Re: USAGE: surname prefixes

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)