Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terry_Roll | Hacker News Reader

Its interesting how different languages have evolved, so Inuit have many words for snow because this highlights area's of concern or importance for them. So the fact these language differentiations exist in Indian and Chinese language, highlights an area of concern or importance for them.

In Iceland, surnames use the fathers firstname and sson for son and dotir for daughter, to highlight the relationship in an otherwise small community. Whether that cultural habit is to reduce the incidence of inbreeding I've yet to find out, but it makes me wonder. History and culture gives away a lot of metadata.

View on HN

It's not at all clear it makes it easier. My great-great grandfathers children and the children of his brother have different last names. That's before dealing with the hassle of married names vs. maiden names for the women.

Most of my family is in Norway and Sweden, and used pretty much the same method as Iceland, except to throw an extra wrench in, a lot of the time people would either use the name of the farm they were born on in addition or or instead of the name derived from their father. Since that could often include extended family, and different owners over time, there might be a proliferation of people with the same last name as you with no close relationship, while someone with a completely different name might be your first cousin.

My last name only exists because one of my ancestors got tired of the name confusion and renamed his farm (changing one letter) because the local area were full of people with the same last name on farms with prefixes like little/large/upper/lower to separate them all, most of whom are not closely related to us due to purchases (the exact same change has happened two different places in Norway; as a result about 50% of people globally with the same last name as me are relatively closely related to me - the other roughly half we've not found a connection point to, but of course one will exist far enough back).

Historically, I believe this is true for all Norse cultures. The most common surnames in Sweden (like Andersson) are afaik based on the most common given names when surnames were changed to be static in families, which was a gradual process a few hundred years ago.

It wasn't "finished" until much more recently than a few hundred years ago.

My great grandfather Søren Kristian Magnussen was born in 1890, and he got his fathers last name. His father, August Magnussen was born Magnusson in 1842 to a Magnus Andersson near Bullaren in Sweden (ignoring the mothers here only because they had no impact on the last names). August's brother Johan Alfred Magnusson had (at least) three children who were named Johansson / Johansdotter born between 1885-1890. So even that late some children's last names were still derived from their fathers first names.

It makes genealogy both easier and harder - on one hand apart from during and after the transition period you get the fathers first name "for free" (most of the time, except when they complicate things by using the name of a farm instead of a last name), on the other hand it makes searches for the transition period a real mess (as if the poor hand writing of everyone involved in record-keeping isn't bad enough).

> In Iceland, surnames use the fathers firstname and sson for son and dotir for daughter, to highlight the relationship in an otherwise small community.

The same happens in most Slavic ("Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin" is basically "Vladimir son of Vladimir Putin"; a hypothetical sister could have been "Ekaterina Vladimirova Putina", Ekaterina daughter of Vladimir Putin) and some Turkic cultures (Nursultan Abishuly Nazarbayev is the son of Abish Nazarbayev), so the theory that this is related to tight nit communities on a small island seems highly unlikely.

I didnt know how the naming system works in other countries, I only know about Iceland and UK, but I still suspect the naming exists to highlight relationships. The point I'm trying to make is that when the naming system was introduced or adhered to in an area on this planet, I wonder if they knew about the problems of inbreeding, you see here in the UK, with livestock, you typically have a one or two studs and the rest of females, so there is an element of inbreeding or deviation towards it. Pig farmers will have two or three bores fertilizing the sows, cows will get a bull and roosters are also limited to one for a brood.

So did/does some cultural naming system highlight a lack of inbreeding knowledge or not when considering when it was introduced?

“ Whether that cultural habit is to reduce the incidence of inbreeding I've yet to find out, but it makes me wonder.”

That’s racist. “The only way these people are going to be able to stop fucking their cousins as if they come up with a naming system that makes it extremely clear who is related to who.” There are probably other explanations other than being inbred as to why they do this. Like how some people go by Junior or Senior. Do you think that’s to prevent inbreeding also?

Knowing who is related too closely to you can be a problem on a small island, the comment was possibly referencing the Icelandic dating-app that tracks if you share a grandparent with someone you meet in a bar[1]; a feature the app itself calls a "Sifjaspellsspillir", or "Incest Spoiler".

Interestingly the article mentions that this is a problem precicely because of the Icelandic naming scheme:

> Neither patronymic or matronymic, instead each person's father's first name becomes the child's last name. Each new generation has a completely different name to the name of the generation that preceded it. Cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews -- all could have very different names.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iceland-incest-app

Reply on news.ycombinator.com