Trees, flowers, mountains, stones

The story I was told, and it may be apocryphal, is that localities used it to make money, drawing up lists of names. Nice names, like Montefiore, cost more money than ordinary ones (mine: Mendlesohn or son of Mendel), and some names were imposed on the poor, like Schwarzkopf.

But that’s just the tradition I was brought up with. I don’t know.

Languagehat post on the topic.

E.T.A. Hoffmann made a lot of money doing this. Who in their right mind would choose Fischbein or Wieseltier if they could avoid it?

I had heard that Jews resisted last names because Moses didn’t have one, and they had to be imposed.

Krauthammer: obviously a very poor family eking out a libving making the unique hammered sauerkraut.

Argh. “Unredemed”=”Unredeemed.” Obvs.

“European states imposed universal last names on their populations, the better to tax and monitor them”: always? I’ve read that English surnames were adopted because a medieval change to property law made it important to establish your heritable rights as a landowner or tenant.

This guy
http://jewishwebindex.com/names.htm
says that in Prussia bribery definetly played a role. Do a search for “Hofmann” on that page, just in case you thought Carlyle was the only despicable Romantic
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=E.T.A.%20Hoffmann

I used to think that the name Katzenellenbogen had something to do with cats’ elbows. As it turns out, the more likely explanation is more prosaic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katzenellenbogen

I, too, doubt that Hoffman was anti-semitic. None of the biographical notes I’ve read suggest this, nor does a quick Google search. One of the major characters in The Tomcat Murr is Master Abraham, a good friend of the author’s alter-ego Kreisler, and, from his name, presumably Jewish.

I’ll second what Emerson said about Scandinavians using patronyms until well into the nineteenth century, and I’ve read that the Scots used patronyms until the seventeenth, when they became fixed (so that MacSomething is not necessarily a clan name).

Patronyms still seem to be in use in Iceland.

The story told to me by my father (third generation Dutch-American, who speaks Dutch as it was spoken in the islands at the turn of the previous century) is that last names in the Netherlands were imposed by the Spanish for taxation purposes. The Dutch, forced to adopt a last name, chose place-based endlessly long names to annoy the Spanish. And I was in third grade before I could spell my maiden name.

That’s what that website says. And I think the story about him coming up with ridiculous or insulting names is pretty well sourced. It could be that the adjective “vicious” is…I dunno… maybe he was just your standard 18th/19th century anti-semitic European.

But as an aside. Aren’t surnames in most languages based on either:
a) Occupation
(Taylor, Schmidt – Smith – Kowalski etc)
b) Place of origin of family long time ago
c) Some personal feature of some ancestor
(White, Newmann (Neumann, Nowak)
d) Related to nature (probably through occupation or place of origin) (Mountbaum, Hillman, Gorski, etc.)
e) Patronymic (Johnson, Ericsson, Emerson? etc.)
f) Name of the master’s family back when your ancestors were slaves/serfs

I’m willing to bet non-Indo-European languages are the same (got a Chinese friend whose name directly translates as “Barbarian People”, or so he says)

No one knows where my last name came from. It’s of the kind that gives linguists a headache.

That’s fascinating. Thank you for mentioning it.

West-Frisians didn’t think of surnames as theirs, up through some time before WW I; this is a problem for US genealogists with West-Frisian ancestry. Norwegians also didn’t have much regard for surnames.

The New York Times style mavens have trouble with Afghans who lack surnames, having to explain the phenomenon in reports, usually in a way that avoids suggesting there’s anything bad about not having one.

but refugees from the Jacobite wars in Scotland, and the name they chose (Hospers) is a rather rare one.

Sounds vaguely like a Northumberland connection…

Spanish colonialists introduced compulsory surnames into the Philippines in 1849, issuing a “Catalogo Alfabetico de Apellidos” from which all were supposed to select family names. Prior to that date most Filipinos had two names, but neither was necessarily a “family name” and both were likely to be the names of catholic saints, combined in seemingly random order, so that “Juan Francisco” in one document might show up as “Francisco San Juan” in another. More than half the women were “Maria XXXX” (Maria Juana, Maria Francisca, Maria Theresa, Maria Candelaria,&c).

In some provinces, this assignment was apparently random. In others, it looks as if pages had been torn from the “Catalogo” and sent to each town in turn, so that you have 80-90% of the inhabitants of one town with surnames beginning with the letter “A”; in the next town down the coast it’s “B,” and so forth. (Thus the town of Oas, Albay, is so heavy with names beginning with “R” that they jokingly claim both Rizal and Roosevelt as native sons!) For a few years, if the historian is lucky, surviving records will show both someone’s new surname and the name by which s/he was previously known.

In Thailand, on the Western model, surnames were adopted by government decree early in the 20th century. The Thai went along because they had to, but did not fully internalize it, and most are still referred to except on official documents by the first (=real) name, not their surname. Thus Dr. Neon Snidvongs would be called “Dr. Neon,” not Dr. Snidvongs.

Most Indonesians still use only a single name. This confused the editors of Time in the immediate postwar period when they started hearing about a brash nationalist called “Sukarno” (or “Soekarno” in the Dutch spelling). Nothing daunted – Time never was in those days – they simply assigned him one, so the fictive name “Achmed Soekarno” is found in some reports of that period – and occasionally even later!

Also, apparently in Iceland you are not permitted to give a child a first name that has not been approved by some sort of naming council.

Was this not also until recently the case in France – the mayor had a list of approved names against which the registrar had to check your application?

Dearieme upthread – I have heard similar, but fixed surnames arose earlier in England than most places, so perhaps comparable legislation wasn’t widespread.

This seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. The same thing happened in late 19th century British India. Some people adopted the name of their profession or location, so that today you have families such as Bankwalla, Canteenwalla, Bombaywalla, Japanwalla etc (“Walla” translates as “associated with”). It is also quite common for someone’s middle name to be the father’s first name.

Also, apparently in Iceland you are not permitted to give a child a first name that has not been approved by some sort of naming council.

Was this not also until recently the case in France – the mayor had a list of approved names against which the registrar had to check your application?

Also in Germany – and something similar (I think) in Turkey – at least for Turkish citizens: you must have at least one given name from a standard list though you may have more than one given name.

In Britain there isn’t a similar requirement (so people could presumably still end up with ‘Puritan’ names like ‘Praisegod Barebones’)

But I believe there’s a list of ‘names’ that you can’t give a child – I’ve been told or read that it includes ‘Satan’, ‘Jesus Christ’, ‘Uz’ and ‘Water’. I guess the list is issued to registrars of births and deaths.

(You may, though, be able to change your name by deed poll to something on the ‘forbidden list’ list

they also audit the name as a whole for laughability, so Mr et Mme Renault are not allowed to call their daughter Clio.

There is a case of “compulsory” middle initials in post-WWII Scotland. So many boys in one primary school class were called Donald Macleod that the teacher called them Donny A Macleod, Donny B Macleod…. and they stuck. Allegedly.

In parts of Sweden patronymics worked into 20’the century. My great grandfather was Sven Karlsson, his son Gustaf Adolf Svensson, my father Bruno Svensson (born 1924, habit fading out by then but cousins kept is up), and I was Fredrik Brunosson.
To avoid the nautrual misconceptions that this caused we then cahgned to a new unique name, this process is still ongoing which results sometimes in rather strange names. The reason is that so many people have the same name that it creates problems: try to look for Per Johansson in the Stockholm phonebook.

Patronyics, variable or standardised as a name, creates confusion outside small villages, of course, so it became a habit for urban dwellers to make up a name. Straightforward natural phenomena or simple combiantions are the most common: Berg, Ekberg (Oakhill), Nyman (Newman)

For the aristocracy in the same situation, i.e. an ancestor from a peasant background (most noblemen were soldiers/officers), more elegant substances were used: Goldstar, Silvershield etc.
Gustaf Eriksson Vasa referred to above reflects the medieval habit, where aptronymics were used but noble families had a third name, usually based on their family crest (Vasa: fasces). of course many noblemen had a foreign background: Bildt e.g.

Of course some bourgeois families tried to make their name sound noble: Lagerfeldt:noble, Lagerberg:not. Lager: Laurel.

Priestly families on the other hand usually latinized e.g. the name of their ancestral farm or village: Linneaus (who Frenchified it to von Linné when he was ennobled)

I knew someone whose father was a German-Jewish immigrant named Langer. When he settled on the lower East Side, his neighbors thought that a funny name, because it meant “a tall, skinny guy”. So he changed it to the more “American” Goldstein…

One side of my family is Jewish and Dutch, and I was always told that my surname came about due to a Napoleonic decree that Jews should have last names (I assume it is the same one listed in the original post). The family worked in the textile business so our name is just the Dutch word for a rather common household item. Here in the USA nobody can pronounce it, but whenever I travel to Holland or to Belgium almost every person I meet tells the same lame joke about how I’d be useful to have around the house. If only my anscestors had been engaged in some more exciting and/or louche work back then, I imagine it’d be a funnier joke.

As far as I know, the Danish state never had specific regulations for the Jewish community with regard to family names. The Jewish community was always very small, so there were other ways of controlling it. If I’m not mistaken, then the oldest Jewish families in Denmark have Spanish/Portugese names.

The decree introducing obligatory family names originate from 1829 and that in turn led to the adoption of the “sen”(son of)-family names.

If I bothered to look, I would find a Christen (regional form of Christian) as a paternal ancestor – most likely in Western or Northern Jutland.

If I bothered to pay, I could change my oh so pedestrian Christensen – the 6th most common surname in Denmark – to either Lassen (maternal grandfather), Olsen (maternal grandmother) or Mouritsen (paternal grandmother).

There is a list of approved first names which is available from the Danish Family Agency.

Bonus information I: You can – in principle – tell a Swede from a Dane and a Norwegian by looking at the -son/-sen ending. Danes and Norwegians use -sen, Swedes (and Icelandic) -son. But you will find -sons in Denmark (Swedish emigrants from the 19th Century) and the US authorities also messed up a lot of Danish and Norwegian names, so Mr. Olson or Larson could very well be of Danish ancestry.

Bonus information II: The Jewish-Danish writer Henri Nathansen had a curious mix of a Jewish (Nathan) and a Danish name (-sen).