Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article about Mali is good, but it made me grind my teeth right out of the gate. It begins:
On the spine of a hogback hill overlooking Bamako, the capital of the West African nation of Mali, is a green sliver of a park, decorated with effigies of Mali’s historic explorers. On a recent visit, I stopped one piercingly hot morning to admire a bronze bust of a turbaned, bearded man set on a plinth. The nameplate was missing, but, judging from the man’s wide brow and Arab features, it seemed likely that this was Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveller, who journeyed through the Empire of Mali and visited its capital, near the River Niger, in 1352.
When Battuta arrived, […]
“Not ‘Battuta,’ Ibn Battuta!” I hollered (in the privacy of my brain, not wanting to frighten the cats). Since I have a bully pulpit, I’m going to use it: “Ibn” is not a first name, it means ‘son’ and indicates a patronymic, or nasab as it’s called in Arabic. You can no more abbreviate Ibn Battuta as Battuta than you can abbreviate O’Malley as Malley. For more on Arabic names, consult my ancient post on the topic (or Wikipedia, if you prefer, but “This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page”—you have been warned).
Addendum.. Robert Irwin, in his devastating TLS review of Robert Twigger’s Red Nile (if you’re going to write an error-riddled book on Middle Eastern history, Irwin is the very last person you want reviewing it), makes the same point: “Referring to the famous expert on optics, Ibn al-Haytham as Haytham is a solecism comparable to referring to Macpherson as Pherson, or Robinson as Robin.”
What a schoolboy error by John Lee Ander!
Derson really dropped the ball on this one.
Ugh! In the New Yorker of all places. Isn’t that the place where people coöperate?
Seeing it in all caps, I thought for a moment that you had written “don’t drop the ISBN”.
Do you think that it should be written as ibn Battuta, or Ibn Battuta, when not at the start of the sentence?
I was thinking it should probably be the former, cf van Buren.
Not “Derson”–“Anders.” Think about it . . .
Maybe this was hypercorrection based on a vague memory of the Dan Brown Foreign Name Affair (“LOL the Of Vinci code! Everyone knows you don’t include the ‘da’!”). Wouldn’t excuse it, but it’d still be better than thinking “Ibn” was a given name.
What is more, on first reference he should have been properly identified as Abū ʿAbd al-Lāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Lāh l-Lawātī ṭ-Ṭanǧī ibn Baṭūṭah (per Wikipedia), though I wouldn’t blame the magazine for reducing that, for typographic reasons, to Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Lawati al-Tanji ibn Battuta. The second and later references are more of a crapshoot: it’s never particularly clear which part of an Arabic name to choose as the equivalent of a Western surname, and various Arab countries have had to establish their own conventions for it, which are by no means universally observed.
I’m sure the cats twigged on anyway.
@David Fried
I get it. I already got it. And I think Ander, as dearieme says, rather than Anders, no? (Though that’s arguable both ways.) But “Derson” amused me, so I went with that.
We can all agree — can we not, John? — that “Ibn Battuta” is sufficient for an ancient, like “Avicenna” or “Averroës” or “Confucius”. Indeed, how do they refer to Bohemond, Baldwin, Maffeo Polo?
Incidentally, that “al-Lawati” means that he was actually of Berber ancestry, so “Arab features” may be something of a misrepresentation… However, I seem to recall that he didn’t actually speak Berber.
Well, “O'” (Ó ‘descendant’) was routinely dropped from anglicized Irish names, e.g. everything that looks Goidelic in origin and begins with an ‘H’ in English (which would have been inserted between ‘Ó’ and an initial vowel of the following name), like
Hennessy Name Meaning
Irish: reduced form of O’Hennessy, an Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó hAonghusa ‘descendant of Aonghus’ (see Angus, and compare McGinnis).
Source: Dictionary of American Family Names ©2013, Oxford University Press
(houseofnames.com actually likes Malley for a variant of O’Malley but doesn’t give a specific source)
So what you’re saying is that if I invest time and effort into finding out how to do Arab names right, my reward and payoff is to spend more time being outraged that everyone actually does it wrong, up to and including the once notoriously competent New Yorker?
Well, “O'” (Ó ‘descendant’) was routinely dropped from anglicized Irish names
In ancient bygone days of yore, yes. Now, not so much.
So what you’re saying is that if I invest time and effort into finding out how to do Arab names right, my reward and payoff is to spend more time being outraged that everyone actually does it wrong
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Reminded of the ‘Eban’ scence from this otherwise crappy movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU_XoJt5uhw
Maybe Crown should post as J ap Crown.
Garrigus: Well, sure. Except in the New Yorker, which is (or was in ancient bygone days of yore) fanatical about unambiguous identifications of absolutely everybody, to the point of always referring to Shakespeare as William Shakespeare on first appearance (doubtless to avoid confusion with some Shakespeare or the other). Anyway, the comic possibilities of such a lengthy name appearing in the magazine’s narrow columns are manifold, to say nothing of its sound in English, which to my ear “sounds like a trunk falling down stairs”.
Shouldn’t that be “Abu Abdillah”? (Which was the real name of the sighing Moor we usually call Boabdil.)
It always seems funny to me to see famous French people identified by their full names in American publications. We refer to most of them by their last name only, we sometimes now their first name (or, in earlier centuries, the name normally used in their families), but only a biographer would list all the names given to them at birth. Such names are listed on birth certificates, official ID cards and passports, but apart from those kinds of official documents names beyond the first and last ones are not considered suitable for public display. There is no such thing as a “middle name”.
oops! we sometimes Know …
It always seems funny to me to see famous French people identified by their full names in American publications.
Seems “American publications” don’t trade in rote pedestal worship or take their cues from the French Ministry of Illustrious Universally Recognizable One-Named Personages? Must be that renowned Gallic sense of humor, more cocorico and navel-gazing, less page filling.
m-l: Detailed identification like this is part of belonging to a low-context culture, where you can’t assume much about what your listener has in common with you. Hozo, offensive as he always is, is basically right this time.
In Ireland in the 19th century, when surnames were being standardized into English versions, it was quite common for people to drop the Ó for various reasons. Thus you find both O’Casey and Casey. There are some parts of Ireland where people drop the Ó in informal speech even if the formal name has it.
Ó isn’t a patronymic any more. It means more like the tribe of people who descend from some famous ancestor.
Patronymics in Irish are done by following the child’s name by the parent’s name in the genitive case. But you wouldn’t refer to someone by their patronymic alone.
“a low-context culture”: bless Canada for its mastery of the art of the euphemism.
JC: I am not sure why you think that Hozo-the-Delightful’s comment is right (in the spirit rather than in the letter).
dearieme: ??? to my knowledge, JC is American, not Canadian.
Hozo, offensive as he always is, is basically right this time.
I too am curious what you think he’s right about; m-l wasn’t saying Americans are stupid for including full names, she was saying it seems funny to her because that’s not how they do it in French, which is as far as I can see entirely unexceptionable.
I am a Yank of the Yanks, and so was Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist who worked out the notion of high-context and low-context cultures. Quoth Wikipedia:
As a low-context culture (not quite as low as Germany, somewhat lower than English Canada), Americans have a much more limited list of “Illustrious Universally Recognizable One-Named Personages” than France does.
JC, I didn’t get the impression that that was quite what Hozo meant.
Most European countries have a longer list of such people than the US, simply because they have been recognized entities for a much longer time. But the list includes persons who are known internationally, whether ancient (eg Homer, Cicero, Saint Augustine, Confucius) or relatively modern (Marie-Antoinette, Liberace, Madonna).
I was referring mostly to cases where French uses only first name (which may be compound, like mine) and last name, even though the person probably has one or two other names on their birth certificate. For example, everybody knew former French president Mitterrand as François Mitterrand, but I just learned from Wikipedia (English version) that his full legal name (given right away) was François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterand. The French version starts with plain François Mitterrand in the introductory paragraphs and only gives the full particulars in a later section dealing with his parents and earliest years. I think that American editors, expecting one name between first and last, are not sure what to do with two or three extra names and put them all in for good measure. In French those extra names are generally unknown to the average person, unlike American middle names which are often common knowledge for public figures (John [Fitzgerald] Kennedy, Richard [Milhous] Nixon, Barack [Hussein] Obama).
“dearieme: ??? to my knowledge, JC is American, not Canadian.” Oh well, I’ll forgive him.
Are American middle names that well known? Those of Presidents and their assassins, certainly. I understand the US also has the convention that you are only “Joe Bloggs Jr” if you have the same middle name as your father. Thus if Joseph Andrew Bloggs has a son Joseph Albert Bloggs, the latter is not “junior”. What happens then if Joseph Albert names his son Joseph Andrew Bloggs? There is also the subconvention, which I will risk international offence by calling ‘dumb’, under which William Gates III became William Gates Jr when his grandfather died.
mollymooly: Only some of them are well-known, but my point is that they are expected. Most forms you need to fill have spaces for “first”, “middle” and “last”. Some newspapers always quote the full legal name (if they know it) the first time a person is mentioned in an article. French names on the other hand usually include at least one extra name between first and last, but those extra names (or even their initials) would never appear on business cards, in newspaper articles, or even on most forms to fill. These extra names are usually the first names of family members such as grandparents, uncles and aunts, etc, thus providing a symbolic link with earlier generations. It is not that people try to hide them: it just isn’t the custom to write them except in places where they are legally required for identification, such as on a passport. (There may be recent counterexamples because of the spread of American customs).
I’m still wondering where Marie-Lucie is seeing these superfluous middle names? American middle names are mostly just brought out for formal occasions like wedding invitations or graduations or presidential inaugurations (also small children in trouble, to let them know it’s serious). They’re printed in newspapers just to disambiguate one crime suspect, say, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt of Springfield, from all the other John Schmidt’s in the area.
I did read an American police procedural in French translation, where NMI (“no middle initial”) was rendered “pas d’autre prénom” or something. I don’t know how many French readers would understand why the writer had bothered to say as much. OTOH I don’t know how many Americans, other than readers of police procedurals, know what NMI means.
Well, no, but Americans who have middle names often go to great lengths to let everyone know that they have them. That is the phenomenon of the middle initial: perhaps only 3 people in the world know what it stands for, but everyone knows it exists! Hence “no middle initial” rather than “no middle name”.
Related to this is the American expectation of exactly one middle initial; two, as in George H. W. Bush, are considered an aristocratic flourish, and higher numbers are unheard of. Over here, it’s at least as common to have three given names (drei Vornamen) as two, and al but the first are so rarely used or hinted at that people don’t necessarily remember those of their brothers or sisters. Four seems to be common in the Netherlands, and I know one case from Québec (a scientist – and I know it because I saw some documents relating to his marriage; his publications contain no hint of that). German nobles easily reach numbers like 8 or 12; Austria has a legal limit on 3.
I know one scientist from Germany who publishes with a middle initial, and one – indeed, one native speaker of German in total! – who goes by his middle name and lets us know that he does it by publishing with his first initial.
A few public figures in Austria have two given names and use both all the time (like the popes called John Paul): Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Konrad Paul Liessmann, Klaus Maria Brandauer and a few other men named Maria… and I think that’s it. This is not counting German hyphen names (Kai-Uwe, Wolf-Ernst, Hans-Dieter, Anna-Lena…) that are considered inseparable.
A remarkable number of presidents of the University of Chicago were known by full first, last, and middle names, and only one was an NMI. I myself use “John Cowan” for all purposes except on my books, where I try to keep librarians happy by being known (uniquely) as “John Woldemar Cowan”.
(Oops, saved too soon.)
Chicago presidents. The present Prez, though, is merely Robert Zimmer.
Danes seem to be quite often known by two given names (sans hyphen), particularly on line.
By no means all American dynastic numbers are reduced: the writer Lucian K[ing] Truscott IV has had no living ancestors in the direct male line since 2000, but he is far from dropping his number. Indeed, changing III to Jr. is one thing, but changing IV to III strikes me as quite another. I remember reading in a novel that a Father Kelly, whose first name I can’t remember, joked that if he had a dynastic number it would be XL, being the fortieth (and presumably last) Kelly of the same name in a row.
David: Related to this is the American expectation of exactly one middle initial; two, as in George H. W. Bush, are considered an aristocratic flourish, and higher numbers are unheard of. Over here, it’s at least as common to have three given names (drei Vornamen) as two, and al but the first are so rarely used or hinted at that people don’t necessarily remember those of their brothers or sisters.
I agree with you about the “American expectation”.
Your comment about German customs describes the French situation exactly. I had to take a moment to remember the other names of my three sisters. I know my parents’ other names (one each) but not my mother’s brother’s, his daughter’s or our common grandparents’. Those names are practically never mentioned outside the family and ID documents, not even on wedding invitations or funeral notices. That’s why finding them displayed in full in English-language media while they are practically unknown in French-language ones is so strange.
German hyphen names (Kai-Uwe, Wolf-Ernst, Hans-Dieter, Anna-Lena…) that are considered inseparable.
Same as French names again. Jean-Paul Sartre would have been called Jean-Paul by his family and close friends, never just Jean. He could have had several brothers all called Jean-something. Similarly with Marie for women. Nobody in French circles would ever call me by just that name, and one of my sisters is also a Marie-something. We share this name pattern with our mother, grandmother and several other female relatives further away on the genealogical tree, not to mention innumerable others over the centuries, including such well-known women as Marie-Antoinette (née Maria Antonia in Austria to Queen Maria Theresa). Our parents had chosen their children’s names well in advance: if we had been boys, at least two of us would have been called Jean-something. (There is more diversity in compound names nowadays).
David NMI Marjanović! Great to see you around again; we missed you.
I’m sorry no Danes have yet popped up in this discussion to confirm what I believe to be the case, that full names in Denmark, too, are never shortened, even though unhyphenated and that, eg, Emil Christian Hansen must never be referred to simply as Emil.
Britain’s The Independent has just done something similar:
______________________
Abu Qatada’s 20-year stay in the UK finally came to an end today, as prosecutors confirmed his arrival in Jordan to stand trial on terrorism charges.
The Government has been actively trying to remove Qatada for more than nine years, and succeeded at 2.46am on Sunday morning when a private jet carrying the 53-year-old took off from RAF Northolt, west London.
Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted his pleasure at the news, saying: “Abu Qatada is back in Jordan. This is something the Government said would get done. It’s now been achieved and I am delighted.”
The Home Office released photos and video footage of Qatada’s departure, and Home Secretary Theresa May said . . .
_______________
Surely Robert Fisk will take the editors to task.
That’s funny, I had meant to add something like “the same, of course, applies to Abu” in my post, but forgot.
…and indeed, there is a noble family in Germany that now stands at Heinrich the Seventy-Fifth.
I know two Jean-Michel who are shortened to Jean-Mi but no further.
Maria Theresia.
David, thanks for the correction. In French she is known as Marie-Thérèse.
Jean-Michel to Jean-Mi
Yes, this is a nickname kind of diminutive. I have a niece married to a Jean-Philippe, who is known in the family as Jean-Phi. But this has nothing to do with the fact that the name is a double one: for instance, a person (male or female) called Dominique could be addressed informally as Domi. In each case, a name consisting of three syllables is reduced to the first two. Such diminutives are only used informally in speaking, within the family, the school or the workplace (among equals, especially young ones), they would not, for instance, appear in a newspaper article about those people, unless perhaps in a quotation.
The House of Reuß, however, cheats. They name all their males Heinrich (after the Emperor Heinrich VI, 1165-97) and number them in order of birth, so that does not mean seventy-five generations of Reußes: the actual number of generations is less than 30. The 24th head of the House since the naming/numbering convention began around the year 1200 died childless in 1927. After that, the headship passed to a younger branch of the family, which has had four heads since then. As for Heinrich LXXV, he was apparently head in 1801-02.
To make matters more complicated, the Heinrich numbers don’t grow without bound; the two branches of Reuß apparently maintained separate enumerations and reset them back to I separately. The older branch resets every 100 males, whereas the younger branch resets at the beginning of every new century.
In Australia I understand that if a person has no middle name it’s common to write ONO (one name only).
It’s a good thing the house of Reuß’s customs have not spread more widely.
Along the same lines I remember from years ago a birth announcement in Le Figaro, a newspaper where the French upper crust choose to publicize major events in their lives. It went something like Jean I, Jean II, Jean III and Jean IV wish to announce the birth of their little brother Jean V. I am surprised these names passed the civil authorities, but the parents were probably quite highly-placed on the social ladder and able to exert “subtle” pressure. I have never seen the like again.
Another misinterpretation of Arab names: in today’s WaPo an article on the role of women in Western Sahara mentions a woman by the name of Djimi el-Ghalia. In spite of the hyphen, later references to the same woman use only Ghalia.
Then there’s that fellow who, when he joined the U.S. Army, insisted that his given names were “R. B.”, which did not stand for anything in particular. So he became, on the face of official forms, “R.(only) B.(only) Jones”, which quickly turned into “Ronly Bonly Jones” ….
“full names in Denmark, too, are never shortened, even though unhyphenated and that, eg, Emil Christian Hansen must never be referred to simply as Emil.”
The current king of Sweden is Carl XVI Gustav, or “Carl Gustav” for short. That is, you can’t just call him Carl, even though the numbering refers only to the Carls, or rather Carls, Karls, and Caroluses (or rather Caroli). There was only one previous Karl Gustav, namely Karl X Gustav. Of course the first six Caroli are entirely fictitious, and Karl XIV Johan was Jean-Baptiste Jules.
I thought so… but I didn’t know it was quite that elaborate!
Let me guess: he was from Texas?
The inversion: Harry S Truman and David S Berman.
A friend of mine has the middle initial F, which likewise stands for nothing. When his office cube acquired a nameplate, it appeared with his first and last name separated by “F.” When I asked why he didn’t protest this excrescent period, he replied, “Simple. ‘F.’ is the abbreviation for ‘F’.”
Then there’s the French habit of refashioning English names to fit the French pattern: Edgar Poe, John Tolkien.
Just to add a data point, naming customs in my native Argentina and other Spanish-speaking countries I’ve lived in seem halfway between the Continental and US patterns.
It is not uncommon to have more than one given name (although there is a legal limit of 3), but how many of those (and, to a certain extent, which) are used can be highly idiosyncratic. Most people go just by their first name, and the exceptions are mostly limited to highly conventional combinations, which nevertheless —and unlike in French or German— are never hyphenated. The former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar is always “José María”, never “José” (let alone “María”).
Then again, some less conventional combinations are sometimes used (e.g., Jorge Luis Borges), and in some formal contexts the additional names can crop up. (I suppose that the bias towards documents produced in such contexts is the reason why some historical figures, such as Juan Domingo Perón, are often remembered by their full names; in life, Perón was variously known as ‘Juancito’, ‘Pocho’ or ‘Juan’, but no-one ever addressed him as ‘Juan Domingo’).
On the other hand, some people eschew the conventional ones for one of the parts; I know many Juan Pablos (there was a craze for the name after Wojtyla’s election), some of whom go by “Juan”, some by “Pablo”, and some by the full compound.
And the Russian habit.
H.G. Wells is always Герберт Уэллс and T.S. Eliot Томас Элиот even though initials + surname is unremarkable in Russian (В.И. Ленин).
And moving to Central Europe: Serbian, Czech and Slovak will always render foreign names either phonetically or to local conventions (Tačer, Thatcherová) whereas Polish, Slovene and Croatian don’t (Croatian used to be it seems to be increasingly rare).
I have long wondered how these customs developed. Was it a single editor of a popular newspaper in each country in the 19th century who adopted a style which has become conventional ?
This thread also cannot omit mentioning the classic pub quiz question of Ulysses S. Grant where the “S” doesn’t actually stand for anything.
Alex: Serbian also respells loanwords (to which it is friendly), whereas Croatian typically does not (the few that it accepts). I think that’s Croatian being purist, in both cases. I don’t know how it came to be so, however.
Thus if Joseph Andrew Bloggs has a son Joseph Albert Bloggs, the latter is not “junior”. What happens then if Joseph Albert names his son Joseph Andrew Bloggs?
He would be Joseph Andrew Bloggs II. Indeed, the difference between “II” and “Jr.” in American practice is that the latter is used for sons who have the exact same name as their fathers, whereas the former is used in all other cases of name coincidence between generations. Henry Ford II was the grandson of the famous Henry Ford, for example, as well as his successor as president of Ford Motor Co. Both of them were NMIs.
I myself am also named for my paternal grandfather, but not exactly so (my middle name comes from my other grandfather), and in any case he was thirty years dead before I was born, so there was no question of a dynastic number. I once asked my father what he would have done if he had been named “John” (his elder brother, who died in his teens, was in fact the John Cowan of his generation). He replied that he would have dropped the “Jr.” when his father died, and would probably not have named me “John” at all.
Americans nicknamed “Trip” are most often IIIs. In Star Trek: Enterprise, the most recent TV series, the engineer is formally Charles Tucker III, but almost always called “Trip”.
For completeness, someone should mention the 19th-century English public school tradition of calling successive brothers “Smith major”, “Smith minor”, “Smith tertius”, and so on.
Or Ferry and Butzi.
“Trey” and “Terry” are also extant in the U.S. for So-and-So III. The only person in my own extended family (a second cousin) who is a “III” has always been Terry, and wikipedia says that Trey Parker of South Park fame is more formally Randolph Severn Parker III. But these things can also be more ad hoc. The only guy I knew growing up who was a “IV” (formally Charles Something Something IV) has always been “Buck” and if memory serves his dad (Charles Something Something III) was universally known as “Tex.” Later in life I knew a woman whose brother (whom I might have met once at the most) was a “IV” who was known as “Tad,” with some vague suggestion that there was a cryptic numerical intent, but I don’t know if that’s really a thing.
There is btw a whole inventory of American nicknames for boys (e.g. Buck, Chip, Skip) that can be used semi-randomly, i.e. there is no formal given name with which they are habitually associated. The formal given names of the various individuals at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_(personal_name), for example, seem to range alphabetically all the way at least from Alexander to Wilbur. I have an impressionistic sense that these names are not so commonly used as they once were (perhaps not unrelated to the general spreading-out reflected in the decrease over time in the total percentage of boys formally given one of the N most popular names), but I’m not sure if there’s good enough data on commonly-used nicknames to confirm that, since almost by definition these are the names that aren’t going into databases in the same consistent way people’s official legal names are. It seems plausible that one of these names would be especially likely to be used (for disambiguation) when there was already a male with the same formal name in the household (or close enough in the extended family to make disambiguation desirable), but again one would need to figure out how to test that against good data.
@ John Cowan
That public school tradition of naming successive brothers is alive and well today.
“My father’s name was not Buck but Charles, nor had he ever been called Buck.” —James Thurber, “More Alarms at Night”
French extra names as formal identification: My father was once one of the examiners for an exam given in all high schools in the region. Two girls taking this exam not only had the same first and last names, but the same second and third names. Fortunately, one of them had a fourth name. Fortunately too, they both passed.
@zythophile (July 7, 2013): Sorry I’m late, but I can disconfirm that. People using two christian names faded out by maybe 1950, and even before that it seems that it was mostly people whose first christian name was Hans or Jens who did it — that’s true for all the examples I can think of, at least.
Also the combinations were relatively few in number, so (a bit like with the Roman praenomen) their initials were enough to identify them. That’s why Hans Christian Andersen is never called that in Danish, always H.C. Andersen. Likewise Jens Christian Christensen, Danish prime minister from 1905 to 1908, was always referred to as I.C. Christensen, except maybe on the most solemn occasions, and using his full name will just confuse people.
But in general many Danes have middle names that are almost unknown to every but close friends and family. In fact the Danish law on names only recognizes one ‘first name,’ though it can be hyphenated.
@Alex – that’s probably Harry S. Truman, not Ulysses S. Grant.
The S in “Ulysses S. Grant” stood for Simpson. And he’s really Hiram Ulysses Grant, anyway.
It is, of course, a common Russian tradition to use patronymics as if they were the only name, at least in the more informal settings. Of course, a Russian patronymic is (usually) instantly recognizable as such (or, at least, as definitely not a regular given name) to any Russian speaker.
Similarly, a lot of Greek mythological heroes are commonly referred to by a form based on the name of their father.
It might be even more unusual than a lack of middle names (in countries where they are expected) to have no patronymic in Russia. I’ve met maybe two or three of such people.
One of them was – or so I recall – Alexander Shen, a relatively famous mathematician, whose father was a Chinese immigrant who went back to China a few years later… apparently the resulting Chinese name did not make a decent patronymic, and – again IIRC – for a while he officially had none in his passport. The patronymic (or best guess as such) is listed in the Russian Wikipedia article, however.
Commissaire Maigret had a (first) given name Jules, which is pretty easy to learn because that’s how his wife called him. You could be excused though if you don’t know his middle names (well, Wikipedia is always 2 clicks away). I am not a Maigret aficionado and know about them (but don’t remember) because he was asked to provide a middle name for travel to Great Britain and gave away only one of them (sorry, forgot in which novel).
The Afrikaners also seem to have been exceptionally fond of using two given names in abbreviated form: National Party leaders included D.F. Malan, J.G. Strijdom, H.F. Verwoerd, P.W. Botha and F.W. de Klerk.
Myself, I have two middle names – one after my mother’s mother’s father, and one after my father’s mother’s father, in an effort to please both sides of the family. I like the combination, though owing to practical limitations I make only inconsistent use of the second one in official contexts. My high school was rather confused by my name: since I had entered three given names into their system, the attendance sheets mistakenly listed me as having a double-barreled first name – a point on which I had to correct every new teacher I had.
This guy?
Lars Henrik: In fact the Danish law on names only recognizes one ‘first name,’ though it can be hyphenated.
Norwegian law recognizes first names, middle names and a single surname. Hyphenated names are considered single names different from their constituting parts. Modern kids often get names of the type Firstname (Firstname) Motherssurname Fatherssurname, with the mother’s surname formally a middle name. Many don’t realize this and fill out forms incorrecty, e.g. when applying for a foreign visa, so I expect a change in the law some time soon.
To expand on this, my wife was given a name of the type Firstname Motherssurname Fatherssurname, When we married she took my name but kept her old name unchanged, i.e. Firstname Motherssurname Fatherssurname Husbandssurname. Both Motherssurname and Fatherssurname are now legally middle names and optional in use. She has kept using Fatherssurname, since that was the name she grew up with and which she passed on to our children, and mostly dropped Motherssurname. But public documents exceeding the number of letters automatically initialize her as Firstname Motherssurname F. Husbandssurname.
@David Marjanović: yes, this guy.
I distinctly remember seeing his passport once, and the patronymic wasn’t listed (and I asked why, and he said his Chinese father’s name didn’t work well as a patronymic).
Was it he who compiled the list of the infamous Jewish questions, or however they’re called?
???
I know what “the Jewish question” is, and there are various FAQs on Judaism out there, but what are these infamous Jewish questions, then?
I’m guessing this is a reference to the questions designed to eliminate Jewish applicants to Soviet institutions (notably the major universities) where they were not wanted, even though officially there was no restriction. Compare the questions used to keep blacks from voting in various states in the Bad Old Days.
Ah. But Alexander NP Shen was born in 1958 and had his tertiary education in the late 70s, which it seems to me would make him rather young for the purpose. The “rootless cosmopolite” campaigns began in 1948 after the establishment of Israel, and the NYT reported on Jewish educational quotas in the Soviet Union in 1964. I think these questions would have to be the product of someone much older.
Nope. The antisemitic stuff lasted right up until the end of the USSR. It has nothing to do with the “rootless cosmopolite” campaigns except that they’re both based in virtually ineradicable Russian antisemitism.
(I don’t mean that antisemitism ended with the fall of communism, obviously, just that the whole system of admission altered. I don’t know what the situation is like now.)
A collection of the Jewish problems
I think that’s the very article where I got the information I was providing above; thanks!
The antisemitic stuff lasted right up until the end of the USSR.
In the 1980s, a neighbor tried to enter the TashMI (Tashkent Medical Institute) a few times but, having a Jewish father (and a Tatar mother), couldn’t. He became an accountant and ultimately emigrated to the US.
However, another neighbor (a Jewish mother and a Russian father) did enter it (her mother had also graduated from it); I’m not sure she graduated from it, since they emigrated to Israel at the beginning of 1992, the year of the great exodus.
An anacdote on the subject:
In a byuro kadrov, a person asks a clerk:
– Vy prinimayete na rabotu lyudey s familiyei na -ko?
– Konechno!
– Kogan, zakhodite!
And the TashMI was the Cander Ward,
Gangart = Meyke
And a zapisnaya knizhka (in Russian) of a writer and a former TashMI student can be downloaded from here:
https://mytashkent.uz/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/MK-Zapisnaya-kniga-Fin-PDF.pdf
In some circles, Robert S. Mueller III is now called Bobby Three-Sticks.
Outside the US, numbers seem to be extremely rare outside of nobility. The one example that comes to mind is Julius Meinl V and Probably Last, under whom the family’s chain of upscale supermarkets went bankrupt. Sen. and jun., however, used to be quite common in Germany and Austria before falling completely out of fashion a few decades ago.
David M: In some circles, Robert S. Mueller III is now called Bobby Three-Sticks.
I understood that this was his nickname in school.
When my wife and I registered our daughter’s name, we thought we had given it to the registrar as . However, the registrar wrote the last two names all in capitals, and in British law, the names in capitals on your birth certificate are your surname. So officially she has a double-barrelled but unhyphenated surname, something we only discovered when she was 10 and we had to apply for her to have her own passport (previously she had travelled on her mother’s Irish passport).
Unfortunately the name disappeared.
n the 1980s, a neighbor tried to enter the TashMI (Tashkent Medical Institute) a few times but, having a Jewish father (and a Tatar mother), couldn’t. […] However, another neighbor (a Jewish mother and a Russian father) did enter it
So the (halakhic) non-Jew is kept out by antisemitism, whereas the Jew makes it in. “Oft evil will shall evil mar.”
Late Soviet antisemitism (after 1949) resembles anti-German sentiment in the late Russian empire (after 1875).
Formerly privileged ethnic minority suddenly comes under suspicion that its loyalties switched to another country (Israel for Soviet Jews and Germany for Russian Germans) and lots of unpleasantness ensues.
A good comparison that hadn’t occurred to me.
A childhood friend of mine, Stephen Anthony S―, was given his choice of an additional name to add on the occasion of his confirmation. He chose “Anthony”, thus making him technically Stephen Anthony Anthony S―.
James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree took great care of his mother, though he was only three.
James James said to his mother, “Mother,” he said, said he,
“You must never go down to the end of the town if you don’t go down with me!”
I wonder if the 40s. reward (£344.20 today in terms of labor purchasing power) is still payable. US$500 would be a nice little extra.
(Note the quotation dash in my previous message.)
TIL of the Abraham Darbys, English Quakers and ironmasters of the Coalbrookdale Company, which established the first commercially successful coke-fired iron smelter in Europe. Abraham Darby I (1678-1719) was known as Abraham Darby and then Abraham Darby the Elder, in the usual English fashion of the day. His son (1711-1763) was Abraham Darby the Younger in his lifetime, and only Abraham Darby II retrospectively. His son (1750-1789) was explicitly Abraham Darby III, and the latter’s great-nephew (1804-1878) explicitly Abraham Darby IV; the latter moved his iron interests to Wales, joined the Church of England, and if there was an Abraham Darby V, Wikipedia has nothing to say of him.
the Jeans I-V led me here, and then i fell down the thread…
in u.s. families who stick rigorously to the same names, the nicknames can also start repeating. i have a friend, Sully, from a texan family whose male line has used a single three-part name since at least the 1830s – his father’s byname, Sul, also turns up for 19th century predecessors…
almost no one on either side of my family has a middle name. i grew up understanding that as a jewish thing, in the u.s. context. no idea whether that’s a general pattern, but it maps with my experience. my observant friends do tend to have a separate shem hakoydesh, but it’s only ever used in ritual contexts, with what could be seen as their kinui being both the everyday and the state-documented name. and of course there’s more variation in the relationship between the two names than would’ve been normal a century ago, when my grandfather went from “yidl nukhm” first to “julius” and then to “jules”…
The name Julius makes me think of the wonderful Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.
Re Knipl, the link says “The word knipl means roughly “nest egg” or housewife hidden savings in Yiddish.[1]”. There is a German verb knipsen, meaning “take a photo”, and since Knipl is a photographer, I thought that was where it came from.
No, knipsen is onomatopoietic.
PlasticPaddy was talking about where the name Knipl came from, not the German verb.
That possibility didn’t occur to me, because surely any last name is much older than photography in these latitudes?
But Knipl is a comic-strip character from the late 20th century, not a real person. I don’t even know if there is an actual surname Knipl (Google is only giving me the comic-strip character), but if there is, its actual etymology is irrelevant — Katchor could well have chosen the name for its resemblance to the German verb. Or he could just have thought it sounded nice. I guess someone could write and ask him…
Remember that list of Google tips and tricks I linked to? Another useful tip is using “
-” (dash character) to only show pages without a particular string. So[ knipl -julius ]shows … non-comic strip Knipls.Of course, it would also remove an actual person named Julius Knipl, but you can’t have everything.
Knipl, Knipl, Knipl:
http://www.peoplebyname.com/people/Knipl
https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=knipl
Thanks all, and sorry for the confusion. I thought Knipl sounded like an invented name. There seem to be some Knipls in bavaria and “Austria-Hungary”.
There’s also Naděžda Kniplová — in the context of the OP, I thought at first that that might be a patronymic, but WikiP suggests that for Czech names, -ova is used for family names.
“Kniplová was selected for the lifetime achievement award in opera at the 2010 Thalia Awards, however she refused the award stating that she should have received it sooner.”
Also, the entomologist Edward F. Knipling.
I have to wonder if he ever heard the Kipling joke modified for his name, which would make it sound a wee bit dirtier.
that’s a respectable number of knipls!
and i wouldn’t be surprised if katchor had both the german and the yiddish in mind – they both seem relevant to the way he’s created the character (and he does love a slippery allusion).
i can’t find my copy of the one collection i have, so can’t give any examples, but i’ve always found katchor’s fictional names of places and people in the strip very satisfying, in a way that other mainly-anglophone writers’ often aren’t (for me) when they try to do an eastern/central european flavor that isn’t strictly german. that’s one of the things i find frustrating about china miéville’s The City and the City, for instance (a book that i otherwise quite like) – he seems to have given no particular thought to making either besź or illitan (including their resepctive onomastics) make any kind of systematic sense. and that gets in my way as a reader.
Belated correction: I have since learned that Harry S. Truman used his dot and signed with it. David S Berman, however, really does publish without one in his in-house journal, where dots are used for the abbreviated middle names of his coauthors.
Truman was asked (when he was a senator, I think), whether he preferred his middle initial written with or without a period. He said he didn’t actually care, and it became journalistic standard to use the period. That set a precedent, so that most American news style guides say to use the period in cases like that, unless the individual has a stated preference for the period not to be there.
TIL that there are people whose names (in English) are Shariful Islam, as in the Bangladeshi cricketer (not to be confused with Shoriful Islam, another Bangladeshi cricketer). These have the advantage for anglophones of helping to get the stress right on Shariful and of not being easily lost. There is also a physician and scientist named Mohammed Shariful Islam, aka Dr. Shariful Islam, and one wonders if some of the plain Shariful Islams aren’t actually named something like this.
Danish kniple means to make lace. And kneppe means, well you guessed. (You can also knytte kniplinger, the verb denominal from knude = ‘knot’, but that’s more of a stretch).
(Does lacemaking have a more specific word than make in English? I see weave used, but I’m not sure if that’s specific to bobbin lace or the like. Come to think of it, Danish knytte may in fact be specific to bobbin lace).
Danish kniple means to make lace. And kneppe means, well you guessed.
Is it “weaving”, like in weaving a carpet? Both sound like they’re related to German knüpfen “to knot, to tie, to weave (a carpet)”. The verb to use with lace is klöppeln.
Here be Klöppel.