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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

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

“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.)

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.

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"?

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.

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.

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

> 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...

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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".

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?)

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

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.

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.

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.

True, and even then, there are currently 7 Björk Guðmundsdóttirs according to their online phonebook... as you might expect

https://en.ja.is/?q=bj%C3%B6rk%20gu%C3%B0mundsd%C3%B3ttir&pe...

Obviously, there are a lot more John Smiths...

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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)

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.

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.

From what I've observed, if they only get ASCII they write out the diacritics phonetically. As an example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Huelsbeck interchangably uses Hülsbeck and Huelsbeck, but never Hulsbeck

> 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.

> 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".

> their children would take the name Travisson or Travissdóttir

Why is it Travissdottir but not Travissson?

dottir = female child (daughter)

son = male child

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

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.

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.

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

> E-Mail is first name at my domain.

Good catch! Fixed it, thanks.

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

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)

> 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.

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

All of them are first names.

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

> 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.

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

Try telling that to Queen Victoria.

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.

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...

> 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".

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...

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

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.

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

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