Robert Cioffi’s LRB review (8 May 2025; archived) of The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner describes the excavations at Wadi al-Jarf:
Wadi el-Jarf lies two hundred kilometres south-east of Cairo on a pristine stretch of the Red Sea coast. It dates from the time of the pharaoh Sneferu, the father of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, who used it as a staging post for expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula in search of turquoise and copper ore. For the past 4500 years, it has lain dormant. To the untrained eye, the port is hardly visible: deep galleries carved out of limestone bluffs, the low walls of a few comb-like structures, a sandy beach, the rocky remnants of an ancient jetty. But on 12 March 2013, a team of French and Egyptian archaeologists led by Pierre Tallet discovered six fragments of papyrus in a depression near the limestone cliffs five kilometres from the shore. Hundreds of thousands of texts written on papyrus have been discovered in Egypt – ritual and religious instructions for the afterlife, works of literature, bills, contracts, tax receipts, lawsuits and orders for grain – but none as old as these. Over the next month, Tallet’s team uncovered more than a thousand fragments of papyrus. They had found, almost by accident, a first-hand account of the men who built the Great Pyramid of Giza. […]
The most enduring mystery of the pyramids is the fact of their existence. There has been serious scholarly disagreement over the number of workers, their status and how they went about their monumental task. Herodotus, who stands roughly equidistant between Khufu’s time and ours, writes that Khufu ‘drove [the Egyptians] into complete misery’, with teams of a hundred thousand men compelled to haul stones for three months at a time. As Herodotus has it, workers first built a set of steps and then used levers to fill in the gaps and produce the pyramid’s smooth sides. Four hundred years later, Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian who wrote in Greek, proposed that the stones were moved on earthen ramps, so that the pyramid seemed ‘not the slow labour of humanity, but a sudden creation of some god, set down in the surrounding sand’. The whole project, Diodorus and Herodotus agree, took twenty years. Archaeologists have found evidence – ranging from the remains of ramps to modern trials with levers and ropes – for techniques similar to those they describe, but both accounts, written two thousand years after the fact, leave much to be desired.
In The Red Sea Scrolls, Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner, an American archaeologist who has worked extensively on Giza, don’t pass judgment on Herodotus and Diodorus, at least directly. They can’t explain all the mysterious cavities of the Great Pyramid, nor can they provide a new account of the way its gargantuan blocks were moved into position. But what they can reveal is perhaps more consequential. The papyri of Wadi el-Jarf, written between 2607 and 2605 ʙᴄᴇ, specify who worked on the pyramid, how they were compensated and what they did each day. Tallet and Lehner also trace the story of the papyri’s journey from the Nile Valley and the Giza plateau to the Red Sea coast, and describe the painstaking process by which they were excavated, studied and pieced back together.
The Red Sea Scrolls comprise at least seven logbooks as well as additional economic accounts. The logs alone total more than five metres of continuous text. They record in extraordinary detail the movements and labours of 160 of Khufu’s workers, and provide information on everything from the delivery of food to the procurement of tools. Although it remains an open question why the papyri were deposited at an intermittently used port on the Red Sea, it is possible that they were intended to become part of – or form the basis for – an official archive.
The star of the Red Sea Scrolls is undoubtedly a man called Merer, a mid-level official or inspector who oversaw a team of forty men transporting limestone for Giza on a ship named The Uraeus of Khufu Is Its Prow (a uraeus was the figure of a sacred serpent, symbolising royal authority). For at least four months of the 26th year of Khufu’s reign, Merer dipped his reed pen in ink and described the activities of his team in a careful and precise hand. We first meet him in the vicinity of Giza:
[Day 25] [Inspector Merer spends the day with his team [h]au[ling] st[ones in Tura South]; spends the night at Tura South. [Day 26]: Inspector Merer casts off with his team from Tura [South], loaded with stone, for Akhet Khufu; spends the night at She Khufu; Day 27: Sets sail from She Khufu, sails towards Akhet Khufu, loaded with stone, spends the night at Akhet Khufu. Day 28: Casts off from Akhet Khufu in the morning; sails upriver [towards] Tura South. Day 29: Inspector Merer spends the day with his team hauling stones in Tura South; spends the night in Tura South.
Merer rarely deviates from this structure: sometimes he takes a delivery of bread; sometimes he gets instructions from a senior official; once he is delayed. He never preens or complains, and – maddeningly – he never describes what it was like to see a great pyramid, inhuman in its scale, rising from the Giza plateau. Tallet and Lehner speculate that he would have found it unnecessary to describe the construction for his contemporary audience. Merer’s text is more like a timesheet or a ship’s log than a memoir. He may have felt wonder, but was hardly compelled to write it down. […]
Besides Merer and Dedi, we meet many others in the Red Sea Scrolls: Ideru, ‘the director of six’, who sails to Heliopolis for food and returns with forty sacks of grain; Hesi, ‘the director of ten’; and, most intriguing of all, Ankh-haf, a close relative of Khufu, who held the title ‘director of Ro-She Khufu’. Ankh-haf has long been known to experts from the astonishing bust discovered in his grand, bench-shaped tomb in the early 20th century. He described himself as ‘overseer of all the king’s works’ and ‘vizier’, positions that he may have held under Khufu’s successor. He doesn’t mention his role in the pyramid’s construction but perhaps he didn’t need to. His burial place at the edge of the Eastern Cemetery at Giza overlooked his domain at the Ro-She Khufu. Pyramid building had its rewards in this life and the next. […]
When the Nile receded in December that year, Merer’s team was dispatched north to the Mediterranean to work on a structure called a ‘double djadja’, perhaps a double jetty. We hear nothing more of them until early April. It’s possible that they were given time off, but we may simply be missing the relevant section of the logs. We next encounter them on the Red Sea. The papyri contain references to sailing expeditions, mountainous areas, a place called Ineb Khufu (the ‘walls of Khufu’, perhaps the Tell Ras Budran fortress on the south-western coast of the Sinai Peninsula) and, finally, a place called Bat, the ‘Bushy Land’, which may be Wadi el-Jarf. It looks desolate now, but it was probably chosen for its topography, access to fresh water and connections to the Nile. One of the fragments discovered by Tallet’s team was a small, folded slip of papyrus, no larger than a business card, that belonged to ‘the great one of the carrying chair, the controller of the dwarves of the department of the clothes of linen of the first quality, the controller of the necklace makers and royal administrator Neferiru’. Neferiru presumably travelled to Wadi el-Jarf on one of many desert roads that are marked today only by a handful of scattered inscriptions, depositions of pottery and, occasionally, ancient tracks. The same roads almost certainly carried Merer and his men to the Red Sea. […]
After September, Merer and his men disappear from view and the Red Sea Scrolls come to an end. We don’t know why they left Wadi el-Jarf, after storing Merer’s diary, Dedi’s logs and other papyri in a pit in front of one of the rock-cut galleries. Were they under threat? Was Merer fired? Did Khufu’s death mean his meticulously compiled records were no longer relevant? Tallet and Lehner find the last option most likely, but we can’t know for sure. […]
Tallet’s career has been distinguished by his recognition of the value of conducting his research outside Egypt’s traditional centres of power. In 2012, he discovered a hieroglyphic inscription from the fourth millennium ʙᴄᴇ in the Sinai Peninsula, which pushed back the date of Memphis by fifty years. It is the oldest known example of a sentence written in hieroglyphs: ‘The Horus, he is Ity,’ a phrase spoken to confer full royal status on a prince. (‘Ity’ means ‘sovereign’.) ‘In the excitement of that moment,’ Tallet writes, ‘I remember thinking that I would never again make an archaeological discovery of such importance in my entire career as a researcher.’ Ten months later, at Wadi el-Jarf, he would prove himself wrong.
The OED (entry from 1926) says of uraeus:
A modern Latinization of οὐραῖος, given by Horapollo as the Egyptian name for the cobra (now transliterated as ἰ?r·t), perhaps influenced in form by the Greek adjective οὐραῖος, < οὐρά tail.
And I must say, “the controller of the dwarves of the department of the clothes of linen of the first quality” is an impressive title.
I am no Egyptologist, though shared a winter rental with Mark Lehner in Va. Beach in, was it, the 1970s, but I may comment on one detail of this report.
That is, the claim that “Merer dipped his reed pen in ink.”
No.
This was before split-nib reed pens and inkwells, but in a time of rush brushes and palettes.
See:
William John Tait, Rush and Brush: the Pens of Egyptian and Greek Scribes, Proceedings of the XVIII International Congress of Papyrology, 1988, vol. 2, 477-481, and
Willy Clarysse, Egyptian Scribes Writing Greek, Chronique d’Égypt, 68 (1993) 186-201.
A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, 4th ed. 1963, 362-365.
Wikipedia:
I was wondering.
I must say that sharing a winter rental in Va. Beach with an Egyptologist sounds like an opening scene in some sort of film-noir script that is going to get dark and weird pretty quickly. I’m glad Stephen Goranson has survived all these decades to tell the tale!
Not all Egyptologists are cursed.
I met Mark Lehner in 1975 when I was dragomanning Ken Kesey around Egypt for Jann Wenner. (Dropping two or maybe three names in one sentence.) He has come a long way from his childhood among devotees of the Sleeping Guru Edgar Cayce.
¿dragomanning?
Has that anything to do with lobsters?
The verb dragoman means ‘serve as dragoman to’.
I thought “dragomanning” was such an excellent participle that it frankly distracted me from the one-time celebrity or quasi-celebrity status of the names dropped elsewhere in the sentence. The Egypt trip presumably did not get Kesey out of his notoriously long-running writer’s block, but that’s probably not the dragoman’s fault.
David M.
written Arabic “j” is pronounced “g” in spoken Egyptian Arabic.
The post doesn’t mention the salacious bit amongst Khufu’s efforts (accn. to Herodotus) to get the pyramid up: “sending his daughter into the stews”, as it was put in an 18th cent. translation.
Chez Khufu sounds like a fine place to spend one’s night.
That ? is a computer-typography fail. It should be an “Egyptological ain” (in Unicode since 2008, ꜥ U+A725 Latin Small Letter Egyptological Ain); the code for it appears in the web version of the OED2 entry as [egyasper]. When the online OED launched in 2000, its character set was painfully limited, and they had to resort to images for Greek letters and a variety of special characters (which was irritating enough that somebody made a script to substitute Unicode entities). At some point — I think this must have been part of the platform redesign of 2010 — they managed to get fonts with Greek and diacriticized Roman letters, but all the other special characters were lost and have never been repaired. You can see the scars e.g. in the etymologies of letters M, N, O, P, Q, R, where glyphs for Phoenician and early Greek forms are missing.
The OED was already playing the game of “Guess which transliteration system this is — we’ll never tell!” in the first edition, but Wikipedia gives it away: this is the Erman 1894 system. Erman and Grapow’s Wörterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache has this word in vol. 1, p. 42 — the entire dictionary is *handwritten*, I think it wins the all-time prize for most beautiful handwriting by a linguist! That means no OCR and no searchability, but fortunately, this word is very early in the alphabet so it didn’t take long to find.
Anyway, Egyptology has moved on since 1926, and Wiktionary has some more recent thoughts on uraeus, using a slightly different transliteration:
Here is the passage in Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica (boldface added) from which Egyptologists took οὐραῖος/uraeus as a technical term:
To read it in the manuscript, go here and scroll down to the image file labelled ‘Carta 68r’. The word οὐραῖον occurs about two-thirds of the way through the third line from the top of the page (this line ends with the word βασιλίσκον).
Recent scholarship seems to prefer an etymology of the term from wrrt. Scroll down to ‘Attestation in the TLA text corpus’ and click on the bar to see the citations from texts. See also wrr.t here. And see the list reconstructed pronunciations, especially Late Egyptian /wəˈɾeʔjə/, in the Wiktionary entry for wrrt. I have some other things I have to do now—maybe other LH readers can follow up on this interesting topic.
Has anybody here seen the theory that the Jewish-Greek name Hyrcanus contains a theophoric reference to Horus? https://www.academia.edu/611696/A_Brief_History_of_the_Second_Temple_Period_NameHyrcanus
Yes, and that’s usually shown in transcriptions, so I was wondering why it wasn’t this time.
That *is* odd, now that you mention it.
Not to be confused with Hufu.
@R.RCK: That’s a very good and thorough paper. Thanks!
[Rescued comments by ktschwarz and Xerîb from purgatory.]
Peter Grubtal: written Arabic “j” is pronounced “g” in spoken Egyptian Arabic.
Or the other way around, depending on your outlook, I suppose.
I myself am currently living in a rental in Virginia Beach, although not a winter one, with my daughter and her nuclear family.
Beware of Egyptologists bearing mummy wrappers!
Re “the controller of the dwarves of the department of the clothes of linen of the first quality”: I wonder whether “dwarves” was a euphemism for “slaves”.
Why would a euphemism be needed, though? I would first speculate about a misreading or mistranslation and then maybe about a reason why average body size was disadvantageous – or was thought to be so – for working with linen of the first quality.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this were a technical term of some kind. After all, a printer’s devil was not (usually) an actual demon, and an âme damnée is generally not a damned soul (as yet, anyhow.)
Dwarfs were dwarfs.
@Cuchuflete: The English noun dragoman has nothing to do with lobsters but you may be interested to know that it has four cognates in Spanish: drogmán, truchimán, trujamán, and trujimán.
@Y:
Ah, but were all dwarfs dwarfs? Perhaps some were only honorary dwarfs …
it has four cognates in Spanish: drogmán, truchimán, trujamán, and trujimán
Tarjaman in Hausa; the word doesn’t seem to have caught on much in West Africa, though, perhaps because anyone who is anyone in those parts can speak at least three languages anyway.
Many Ghanaian cultures have a hereditary high councillor who speaks on the chief’s behalf on all public occasions, very much like an interpreter, but for the most part in cultures where, in fact, the nobility and the plebs actually speak the same language. In Ghanaian English, he’s called a “linguist”, in Twi, an okyeame, and in Kusaal, a nɔdi’es. The Kusaal Bible translation uses Wina’am nɔdi’es “God’s linguist” for “prophet”, which has always seemed to me to be one of the happier Christian calques.
So a linguist is a prophet without a god?
Quite so.
Unemployed, yet not without honor except in his own dialect.
I recently took in the big “Divine Egypt” temporary exhibition now up at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan, and was struck by how they consistently referred to the solar deity most commonly referred to (in English) as “Ra” as “Re.” I didn’t know that variant spelling, but wikipedia advised me that it was a thing, and was a reasonable transliteration of the Coptic spelling. Although of course the Coptic-scripted version of the deity’s name was quite late in his multi-millennium career and to the extent it accurately represented a pronunciation it would have represented a late one that shouldn’t necessarily be read back into earlier periods.
But bottom line I assumed the organizers of the exhibition meant to send *some* factional signal within the Egyptological world by choosing this variant spelling and sticking with it, but I can’t immediately figure out after minimal googling what exactly that would be. Thus I am hoping someone else will.
Alan Gardiner himself proposed (and used) Copticising transliterations like these: he justifies this as being on the one hand better than the Ra-type, which has no connection with the original pronunciation and is a purely conventional pronunciation of the consonantal skeletons alone represented in the Egyptian scripts, and on the other, also capable of being done pretty consistently. There are transcriptions into cuneiform and things like that, along with internal reconstruction, which shed light on earlier periods; but Gardiner thought (reasonably) there wasn’t enough to carry a reconstruction on such lines through properly.
Incidentally, it’s pretty clear that sun (god) was called /ri:ʕ(ə)/ in yer actual Middle Egyptian.
@David E.: Okay, but Gardiner is dead 62 years ago next month. He can’t currently help direct funding or other career opportunities to anyone. What are the current professional incentives for ambitious young people to align themselves with his orthographic preferences in order to boost their own status within an Egyptological milieu?
Gardiner’s Middle Egyptian grammar is even now still in many respects the standard. All serious Egyptologists have read it. Since his day there have been major developments in the understanding of the verbal system (Hans Polotsky is the name to google*) but G’s level of detail is still unmatched (and his grammar is still in print.)
So it’s basically pop-sci versus Egyptology. If people use “Ra” they are talking down to you**. (Among themselves, Egyptologists say rʿ. Vowels are for the weak.)
* I have his Études de syntaxe copte on my bookshelves. Polotsky was a clever lad indeed, and his insights were very illuminating. But he also kicked off a bizarre turn in the study of ancient Egyptian where for decades the grammatical description of the language used a highly idiosyncratic framework rather remote from mainstream syntactic theory, with a kind of built-in deep confusion between form and function, which is Bad. It’s a very interesting story from a general-linguistic standpoint.
** Or are Thor Heyerdahl, and just don’t know any better.
The New Kingdom names Potipherah and Ramses are spelled in the Genesis and Exodus, respectively, with raʿ; LXX spell them Πετεφρη and Ραµεσση[ς]. So is the later Aperies, ḥŏp̄raʿ or ḥāp̄raʿ in Jeremiah 44:30, Ουαφρης in the LXX.
In “Rameses” the god’s name is a reduced proclitic form, rather like a construct. LXX is likely continuing an older tradition as far as the vowels go than the Masoretic text (as often elsewhere.)
In this particular case, the original Middle Egyptian pronunciation is actually known (for example, from cuneiform transcriptions), as are its later Egyptian versions. So we can actually tell when the Masora is wrong.
By the time of the LXX, the god’s name had already acquired the /e:/ vowel of Coptic (apart from the enormous Greek loanword element, Demotic and Coptic were pretty similar: the major linguistic time division in Egyptian is between Old and Middle Egyptian, on the one hand, and Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic on the other.)
Coptic represents a script (and cultural) change from Demotic rather than a major linguistic change (at least, if one means “linguistic” in a Chomskyoid who-cares-about-culture-anyway sense.) Hindi vs Urdu more than Hindi vs Sanskrit.
WP says [ˈɾiːʕuw], but gives no sources or dating.
The LXX translators also likely knew people who spoke Coptic, or even spoke it themselves.
It’s not actually called “Coptic” unless it’s written in Greek letters, so technically, the LXX translators would have known people who spoke “Demotic” (confusingly, but tellingly, named after the script rather than vice versa.)
There are pre-Christian Egyptian spells and curses written in Greek letters: they’re usually said to be in “Old Coptic”, Because Greek Letters, but of course the writers could perfectly well have written exactly the same spells in Demotic if they were able to cope with the ghastly complexity of the script (much worse than hieroglyphic.)
Lambdin, in his Coptic grammar, makes the reasonable point that the early Christian translators of the Bible into Egyptian probably used Greek letters rather than Demotic script, not so much because of the “heathen associations” of the latter, but because it was so bloody difficult.
Cleopatra VII (the fatale monstrum) was famously the only Ptolemaic pharaoh who could actually speak Egyptian, but there must have been plenty of Egyptian Greeks farther down the food chain who could.
So why do you think the Masorah uses an -a-?
The i-Vocalism is attested in Akkadian transliterations of second Millennium BC. The Akkadian transliterations are afaik the oldest direct attestations of Ancient Egyptian vowels that we have. Along with the (much later) Greek transliterations and Coptic they are the basis for reconstructions of Ancient Egyptian vocalism (which changed over its long history, and there were probably regional differences, too). A lot of these reconstructions is speculative — after all, only a few names are recorded in Akkadian (or Greek), so for most words we must rely on the very late Coptic reflexes, if they exist (and it’s not just words, many forms of Ancient Egyptian didn’t exist in Coptic times any more). The basis for reconstructions is basically the syllabification of Coptic — there is a whole chapter in Gardiner about the early attempts to reconstruct the older pronunciation. There has been progress since then, but a lot of it is highly speculative. You’ll find examples in the books of Loprieno (Ancient Egyptian. A Linguistic Introduction) and Allen (not his Middle Egyptian Grammar, but The Ancient Egyptian Language. An Historical Study). We simply cannot reliably reconstruct the pronunciation of every name or word of Middle Egyptian, and that’s the reason why conventional pronunciations based on the consonantal skeleton (which Gardiner uses in his grammar) and Greek, Coptic and other traditions are used. I think there are also different national traditions of giving pronounceable versions of Egyptian names, and there are also differences between the forms preferred by egyptologists and those used by historians (especially if they write for a wider audience).
In their full form (there were shortened everyday forms already in the Old Kingdom) Egyptian royal names are sentences, and Rameses means (afaik) “Ra is born”. The -a- in the biblical tradition may be the result of developments that happened in Hebrew.
German.
Drastic examples: Nefertiti is Nofretete over here (penultimate stress and length), Akhenaten is Echnaton (three syllables, initial stress).
Maybe just a reasonable guess from /ʕ/.
OK, now I’m scared.
We discussed such matters in 2020 and way back in 2003 (alas, I never got any further with my Egyptian studies).
The -a- in the biblical tradition may be the result of developments that happened in Hebrew.
No, the Greek transcriptions have Ra- too. The first element in names like these was unstressed, though it does indeed represent an original subject. By “rather like a construct”, I just meant phonologically, not syntactically.
I suppose I don’t see the point of deviating from the established/common version of the name in English when communicating with non-specialist Anglophones. Consider by way of parallel “Bible names.” “Isaac” is the established English version of the name of the Old Testament fellow. Other languages can handle that differently if they wish, e.g. Isaak in German or Isacco in Italian.* But why insist on something like Yiṣḥāq in a general-audience Anglophone context other than arrogance for its own sake, or perhaps more charitably a nerdview failure to understand that ones own petty obsessions are not of equal interest or relevance to everyone else? ETA: I respectfully reject David E.’s “talking down to” characterization. I don’t think normal people generally feel patronized when specialists communicate to them using conventional spellings they (the normals) are accustomed to.
*I had no idea until this thread that Nefertiti had a different name in German, but good for her. Or good for them, if you prefer.
If I recall, you’re the guy who thought saying Vla-DEE-mir rather than VLAD-i-mir was a crime against English.
@J.W.: You can be even more charitable about specialists’ reasons for using correct or likeliest to be closest to correct names, such as wanting to be correct oneself and wanting people to know the best forms.
Biblical names such as “Isaac” might not be that good a parallel because they’re so familiar. We manage to say “Yitzhak” for Israeli prime ministers. It would be a lot easier to switch from “Ra” to something else than from “Isaac” to “Yitzhak” for Abraham’s son—only I’m not clear from the above discussion what the something else would be.
On the other hand I’m not giving up this (less than entirely original) bit from Illuminatus!:
There is only one god
And he is the Sun god.
Ra! Ra! Ra!
And let us not forget the great Sun Ra.
The form in the Amarna letters, referenced in WP, is ri-a or ri-ia. I wonder if it represented something like riʿ~reʿ ([i] and [e] are allophones in Egyptian), with an epenthetic -a- before the final guttural, like a Hebrew furtive patah.
On similar lines, I’m thinking that the second part of the place name qādēš barnēaʿ in the northeastern Sinai, mentioned in Numbers and Joshua, might be an Egyptian word. A quick check comes up with only shaky and unlikely Hebrew etymologies, but surely someone must have thought of looking for an Egyptian one.
Back to the personal names, could unpointed רִעַ– -riaʿ have been misread as רַע– -raʿ?
And let us not forget the great Sun Ra
Evidently short for the Hausa rana “sun.”
Back to the personal names, could unpointed רִעַ– -riaʿ have been misread as רַע– -raʿ?
If the vowel had got shortened somehow or other, I think /raʕ/ would have resulted pretty much inevitably in Biblical Hebrew.
To refer to some alternative to the common English name for something as the “correct name” is to load the dice. The common English name for something is BY DEFINITION the correct name, or at least a correct name, when referencing its referent in a discourse conducted in English. Obviously if that chant/cheer from _Iluminatus_ is translated into another language the translator should use that language’s own word for “Ra” just like that own languages words for “sun” or “god.” When it comes to personal names of currently-living persons, there may be a politeness norm in favor of deferring to the specific person’s preference if easy to accomplish, but I don’t think the current Egyptological profession is authorized to express the preferences of the reputed deity in question, although I might be open to the possibility that Sun Ra might have been.
You can certain use the current-consensus reconstructed classical pronunciation of Ivlivs Caesar if you are reading a Latin text about him aloud, or perchance conversing in Latin. You can use the English pronunciation of Julius Caesar (in your own variety of English as regards rhoticism etc.) if you’re talking about him in English. It’s not that complicated. Maybe the Egyptologists should conduct their scholarly symposia in Coptic if the English language isn’t fancy enough for them?
if the English language isn’t fancy enough for them?
Well, now: it just doesn’t have the sheer gravitas of Welsh, does it?
Indeed, we don’t even have our own word for “gravitas” but had to borrow one.
Possibly analogous situation, possibly not. I have learned via telephone conversations this evening that one of my daughters pronounces the surname of Walter Benjamin quasi-Teutonically, i.e. as /ˈbɛnjəmin/ rather than /ˈbɛnd͡ʒəmɪn/. OTOH, she pronounces the surname of Leo Strauss as /stɹaʊs/ rather than /ʃtʁaʊ̯s/. But Strauss spent many decades in the U.S. after exiting Germany and may have actively acquiesced in an Americanized pronunciation whereas Benjamin regrettably did not get that opportunity. Moreover, the daughter in question may currently be mulling career ambitions where “sound like an insider” could be a more useful strategy in the near term than “be understandable by the general public.”
Another problem, come to think of it, with the “Re” spelling of the sun-god’s name is that I suspect (although of course it turns out that vowel pronunciation varied even within the period Coptic script was used …) they mean it to be uttered with the DRESS vowel. But in normal English phonotactics DRESS is a “checked vowel” that doesn’t usually appear w/o a following consonant.* So the only available spelling pronunciations of “re” in English are with FACE (as in do re mi) or FLEECE (as in any word starting re- clipped back to that prefix).
*I can personally say it outside that environment but maybe only because when I was 8 years old I was taught how to chant the table of hiragana, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re_(kana).
one of my daughters pronounces the surname of Walter Benjamin quasi-Teutonically, i.e. as /ˈbɛnjəmin/ rather than /ˈbɛnd͡ʒəmɪn/.
As do I, and I respectfully submit that the average American in the street (to whose patriotic sentiments of outrage you advert when deprecating the furrin pronunciations of cosmopolites like myself) is so unlikely to have heard of Walter Benjamin that your proud nativized /ˈbɛnd͡ʒəmɪn/ is likely to be taken as some local Uncle Benny, and those who actually know the work of the cultural critic in question by and large pronounce it like your daughter and my humble self.
pronounces the surname of Leo Strauss as /stɹaʊs/ rather than /ʃtʁaʊ̯s/.
Any Strausses I’m liable to pronounce would be Austrian composers [**] rather than global/Americans (Philosophers, Anthropologists or otherwise).
[**] Or possibly Emperors; or the homonymous Brandt-era Politician.
You can use the English pronunciation of Julius Caesar (in your own variety of English as regards rhoticism etc.) if you’re talking about him in English. It’s not that complicated.
It’s not that simple either. You can change “correct” in my post to “like the original pronunciation”, and I agree with you about Julius Caesar, but I think we’re better off for saying Mohammed or Muhammed instead of Mahound and not pronouncing Don Juan’s first name as /’dʒuən/ or Don Quixote’s as /’kwɪksət/. Quite possibly more people have occasion to encounter the name of that Egyptian sun god than “Walter Benjamin”, but I think the sun god’s name is still amenable to change.
Obviously if that chant/cheer from _Iluminatus_ is translated into another language the translator should use that language’s own word for “Ra” just like that own languages words for “sun” or “god.”
It’s not that obvious. You could make a good case for translating it with a cheer or similar word in the target language, even though you’d most likely have to change the preceding sentences out of recognition. I’d probably do it your way, though, especially if I could provide a footnote. (The only language I know how to cheer in is Spanish, and nothing comes to mind for olé.)
Perhaps we could compromise on “Mahomet”? I will admit to generally having lived my life so as to avoid having occasion to utter the surname of Walter Benjamin out loud. But your kids are gonna do what they’re gonna do.
Allen reconstructs a 3-vowel system *a *i *u for New Kingdom Egyptian. The Akkadian rendition nibmu’aria for Egyptian nb-mꜢꜤt-rꜤw he reads as *nibmuˁaríˁa. So he sees the -a- not as a glide like furtive Patah, but as an ending, after the final *ˁ.
I think we’re better off for saying Mohammed or Muhammed instead of Mahound and not pronouncing Don Juan’s first name as /’dʒuən/ or Don Quixote’s as /’kwɪksət/.
Why? Serious question. Would we be better off for saying Pahree instead of Paris, and even better off for using the French r? If not, what’s the difference? Is your ideal moral/ethical/philosophical (whatever you mean by “better off”) state for everyone in the world to pronounce all foreign names exactly as the foreigners say them? What’s the end game?
I’m not actually sure how to pronounce the chivalric name of Alonso Quijano in modern Danish, but Alonso comes out very close to the Spanish (since his first name was mentioned). Or how TYPNAD do it. But I learned from my grandmother (born 1903 or so) that it was [d̥ɒŋkʰeˈsjɒt̚] which is probably the nearest that 19th century Danish could get to the older Spanish pronunciation.
Also it was [d̥ɒn.sju.’aŋ] for the same generation. Velar glide? Get off. We’ll do three syllables, thank you very much. (Danish doesn’t have a phonemic contrast between IPA [j] and [ĭ], nor between [ʃ] and [sj], so I’m going with the simpler notation. We do have something like rising ɰ-diphthongs [spelled with v-], but not after /sj/ which always starts an i-diphthong. I blame the /ŋ/ on francophilia, it’s not a thing otherwise).
Another thing is that while I’m fully capable of adopting English, or Swedish, or German, or French, or Spanish, manners of pronunciation (or at least approximations of those) when speaking those languages, they really can’t be chained into connected Danish speech at speed. There needs to be a tiny pause before and after to allow a kind of reset of the speech organs, and quite apart from the question of sounding like an affected know-it-all, it makes you less fluent. These days we spell Milano, not Mailand after the German, but we use the vowels it would have if it were Danish (also unvoiced throughout). Second-syllable stress and length because foreign (I think), but pure luck if that coincides with your actual Italian.
I think we’re better off for saying Mohammed or Muhammed instead of Mahound and not pronouncing Don Juan’s first name as /’dʒuən/ or Don Quixote’s as /’kwɪksət/.
Those strike me as three rather different cases. “Mahound” was, as far as I can tell, never a neutral term; it was already begin glossed in 1898 as “a contemptuous name for Mahomet. Given the general mood of Byron’s poem, I suspect (uninformedly) that Don /’dʒuən/ was already intended to be comical even then. /’kwɪksət/ still survives in the derived adjective quixotic – but /’kihoʊti/ would perhaps have puzzled Cervantes less than the still-current French pronunciation /kiʃɔt/…
In Cervantes’ time the spelling was Quixote, and x was probably still pronounced [ʃ]. It was only in 1815 that the letter x was replaced by j [x].
“Mahound” was, as far as I can tell, never a neutral term
Yeah, that one’s a ringer — it’s always been an insult, never simply an anglicized form.
The Middle English lexicon apparently had both
a) Makomet(e n. Also macomete, machomet(e, mahomet, makamet(e, machamete, machamote, makemet(e, mahimet, mahumet & makometh, makameth, macamethe, macumeth & makamed(e, makemed & (error) maghnete;
and
b) Mahǒun n. Also mahun(e, -hon(ne, -hound(e, -honde, -hount, -houm, -hum, -hombe, -choun, mauhoun.
These developed into Mahomet and Mahound respectively, but it’s not clear to me that one of these was neutral and the other pejorative. But of course it may be that pretty much all actual uses of either in actual Middle English texts might seem pejorative from a modern perspective.
@Hat: Would we be better off for saying Pahree instead of Paris, and even better off for using the French r? If not, what’s the difference? Is your ideal moral/ethical/philosophical (whatever you mean by “better off”) state for everyone in the world to pronounce all foreign names exactly as the foreigners say them? What’s the end game?
I’m not trying to play this game out to mate. I think we’re better off with “Livorno” (pronounced with English sounds, in line with what Lars said) than “Leghorn” because it’s more like what the people who live there call it, makes learning one name easier once you’ve learned the other, and reduces the dissonance in my head. That’s very slight dissonance. I’m not going to start a movement to change the pronunciation of “Paris” or the pronunciation or spelling of the capital of Austria; it’s not that big a deal. But you’ll notice very few people now want to go back to saying “Leghorn” for the city.
I don’t think “Mahound” was loading any dice—certainly no more than your adducing the most established names such as “Paris”. As J.W. said, the early forms of “Mahound” and “Mahomet” were both initially hostile, and after looking at the OED, I’ll add that both meant “idot” (comically enough). I’ll admit that all of the non-idol early citations for “Mahound” are consistent with the OED’s definition as a supposed god, though some seem consistent to me with knowing the reference was to a prophet. Chaucer in “The Man of Law’s Tale” clearly refers to Mahomet as a messenger, but Chaucer was smarter than the average bard. It’s no surprise that by the late 1800s, “Mahound” was contemptuous; in addition to that -hound, by then it was deliberately
incorrectfar from the original.@Lameen: I don’t think it matters to my argument if the three cases are different.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Byron might have intended his pronunciation of “Juan” (and “Guadalquivir”*) as comedy. Apparently both pronunciations were in serious use. Here’s a monosyllabic one:
“Through jealous rage she’s lost her life !
Don Juan, of large estate,
Did cruel treat his guiltless wife,
Deserving better fate.”
…
“The message to Don Juan he bears:
No mercy will he show;
His cruel purpose he declares,
More to increase her woe.”
—James Templeman, “The Cruel Spaniard, a Ballad”, 1810
Here’s a disyllabic one:
“Gasp[ar].
Juan, well met: welcome once more to Milan;
Thrice welcome: yet your search, like ours, I fear,
Has ill succeeded.”
…
“Prior.
Who last beheld him?
“Conf.
Juan! at dawn, when he unbarred the gates,
Alfonso darted forth,
Striking his breast in anguish.—Heav’n protect him!”
—William Sotheby, Ellen; or, The Confession, a Tragedy, 1816
(The victim in “The Cruel Spaniard” was also named Ellen. Elena, I guess.)
*Some here will remember
“Don Juan’s parents lived beside the river,
A noble stream, and call’d the Guadalquivir.”
@Hat: Since you had a lot of questions for me, I meant to ask about your pronunciation. How do you pronounce “Nabokov” or “Mikhail Gorbachev” or “Mstislav”? I’d say the usual English pronunciations are “NABokoff, “MiKHAIL GORbachoff”, and “MISTislav”.
Higgledy piggledy
Vladimir Nabokov —
Wait! Hasn’t somebody
Made a mistake?
Out of such errors, Vla-
dimir Nabokov would
Sesquipedelian
Paragraphs make.
As he himself explained,
(-pedalian)
Nabokov even wrote a little poem for his students demonstrating the correct pronunciation and accentuation.
His son once confessed how such mispronunciations irritated him.
blockquoteMISTislav
Rostropovich once said whoever for some reasons has difficulties pronouncing “Mstislav” (two syllables, stress on the final), is allowed to simply call him “Slava”.
And Mussorgsky insisted on his name being stressed on the first syllable, after all he was Russian, not Polish.
I’m not going to start a movement to change the pronunciation of “Paris” or the pronunciation or spelling of the capital of Austria
You’ve only really arrived as a country when foreigners have their own version of the name of your capital. (The current regime in Peking has not grasped this fundamental geopolitical point.)
My favourite is ‘Monaco’ for Munich (or München, if you prefer).
Actually, LH, my questions were unfair because they bring in the question of how people whose lives overlapped with ours pronounced their own names, so consideration for their feelings in involved.
For the former “Russias”, the closest I can come to an example is whether you went along with “Belarus”. Also the politically charged “Kyiv”.
@ulr: Thanks, I didn’t know about “Mussorgsky”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it with the accent on the first syllable.
As I have no doubt mentioned before, my father as an undergraduate in the late Fifties took a class taught by Nabokov, despite the seeming irrelevance of his lectures to mechanical engineering. When I asked him once about pronunciation he said (as best as I can recall) that folks on campus were generally aware of VN’s preference for second-syllable stress in his surname and mostly tried to humor him on that but were less inclined to go along with second-syllable stress for his first name. Which would be consistent with my theory that “Vladimir” actually has a previously-established pronunciation in English that’s sort of ontologically independent of any individual Vladimir. Whereas one would not have been familiar with other prior instances of “Nabokov” and the first-syllable stress would instead have come via the application of various default rules about Unfamiliar Foreign Words which were mere defaults and could thus more easily be overcome with new information about the specific word.
There are some hard lines. I pronounce LH as a dactyl. if I heard furriners or migrants pronounce it as an amphibrach them would be fighting words.
My meter right or wrong, as the saying goes.
I think we’re better off with “Livorno” (pronounced with English sounds, in line with what Lars said) than “Leghorn” because it’s more like what the people who live there call it, makes learning one name easier once you’ve learned the other, and reduces the dissonance in my head.
I think the last element is the crucial one. I would remind you that the vast majority of speakers of any language neither know nor care what speakers of other languages say or how they say it, and that’s perhaps especially true of English-speakers. The test case for the evils of nativized pronunciation is not thee or me or any of the cosmopolites who hang out here but the man on the street (or, if you’re that way inclined, the Clapham omnibus), and that personage cares not a damn “what the people who live there call it”; I’m curious whether you think that person is somehow less well off for not using the local term for someplace they have never visited and care nothing about except as an occasional referent. And I don’t understand the problem with my “adducing the most established names such as Paris” — if it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and ideally should be changed. I agree it’s unlikely the average English-speaker is going to start saying Pah-REE; my question is whether you think that is desirable, whether it would somehow make us better people. Again, I’m not trying to poke you with a stick, I’m genuinely curious about this attitude, which I see so often — this deprecation of nativized forms and desire for English-speakers to adopt local ones. I note also that I have never once seen anyone with this view express the desire (which I would think would be an obvious corollary) for foreigners to adopt local forms of English names — for Spanish-speakers, say, to trade in Nueva York for New York. That makes me think it’s more about self-flagellation than principle. But I want to understand!
Since you had a lot of questions for me, I meant to ask about your pronunciation. How do you pronounce “Nabokov” or “Mikhail Gorbachev” or “Mstislav”? I’d say the usual English pronunciations are “NABokoff, “MiKHAIL GORbachoff”, and “MISTislav”.
Of course they are, but my pronunciation is neither here nor there: I spend much of my intellectual life in the Russophone world and of course pronounce Russian names in the Russian way. I would no more mispronounce Nabokov’s name than my own. The crucial point is how I think other people should say them, and I would never dream of trying to get an English-speaker to say MSTI-slaf in the Russian way (much less khrush-CHOF), nor would I consider it a moral victory if they did. My issue with JWB is not that he prefers to say VLAD-imir — that’s fine, to each their own! — but that he considers it some sort of betrayal of Anglophonicity to say Vla-DEE-mir. I say that’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.
Thanks, I didn’t know about “Mussorgsky”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it with the accent on the first syllable.
So are you now (in accordance with what I understand to be your principles) going to start saying it that way?
In Mussorgsky’s time there were further implications: Russian surnames in -sky usually were those of old noble families, whereas Polish names in -sky were often those of lower nobility or bourgeois families; and Belarussians and “Little Russians” often chose Polonised names in preference of their original family names (Chaykovsky’s grandfather changed his name from Chayka to Chaykovsky; and Rozum->Rozumovsky (Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the last Ukrainian Hetman in the 18th century)->Razumovsky (his son, Russian ambassador in Vienna and well known to lovers of Beethoven’s music). So M. wasn’t just asserting his nationality, but also his nobility.
Fun fact: the head of the Provisional Government at the time of the October Coup was Kérensky, but there are contemporary poems (by Mandelstam and Pasternak) where the name is stressed on the second syllable. There was no radio or television at the time where people could hear the correct accentuation of uncommon Russian surnames without an obvious etymology.
Wikipedia has some interesting information about Mussorgsky’s name, some of which I knew (the ‘garbage’ issue) and some of which I didn’t:
I also spend a lot of intellectual time in the “Russophone world” but was unaware of the preferred Musorgsky stress. I wonder how many normal Russians are aware of that pronunciation. It is also quite possible I have simply never heard his name spoken aloud, or just wasn’t paying attention.
To Jerry’s point about “Livorno” being better than “Leghorn” because “that’s what the locals call it”, this is may be a result of the boom in Anglophone mass tourism to Italy. When you are driving down the coast looking for the exit to get to your hotel, the road signs say “Livorno”. Presumably this is also why we are told to use “Torino” instead of “Turin”. “Rome”, “Naples”, etc. still have too much cultural gravity to be pulled down like this but maybe their time will come.
I have also noticed a tendency among some Austrian Anglophone expats to get annoyed when people refer to the provinces of “Styria” or “Carinthia” instead of using the local terms “Steiermark” and “Kärnten”. I don’t think it’s a pretentious effort to show how good one’s German is, I suspect most Anglophones had never heard of “Styria” or “Carinthia” before moving to Austria. Asking them to remember yet another term for regions they only discovered when they moved here seems like excess mental effort.
I do actually think that if the Welsh are going to insist on ‘Yr Wyddfa’ and ‘Eryri’ in English then they’re being unreasonable (or at least inconsistent) if they don’t stop running trains to Caer and Manceinion.
But I don’t think it strongly enough to start any kind of campaign about it. It’s just one of my tiny idiosyncratic opinions.
(Also, why not Mancaer, or do I mean Caer Man?)
“Manceinion” seems to have basically been made up:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Manceinion
I think an echt version of the actual British name would have come out in Welsh as something like *Mamyg (or *Mafyg) or *Caerfamyg. Maybe the place wasn’t just important enough at that time for its real name to have been remembered, unlike, say, Efrog or even Caerliwelydd.
To Jerry’s point about “Livorno” being better than “Leghorn” because “that’s what the locals call it”, this is may be a result of the boom in Anglophone mass tourism to Italy. When you are driving down the coast looking for the exit to get to your hotel, the road signs say “Livorno”. Presumably this is also why we are told to use “Torino” instead of “Turin”. “Rome”, “Naples”, etc. still have too much cultural gravity to be pulled down like this but maybe their time will come.
Yes, that’s a good point. In that case it’s not a matter of being better but just of familiarity in the local context. Me, I would never dream of using Moskva in English just because I have been there and heard it called that, but I am a known curmudgeon; I have no quarrel with people who use local terms on that basis, but they should still refrain from lording it over less-traveled English-speakers who use the names they are familiar with.
May I just say that for Anglophones to call my erstwhile home town of Bɔk by the name “Bawku”, is a deeply hurtful colonialist habit, perpetuating the British invaders’ imposition of the erroneous and culturally insensitive forms used by their imperialist Mamprussi co-conspirators? [continued page 94]
I have probably said this half a dozen times before, but this is my issue with Gaelic-only road signs in the Western Isles – no one really uses the Gaelic names in English conversation (although they do often sound similar), and the local bus timetables are still English-placename-only.
This could also reasonably be fixed by changing the bus timetables – but it hasn’t been. Anyone would think the council didn’t want people to get anywhere.
Anyway, in practice most of the signs seem to have gone back to big Gaelic and slightly smaller English (different from the signs on roads like the A82, which have the languages the same size but different colours).
I’ve read (in translation) the first few pages of his autobiography. He mentioned this, and explained it from a river named Kérenka – which is just as counterintuitive, to me at least…
Compare Nevsky?
@JeninEd: Is cellphone signal coverage still spotty enough these days in the Western Isles that one can’t just rely on a smartphone to translate toponyms as needed? As I have no doubt commented before I spent a few days driving around Lewis/Harris/etc way back in the Nineties when monolingual Gaelic signage was new (some EU grant money, I was given to understand, and there was bilingual signage in the metropolis of Stornoway on account of how cosmopolitan it was) but most paper maps carried by tourists in rental cars were monolingual English, which created a certain mismatch. I had pretty much the right skill set to make pretty educated guesses about what Gaelic spelling on a sign at a crossroads likely corresponded to what English spelling on the map but I may have been unusual among tourists.
As I understand it, quite a lot of local Hebridean toponyms are of Old Norse origin and quite often the “English” spellings were closer to the Norse spellings than the Gaelic ones were.
The stress of Kérenka is counterintuitive; I’d have expected Kerénka, which would have led to the separately expected yet counterfactual Kerénskiy.
@Hat: If your pronunciations are neither here nor there, so are mine. Usually I don’t try to change people’s pronunciations. I admit that I got a colleague to pronounce “Euler” like “oiler” instead of rhyming with “ruler”, but I think that may save his students from being laughed at when they go to a university. A couple other exceptions will appear below.
If you’re interested, though, I use the usual English names of places. There are a few personal names where I get closer to the original than is usual, such as naBOkov and dəbooSEE or even dəbüSEE (not DEByoosee or DAYbyoosee), and when referring to the former Autocrats of All the Russias, I start with a /ts/. I’m not planning to change my pronunciation of “Mussorgsky” except in the privacy of my cerebrum, since no one would understand.
Oddly enough, last week I was thinking about writing to the local classical radio station with some pronunciation tips, and one of the things I was going to say was that I wouldn’t recommend going too far toward original pronunciations, since they’d be hard for most listeners to understand. I might have said that in regard to accenting “Khachaturian” on the last syllable, and now I know “Mussorgsky” is the perfect example. On the other hand, I think they have to stop accenting the third syllable of “Rachmaninoff”. I’d go as far as suggesting accenting the second syllable of “Sergei” on a classical station where the DJs make some effort at foreign-sounding pronunciations, so not the person in the street. The straw that didn’t quite break my back was one of the DJs pronouncing a French d’ as “day”, maybe “day oon fawn”, though actually I think it was something less familiar.
No doubt the vast majority of English speakers don’t especially want a new name for the capital of Denmark (which I rhyme with “Reagan”), but I strongly suspect that a majority would think /’dʒuən/ and /’kwɪksət/ are ridiculous, and that’s why I think we’re better off having made those changes.
I wouldn’t raise my preferences on this to the level of a principle, I’m not going to lord it over anyone, and speaking of Quixote, I’m going to leave all the windmills untilted. But I do like pronunciations that are close to the original where practical. I asked about your pronunciation because I think you should be able to understand my preference.
Oh, OK, I guess we’re pretty much on the same page. I got the impression you were more moralistic about the value of using local forms than you appear to be.
Unbegaun derives Kérensky from the name of the city of Kérensk (since 1940 named Vadinsk, after the other river close by).
@dm
Russian Wikipedia has
—
Реки
• Керенка (Каренка, Дальняя) — река в Пензенской области, приток Вада.
• Керенка — река в Пензенской области, приток Веж-Айвы.
• Керенка — река в Пензенской области, приток Шукши.
—
So 3 rivers in the same (former) administrative division (I think the first one is Kerenski’s).
If you are looking for why the stress is on first syllable, all I can guess is that there is some relation to корень “root”. But the names shukshi, vada and vezh-aivy look a bit exotic, so maybe there is some substrate/adstrate involved.
The first one is the one with the city of Kerensk/Vadinsk.
Айва (коми), «отец-река»
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%B9%D0%B2%D0%B0_(%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D0%A1%D1%83%D1%80%D1%8B)
Вад (…от морд. «вадь» — вода)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B0%D0%B4_(%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B0)
Many of the hydronyms in this area have Moksha or at least Mordvinic etymologies, it seems. I did some quick searching. From Полубояров, Михаил Сергеевич (1992) Мокша, Сура и другие…: материалы к историко-топонимическому словарю Пензенской области, p. 74 (apologies for uncaught text capture errors in what follows):
Here is the entry that was cross-referenced:
But on the other hand, from Четвертков, Н.В., ‘Несколько штрихов к портрету А.Ф. Керенского’ Отечественная история, 2001, № 6 (available here), on p. 136 (boldface added):
I do not have the least expertise needed to evaluate Uralic etymology or Russian toponymy. It is suspicious that the one says кера means ‘дерево’ and the other that керь means ‘деревня’… Uralonet has ‘linden bark’ for a Mordvinic word of this shape here. I don’t have the time to look into the question any further now, but maybe this will stimulate someone else to get to the bottom of it.
Half-noble?
I see Vasmer has a Russian керь ‘village, hamlet’ here for Ryazan’. The reference to J. Kalima there goes here.
The entry in С. А. Мызников (2019) Русский диалектный этимологический словарь, p. 288:
I looked at Мызников and thought “Aha, someone who has a мыза,” and sure enough! And мыза (from Finnic) is a nice dialectal word as well.
Until the 18th century, there were not only бояре and дворяне, but also дети боярские (who had their own sub-divisions). Although I doubt this is meant by this name (which looks like originated as a nickname — someone who behaved as if he was a boyar, and so was called a “semi-boyar”). Those noble houses (whatever class they belonged to) all had their own surnames early on.