Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more

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.

> Pritchard (from ap Richard)

Also: Pratchett

"The name Pratchett was a Welsh patronymic surname created from the personal name Richard."

https://www.houseofnames.com/pratchett-family-crest

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

> 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.

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

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

Oh nice! Does Upton follows the same pattern?

Don't forget the infamous ap Doc.

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.

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

Prince Harry’s real name is Henry.

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

Isn't Harry short for Harold?

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

Iron Maiden: Shichirō no Shichirō

That's pretty convenient and easy to remember

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.

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...

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.”

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.

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.

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.

This is done still on wedding invitations in the US

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

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.

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.

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...

If you want to go looking,

  grep '[^s]kin$' /usr/share/dict/words

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

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

Obligatory: https://youtu.be/I-OOpZitfd0?feature=shared

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.

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.

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?

López, Gómez, Gutiérrez, Suárez, ...