What’s in a name ? Ask the former Dutch cycling champion Joop “sweet milk” Zoetemelk. What’s in a name ? IMPRESSION OF A BRIT A study of European names is an object-lesson in the different cultural interpretations of identity. We all started off with a first name but, with the passing of the centuries, the powers-that-be felt something more was needed, since so many people sharing the same name led to some confusion. Richard Hill M ore often than not, the new aristocracy took its surname from the descriptive name of the lands it acquired (or didn’t, as in the case of John Lackland, not to be confused with Jacques Santer). The habit then extended, often for more practical reasons, to many of Europe’s com moners. Names, as Robert Bartlett states in his book The Making of Europe, are “tokens of identity”. The naming solution took many forms. In some places you find lots of people who derive their family names from their places of origin: this particularly applies to countries like Spain, Italy and Belgium, where the spirit of localism still runs riot. Many cultures worked from the first name. A tradition emerged in Visigothic Spain of modifying first names to give surnames, by adding an ez to the father’s name indicating ‘descendant of’, e.g. Gonzalo = Gonzalez, Alvaro = Alvarez, Domingo = Dominguez, Rodrigo = Rodriguez, etc. This didn’t necessarily resolve the basic problem, since a lot of people still ended up with the same combinations of first and family names… Not surprisingly, most cultures adopted the patronymic system: e.g. Petersen (Danish), Andersson (Swedish), Johnson (English), Christopoulos (Greek), Ivanovitch (Russia), etc, with all the 50 BECI - Bruxelles métropole - mars 2015 suffixes indicating ‘son’ in the relevant language, as does the prefix ‘Mac’ in Celtic regions. By contrast, Turkish surnames often describe the attributes of a forbear: Ekmekçioglu (“son of a breadseller”), Kilimçioglu (“son of a carpetmaker”) or even Salakoglu (“son of an idiot”). In Iceland, a sensibly feminist society, the girls acquire their own incontrovertible identity: a son whose father is called Helge will be named Helgason, but the daughter is Helgadottir. Even Spain carries historic identities forward as in the name of Hidalgo (= hijo de algo = son of somebody, which is more complimentary than it may sound). Some Spanish and many Nordic and old English surnames, like my own, are based on topographical features. The descendants of Swedish artisans delight in poetic names like Granqvist (‘spruce twig’), Blomkvist (‘flower stalk’), Lindgren (‘linden branch’), Lindström (‘linden stream’), Boklund (‘beech grove’) and Hägglund (‘bird-cherry grove’). All of these were adopted in the 17th century when people were encouraged to abandon the patronymic system (Andersson, etc.) because of the confusion it caused. In the Polish lands of the Austrian Empire, government officials often gave descriptive names like ‘appletree’, ‘rosetree’ and ‘willowtree’ to their Jewish subjects. One of these officials was the writer ETA Hoffmann, the inspiration of Offenbach’s Tales, who would even resort to inventions like Affengesicht (apeface) and Wiesel (weasel) if he had had a bad lunch or was in a bad mood…. Something similar happened when Napoleon and his administrators occupied the Netherlands in the early-1800s. No respecters of authority, and thinking that the Corsican wouldn’t be around for long, a lot of solid Dutch burgers chose silly names like Suikerbuik (sugar belly), Naaktgeboren (born naked), Zeldenthuis (rarely at home) and Nooitgedacht (never thought of it). Some of them came to regret having done so later. Of course, names are no guarantee of identity when passing through language zones. My personal realisation of this came when talking over the phone to a French Antilles au pair. Finding myself unable to explain my name to her, I resorted to spelling it out phonetically à la française: ash-i-deuze-elles. She had a phonographic memory: when I called back later, she recognised my voice immediately and greeted me with a cheerful “Bonjour Monsieur Achille Dezelles!” Which reminds me of the great Florentine painter Fra Angelico who transmogrified in the columns of a British magazine to Frau Angelika… ●
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