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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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

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.

How come you know one person, not two?

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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-...

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

“Tax Agencies hate this one trick…”

> 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.

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

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.

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

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.

> 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

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.

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

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).

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.

Visions of Epic Rap Battles of History when you read it spelled out like that: https://youtu.be/WGN5xaQkFk0?si=aKCPFF_yfy6ly8Tb&t=61

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

Kirchner?! Hehe

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

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

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...

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

I am Lithuanian, and I never heard of that happen. This [1] also concurs: "Sons inherit their father's surname, with no changes."

[1] https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Lithuania_Naming_Custom...

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

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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).

The only source I could find on this in a Danish journal says that between 1992 and 2006 9% of kids got pat/matronymic surnames, so they are probably still used to some degree.

Source: https://tidsskrift.dk/sin/article/download/17070/15768/

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)

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.

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.

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

> 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

> 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.

The would be “ap Dagbert”.

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

> (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.

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

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.)

Don't forget the infamous ap Doc.

Oh nice! Does Upton follows the same pattern?

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

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

what's up town?

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

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

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.

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

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".

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.

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.

More likely it comes from the very common place name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton

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

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?

Interesting I never knew this.

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