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Re: USAGE: surname prefixes

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Friday, April 21, 2000, 8:01
At 08:58 20/04/00 +0100, you wrote:
>Just a little research into the use of surname prefixes (as in: de Gaulle, >van der Planck, di Montezemulo, etc) in European natlangs and naturalistic >conlangs. > >To the L1 speaker of French, is there a semantic difference between, say, >"de Something", "de la Something", "la Something" and just "Something" in >someone's name? And is there a good reason why someone might have the name >"van der Planck" and another simply "Planck"? >
I'm an L1 speaker of French :) . The use of 'de' often means nobility, but not always. The presence of 'la' has no special meaning, just etymology says it has to be here. But names with 'la' without 'de' must be very rare now. Most names that used the article have it now incorporated into the name. We thus spell 'Lejeune' instead of 'le Jeune'. the use of 'de', an article, or not, for a last name depends mostly on the etymology of the name, whether it is a place (triggering the use of 'de', that's why nobles, who are generally named after the place their ancestors owned, always have a name in 'de', but many names like 'Dupont' - 'du pont': of the brigde - are of the same origin, the article has just been incorporated in the name, and they are absolutely not noble names) a job or a physical characteristic (often triggering the use of 'le' or 'la', which is often incorporated in the name, and comes from nicknaming people, like for example Jean le jeune - John the young one - becoming Jean Lejeune, the nickname has become a lastname) or any other etymology.
>Do such prefixes tend to follow any pattern? For instance: >de la, du describing features >de geogr. origin >la, le occupation >
'de la' and 'du' show rather geographical origin, like 'de', and 'le' and 'la' are used for occupation and describing features as I described earlier.
>I'm curious as to which prefixes are so used in natlangs or your conlangs >(although I exclude things meaning "son of" etc in this study), and how they >are used. This is because I'm considering the finer points of surname >prefixes in Jameldic names, as in my own loan-translated name "te Kraamlep". >
I had a discussion with my boyfriend who told me that Dutch people with 'van' and 'van der' ('of' and 'of the') were not mandatorily noble, but that people with 'van' and 'tot' (tot: until) were always noble. The explanation is that each time a noble person annexed a place, he added the name of the place after his name. So they began to have one-kilometer-long names, like Johannes van..., van der..., van..., van..., van der..., etc... To simplify those names, they kept only the first and last place and used 'van': from and 'tot': until in the sense of 'owning the land from... until...'. Only the Queen keeps a very long name, but it's because each of her names is associated with a title. Christophe Grandsire |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G. "Reality is just another point of view." homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org (ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)