On Sun, 20 Jul 2014 09:25:37 +0100, Timothy Collinson
<xxxxxx@port.ac.uk> wrote:

>>> What is the correct Russian patronymic for Son of Peter?

>> ????????, generally rendered in English as "Petrovitch"

>Awwww, and there was me waiting for someone to do it Cyrillic!

I tried. Unfortunately, my mail client still doesn't do Unicode
properly.

The first letter looks like a capital Greek Pi; the second looks like a
reversed Euro symbol, but with only one central bar not crossing the
curve; the third letter looks like a T; the fourth looks like a P; the
fifth looks like an O; the sixth looks like a B; the seventh looks like
a reversed N; the eighth and last looks like the 4 on a seven-segment
LED/LCD. With the exception of the P (which is an R by sound), the upper
case and lower case forms differ only in size; the lower-case P (R)
undergoes the same modification as the Latin P/p.

>While I'm here, I learned a year or three back that my (female) friend
>from Czech Republic with the surname Fusova was daughter of Mr Fus.
>(think it meant 'fudge' meaning her exotic sounding name translated at
>as Helen Fudge which sounded nicely English.)

That's a common pattern in Russian and other Slavic languages, as well,
and often applies to wives as well as daughters (though the actual
suffices may be different, both between languages, and between wives v.
daughters).

(Digression resulting in subject change provided from this point
forward, as grist for your Traveller mill to add 'local color'.)

Other interesting past, present, and/or fictional naming patterns:

In many Spanish-speaking areas, it was at one time common for a wife to
combine her husband's family name with her own. There were several
patterns for doing this, but in all cases the husband's name was last -
for example, "Inez Rodriguez de Gomez" or "Inez Rodriguez y Gomez".
Sometimes the latter form carried through to children, so that it was
theoretically possible for a woman to end up with a name like "Maria
Gomez y Rodriguez de Castro y Barilla" - and no, those weren't separate
names; everything from the G to the final A was part of her single
surname.

At one time, it was not uncommon - and may still be practiced today; I'm
not sure - for a German woman to take a feminized form of her father's
surname as her own - so that Georg Blucher's daughter would have been
known as Anna Blucherin. Names were not changed with marital status,
though there were usually indicators of such - the equivalent in English
would be something like "Jane Jones m. Smith" (m. for "married to"), or
"Samantha Brown w. Johnson" (w. for "widow of"). The indicators were
only for the purpose of "fine-tuning" identification or tracking
genealogical data; her name for legal purposes remained "Anna
Blucherin".

Most Far-eastern languages place the family name first - Ho Chi Minh
(Viet Namese), for example, was "Mr. Ho" or "Chairman Ho"; Roh Tae Woo,
Kim Il-Sung (both Korean), Sun Yat-Sen, Deng Xiao-Ping, and Mao Tse-Tung
(all Chinese) were similar (Note: I'm not using a consistent
Romanization for Chinese names). Japanese is a recent exception; it is
increasingly common to use the Western pattern of personal name followed
by family name - though the traditional family-name-first pattern is
still widely used. In the west, this pattern is also used, in Hungarian
- a Hungarian might be known in the US as Istvan Szabo (Stephen Taylor),
but would be known as Szabo Istvan at home. This pattern was also used
in fiction in H. Beam Piper's Paratime series, by the First Level
civilization - Verkan Vall and Hadron Dalla were married for a while,
and called each other "Vall" and "Dalla"; Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime
Police, was known professionally as "Chief Tortha", and when Verkan Vall
took over the position, he was professionally known as "Chief Verkan".
It should be noted that John F. Carr doesn't seem to get this, in the
sequels he's written to "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen", which is connected -
by Piper - to the Paratime stories.

Iceland doesn't use "family names" - you have a personal name, and a
patronymic, formed by taking the genitive of your father's name and
adding "-son" (or "-dottir" for female children). If Eric marries Ingrid
and they have a son that they name Ivar, that son is legally known as
Ivar Ericsson, and his sister would be Helga Ericsdottir.

Going back to Piper's Paratime stories, in "Last Enemy", all family
names on the "out-time" parallel world are locative - Piper rendered
them in English, as "of Roxor" or "of Starpha" or "of Bashad", et
cetera. Additionally, there was a notable pattern in _personal_ names as
well; male names all had an interior -irz- or -arn-, and female names
all ended in -itra or -ona. Verkan Vall, while operating on that
parallel world, called himself "Virzal of Verkan", and Hadron Dalla was
known as "Dallona of Hadron". It was apparently not uncommon for a
father to give his son his own name, merely changing -irz- to -arn- or
vice-versa (so that Garnon of Roxor's son would be Girzon of Roxor).

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have woven a rich tapestry in their Liaden
Universe, and hidden in one of the internal-chronologically earliest
stories is an interesting nugget - by inference, many Liaden family
names - NOT clan names - are originally occupational: The name
"yosPhelium" is given to mean "Courier pilot", and a comment in the same
story suggests that "yosGalan" is also a pilot, with a different duty
(other than courier). Most such names do not have meanings given, but
the pattern is suggestive - "deaGauss", "yoVala", "sigRadia",
"deaJuden", "venDeelin", and so on.

The British royal family does not have a surname, despite the widespread
belief that it's "Windsor". They are the House of Windsor, true, but
when Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, was commissioned in the RAF, it
was as "Lt. Wales", based on his father's title of Prince of Wales, not
"Lt. Windsor". The royal House name has changed in comparatively recent
times; at one time, prior to World War I, they were the House of
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, later the House of Hannover, then the House of
Hannover-Windsor, and when the Monarch formally renounced the title of
Elector of Hannover (which was in abeyance since the Holy Roman Empire
was disbanded), it was changed to House of Windsor. [Not relevant to
this discussion, but interestingly, the succession laws of the various
nations of the Commonwealth have NOT yet been formally harmonized, and
if Prince George of Cambridge (son of Prince William, Duke of
Cambridge/grandson of Prince Charles, Prince of Wales) has a daughter
before a son, it is not currently clear whether the daughter would be
Queen of the entire Commonwealth, or whether the son would be King in
some countries (at the present time, it appears that the daughter would
be Queen of the UK and Queen of Australia, but the son would be King of
Canada). There has been an agreement (the Perth Agreement), however,
that all Commonwealth countries will pass appropriate legislation
establishing absolute primogeniture, and once that has been done (with
the respective legislation to take effect simultaneously), there will no
longer be a question.]

In Cordwainer Smith's world of the Instrumentality of Mankind, (legal)
underpeople were named to indicate their animal derivation. Smith may
not have completely thought this out, as underpeople of several
derivations would share a single indicator level (e.g., bull and bear
derivations both used B' as a prefix).

The Jao from Eric Flint and K.D.Wentworth's Jao Empire books do not use
family names, but they do use /kochan/ names (a /kochan/ is most
equivalent to the idea of 'clan' in human terms, but it's definitely not
an exact match), and an indication as to whether the individual Jao is a
product of the main breeding line, or a collateral line.

There's a nice long article about Roman names on Wikipedia.

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