Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
Subject: Re: Phoneme winnowing continues


> I also forgot to add that the best I could find about the etymology of my
> name is that it would be related to the name of a stream of water (maybe a
> small river). There's also the common etymology that it would simply mean
> "high lord" (that's the direct etymology of the word cut into "grand
> sire"), and would have appeared as a pejorative surname for someone who
> acted a bit too much with his nose in the wind ;)) . But this is only
> speculation, as we actually don't know when that lastname first appeared
> (and it seems quite old).
Lucky you.  We don't even know what our last name means, nor how old it is,
nor even what language it's in.  The family is Slovak, from the southeastern
part of the country, but that doesn't ensure that it's a Slovak name.  It
seems like Fatula is a pretty rare name even in that part of Slovakia, so we
might never know.