob -> Bobby

• Margaret -> Meg -> Peg -> Peggy

• Edward -> Ed -> Ned | Ted -> Teddy

A lot of common names also have just a variant which barely seems related:

• Henry -> Harry

• John -> Jack

• James -> Jim

And you'll have to Google for all the nicknames for "Elizabeth" because I can't remember them all.

What we lack for creativity in names themselves, we make up for with creative nicknames because every other kid is called Elizabeth.

kej

9 days ago

To add on to what you said, the rhyming is usually in the direction of easier sounds for children to make. Kids will struggle with R a lot more than D, so you get Richard -> Rick -> Dick but not David -> Dave -> Rave, for example.

iteria

9 days ago

Now all I can think is how there was a Janet in my family and none of us children could say her name, so she became Janice to us forever even as adults.

card_zero

9 days ago

And somehow, Mary -> Polly. This is "lambdacism" apparently.

tsm

9 days ago

It's Mary -> Molly-> Polly, which makes slightly more sense

Anthony-G

9 days ago

Thanks. I always assumed that Polly was a diminutive of Pauline.

nemomarx

9 days ago

mary to molly to Polly? I can kinda see the molly step at least

DavidAdams

9 days ago

There are also a lot of nicknames for Margaret (Marge, Madge, Maggie, etc), I guess because there just aren't nearly as many biblical names for women/girls so people wanted to get creative.

Jordan_Pelt

9 days ago

Hank and Hal are also short for Henry.

toyg

9 days ago

Jack is also used for James, since it is the equivalent of Jacques in French and Giacomo in Italian. The apostle was actually called Yakov, after Jacob, which is the root of all those names.

dmit

9 days ago

Also the r->z substitution. Charles -> Chaz. Barry -> Baz. Jeremy -> Jez. Caroline -> Caz. etc etc

rectang

9 days ago

My initial thought was that in certain English accents, including some from the northern parts of the UK, the r is "flapped" or "tapped" similar to an r in Spanish. With a tapped r, the pronunciation of "Rick" is much closer to that of "Dick".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_/r/#V...

However, further research has turned up that rhyming nicknames have been a thing going back centuries and "Dick" is one among many.

https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/how-did-dick-become-sh...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH1NAwwKtcg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_(nickname)

arrowsmith

9 days ago

If it's not obvious: "Dick" was a nickname for Richard long, long before it became a slang word for "penis".

And the newer meaning is probably why almost no Richards go by "Dick" anymore.

SiVal

9 days ago

Yes, Dick has been a nickname for Richard for about 800 years but only got its modern slang meaning in probably late-19th or early 20th century. It seems to have come out of the British military from the phrase "Tom, Dick, and Harry", which were such common names that the phrase meant every ordinary man. (Tommy was already slang for "British soldier".) And from there, one more evolutionary step for mankind....

chuckadams

9 days ago

WW1 coined “Jerry” for a German soldier, thus giving us Tom and Jerry

irrational

9 days ago

My wife had an elementary school teacher Richard Weiner who went by Dick. You can't make these things up.

Huffers2

9 days ago

I still laugh occasionally when I remember an army career video I saw in school which featured (among other officers) a "Major Richard Head".

irrational

9 days ago

Major Dick Head must have been praying for a promotion to Lt Colonel.

washadjeffmad

9 days ago

Pronunciations have changed with literacy and dialect. (ich) sounded like (aick) in proto-Germanic, making Richard phonetically more similar to modern Ricardo.

Rhymes are also popular for nicknames, especially if you've got a village full of people with the same name, also especially if the rhyme sounds like something else. Ryke(r)/Rick/Rickon, Dyke/Deek/'Deacon'/Dick, Hyke... that's more of a surname, and perhaps more common to people who encountered the Scandinavians.

There's also Richert, Ricard, and Ricart from the same root. Modern 'Richard' is softer (ich), almost like (ish), and may have been pronounced like Rishard in places before the modern compromise.

AdmiralAsshat

9 days ago

Rhyming nicknames are common.

See also: "Bill" being a common nickname for "William" (far more common, in fact, than "Will").

wrboyce

9 days ago

I know a few Williams (I am also one myself) and they all go by Will. I do know a guy whose middle name is William and he goes by Billy. I do not personally know anyone who goes by Bill.

I’ve only ever been called Bill once and that was by a US Border Agent which leads me to suspect this is a regional thing (the commonality, not the validity). For clarity, I am in the UK.

myself248

9 days ago

From my view (in the US), it seems mostly generational.

My grandfather William went by Bill, but most of the Williams in my own generation go by Will. In particular if they're the son of a Bill, they use the different nickname. I wonder if their sons will go back to Bill.

I've seen this alternate nickname scheme in a family that reused women's names down the line, with "Katherine" and "Elizabeth" taking turns and wearing nicknames left and right. Grandma was Katherine, grand-aunt was Eliza, mom was Kate, aunt was Beth, daughters were Kitty and Libby...

toast0

9 days ago

> I've seen this alternate nickname scheme in a family that reused women's names down the line

I've been doing a smidge of genealogy lately, and my dad's side of the family is full of this kind of stuff. They have a tradition of first son takes dad's dad's name, first daughter takes dad's mom's name, second son takes dad's uncle's name, etc. Not a lot of middle names. My great grandmother's maiden name is the exact same as her mother's married name, although some records have a shortened form, mostly for my GGM, but sometimes for my GM. For my kid, we tried to look around and pick a name that wasn't super common, but also not unique; I think we did well with the whole name, but there were three of his first name in kindergarten; thankfully with different last names, but the initial of their last names were sequential!

zdragnar

9 days ago

Bill Clinton, Bill Nighy, Bill Gates, Bill Cosby, Bill Nye.

Other than Nighy, maybe it's just more of an American thing?

wrboyce

9 days ago

I suspect that is the case, yeah. I can think of maybe 3 other (famous) Bills from the UK but a lot more from the US.

Bill Bailey, Bill Oddie, and Bill Shankly - alas I don’t know any of them personally!

zdragnar

9 days ago

Oh man, Bill Bailey would certainly be a treat to get to know!

wrboyce

9 days ago

Absolutely! Nearest I have been is seeing him perform live, still a great pleasure; the man is a comic genius.

(If you haven't watched it, he made a short series called "Perfect Pub Walks with Bill Bailey" which was great -- I'd highly recommend if you're a fan. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31434018/)

Affric

9 days ago

By all accounts.

amiga386

9 days ago

Bill Shakespeare, Bill Nighy, Billy Brag, Billy Connolly, Billy Cotton, Bill Drummond, Bill and Ben, Portland Bill?

Affric

9 days ago

I think it’s partially a generational thing. I know a couple of “Bill”s my age but couldn’t count the “Will”s.

My father and older age though there’s not one person I know called “Will” but I know countless “Bill”s

SoftTalker

9 days ago

My father was William and was often called Willy as a kid but went by Bill among friends as an adult.

dylan604

9 days ago

Charles => Chuck in the same head scratching reason to me as well

ttyprintk

9 days ago

Actually Chuck is fascinating: only found in America. It’s easier to pronounce in Chinese and a lot of immigrant Charles landed first in Chinatown.

madcaptenor

9 days ago

I once had a coworker try to convince me that Chuck was short for William.

(His full name was William Charles Lastname, and he went by Chuck.)

dylan604

9 days ago

That sounds like one of the names where "the third" rolls off naturally. I've seen a lot of "juniors" where the senior goes by the first name while junior goes by the middle name.

How parents refer to their kids is an interesting little view into their world

somat

9 days ago

That is my case, same name as my father(no Jr however), so the family called me by my middle name, Which you get used to, to the point where I won't recognize it if called by given name. It is a bit confusing as I have to be mindful to use the correct name when doing government tasks.

madcaptenor

9 days ago

I think he was a junior. I don't work with him any more, though, so I can't ask.

FactolSarin

9 days ago

A lot of old nicknames don't really make a lot of sense at first glance. The short answer is rhyming slang, and the long answer is there simply used to be a lot less names in English that were acceptable and commonly used. So, for instance, Richard being shortened to "Rick" is pretty straightforward, but you probably knew several Richards and Ricks, and you want to call them different names. So instead of Rick, you call them by a rhyming nickname, in this case "Dick." The same is true of "Rob" being short for "Robert," but "Bob" was too. Because "Bob" rhymes with "Rob".

One of the oddest in this vein is Peggy, which is short for Margaret. Because Margaret would get shortened to Meg, and then rhymed with Peg, and then somehow lengthened back again to Peggy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

dhosek

9 days ago

In Slavic languages, it’s not uncommon to do doubled diminutives, so Pavel ⇢ Pavlik ⇢ Pavliček. (Or my ex-wife who didn’t like the shortness of my name “Don” but liked the Czech vocative of it, Doničku¹ which she then abbreviated to Ičku, then she hispanicized that by adding a new diminutive to it, becoming Ičquito.

⸻

1. I’m named after my father and this is how his Czech-speaking great-grandmother who lived with his family until her death called him. On one occasion not long after we were married, the three of us were driving and I made some slightly tasteless joke and my ex-wife from the backseat said in a scolding tone, Doničku which made my dead whip his head around in surprise/shock.

selimthegrim

9 days ago

Now I am imagining Donald and Ivana Trump arguing

toast0

9 days ago

As a Richard, I imagine, it started as Richard -> Rick. And then someone wrote the R with a real big top part and the lines at the bottom got overlooked.

Got in the wrong government records like that, and soon enough it's a long explaination or you just go with it, and Bob's your uncle.

But rhyming as a sibling notes is more likely (and insinuated by Bob) cockney rhyming slang is insiduious but nickname rhymes aren't quite to the same level.

I'm not going with it, fyi.

samspot

9 days ago

Don't feel bad, native English speakers like me can't understand it either. FWIW I think those that explain it are mostly making up reasons.

nonchalantsui

9 days ago

From what I recall reading: Richard was a common name so people used nicknames often, and this became shortened versions Rick/Rich. Eventually rhyming into Dick/Hick.

Similar for Robert -> (shortened) Rob -> (rhyme) Bob.

Worth noting, the dick = penis connotations happened later on, so Dick was just a nickname!

gadders

9 days ago

As well as boys names, girls names have some strange shortened forms:

- Margaret -> Peggy

- Anne -> Nan

amiga386

9 days ago

- Margaret -> Madge, Marge, Maggie, Marjorie, Margarethe, Margherita, Greta, Gretchen, Margarita, Rita, Margot, Margo, Molly, ...

- Elizabeth -> Eliza, Liza, Lisa, Liz, Lizzy, Elly, Ellie, Ell, Elle, Elsa, Liesbeth, Lizbeth, Lisbeth, Lizbet, Isabella, Isabel, Isabell, Sabella, Zabel, Bella, Beth, Betty, ...

gadders

9 days ago

Yes, was just listing the least intuitive ones.

downrightmike

9 days ago

And dick used to be short for detective, and used by private investigators like Dick Tracy. Then there is the implied Dick pun, like "Magnum" PI, where Magnum is a "Big Dick"

dylan604

9 days ago

Wasn't a detective written as dic without the k? Clearly, the k was going to be used because everyone's inner 12 year old

madcaptenor

9 days ago

Also "dic" just doesn't look like an English word - compare kick, lick, sick, tick, etc. There are English words ending in -ic but they tend to be longer, Latinate ones.

ASUfool

9 days ago

Epic mic drop there.

madcaptenor

9 days ago

OK, that's actually a good example, but "mic" is a clipping of "microphone" and isn't pronounced the same anyway.

dylan604

9 days ago

sic joins the chat

user

9 days ago

[deleted]

duped

9 days ago

Dick rhymes with Rick short for Richard

user

8 days ago

[deleted]

jMyles

9 days ago

How about Jenkins?

Is it "Son of Jen", or some totally different formulation?

madcaptenor

9 days ago

Wikipedia has "Jenkins" as "son of John".

nickpeterson

9 days ago

Embarrassing how little of this I knew, especially with my username.

hunter2_

9 days ago

Simpson (from Simon) is an interesting one. Most of the consonant adjustments are for simplification (e.g., Robkins -> Robins, and Adkins -> Atkins) but expanding Sim to Simp seems like an outlier in this sense because Simson doesn't seem particularly difficult to say. I believe dropping the /p/ is common, even, depending on the dialect.

SoftTalker

9 days ago

Simpson eh? I'll remember that name.

Affric

9 days ago

Without the p most English speakers would turn the s into a z because the m is voiced.

raldi

9 days ago

Don't forget Niklaus or Nicholson.

floxy

9 days ago

How about Madison? Son of Madi...?

zamadatix

9 days ago

Maddy was a nickname for Maude (before becoming a nickname for "Madison" itself) but that would make it a rare since it'd be from the mother's side. Random internet sources claim it's more likely to be a variation of "Matthew's Son" but none seemed particularly certain.

725686

9 days ago

So Rich Hickey is Richard Richard.

krunck

8 days ago

What about Mason and Jason?