Nils William Olsson has a paper called “What’s in a Swedish Surname?” (Swedish American Genealogist 1.1 [1981]) that is, as you might expect, about Swedish surnames. I’ll quote some bits that particularly interested me:
It should be emphasized that the patronymic is not identical with a family name. It was not until the latter part of the 19th Century that the patronymic in Sweden congealed to become a family name. Before that time it had changed with each generation. Thus persons named Sven and Anna, the children of Anders, were known as Sven Andersson and Anna Andersdotter. If Sven in turn had a son, he became Svensson and his daughter became Svensdotter. Iceland is the only Scandinavian country today, which retains the system of patronymics. Even the telephone directories follow this custom by listing Icelandic telephone subscribers by their Christian names. The patronymic follows in second place.
By the 15th and 16th Centuries family names begin appearing in Sweden, at first confined almost exclusively to the aristocracy, somewhat later but in a parallel development to what was happening in the British Isles and on the Continent. At first the family name was simply an identifier added to the patronymic. This identifier was usually the symbol emblazoned on the field of the escutcheon, thus Ture Jonsson Tre Rösor, a Swedish political leader, who died in 1532 was named thus because of the three roses inscribed on his coat of arms. Gustaf I (1521-1560), the first of the modern kings of Sweden was known as Gustaf Eriksson Vasa or Vase because of the fact that his escutcheon was inscribed with a vase (fasces in English). One of the oldest Swedish families of nobility used an escutcheon on which the chief or upper half was emblazoned in gold, the lower half or base was inscribed in blue. In the popular jargon of the day the family which carried this heraldic emblem was first known as Dag och Natt, later changed to Natt och Dag (Night and Day), a name carried by the family to the present time […]
By the 17th Century the clergy had begun to adopt family names. In the pre-Reformation era young men who entered the church automatically latinized their baptismal names as well as their patronymics. This custom continued in the 16th Century and into the beginning of the 17th. Thus patronymics like Andersson became Andrae, Eriksson – Erici, Hakansson – Haqvini, Hermansson – Hermanni and Petersson – Petri, etc. Though they were latinized forms, they were still the patronymics they had inherited at birth. By the beginning of the 17th Century, young clerics went one step farther. They actually adopted new family names, using their knowledge of Latin and Greek. The young student pursued various methods to concoct a new surname. One method was to take a name of the farm, village or parish in which he was born and simply translate it into Latin. Thus Berg, meaning mountain, became Montanus. This was the route taken by the hero in Ludvig Holberg’s delightful comedy, Jeppe på Bjerget (Jeppe on the Hill), in which the rustic student, possessing a smattering of Latin attempts to impress his home village neighbors with his learning, by having taken the name of Montanus. There are legions of such names. Another name, which has become internationally known is that of Anders Celsius, inventor of the centigrade thermometer, whose ancestors came from the manse of Högen in Ovanåker Parish in the province of Hälsingland. Another interesting transformation is the name Cavallius taken by a student from Håldala in Småland, who simply translated the name of his home village into Latin – cava vallis. A Danish counterpart is the name of Pontoppidan, taken by a young student from Broby, who likewise translated the Danish into Latin – ponto (bridge) and oppidanus (town).
Still another method was to add the Latin -ius to a Swedish name, usually derived from a place name, as for example Bergius from Berg. A few other -ius forms which come to mind are names like Abelius, Acrelius, Agrelius, Arrhenius, Barchaelius, Boethius, Craelius, Darelius, Dryselius, Fornelius, Forselius, Gumaelius, Hallenius, Hagelius, Hagrelius, Hazelius, Hesselius, Lothigius, Moselius, Netzelius, Nobelius, Normelius, Nyselius, Topelius and Unonius. Most of these surnames are also formed after the principle of using a first syllable anchored in a Swedish place name. There are exceptions as with Unonius, which originally was the latinized form of the Christian man’s name Uno. With succeeding generations, the bearers of these typically clerical names, entering into secular professions, often would lop off the -ius ending, calling themselves Abel, Acrel, Agrell, Darell, Drysell, Hagrell, Mosell, Netzell, Nobel, Normell, etc.
Another favorite Latin ending was -aeus as in such surnames as Barchaeus, Bosaeus, Tranaeus and the modern 20th Century form Lonaeus.
Some scholars preferred to use the suffix -ander, derived from the Greek word for man, andró(s). This suffix became so popular, that it is used even today to create new Swedish surnames, despite its clerical past. Surnames ending in -ander are as numerous as there are persons with fertile minds to fashion a new variant. […]
If we, for a moment, look at surnames formed from Swedish place names, we shall discover that the list is endless. Particularly in recent years, when the campaign has been going on to induce Swedes to take new names, thousands of new names have been selected, most of them based on a Swedish place names. Only two examples will be given here, in order to show how many names have their origin in the Swedish countryside. Two of Sweden’s largest lakes are Vänern (old form was Wenern) and Vättern (old form was Wettern) which have given birth to many such names as Wennerberg, Wennerström, Wennerstrand, Wetterberg, Wetterdahl and Wetterström.
There is much more, including sections on Walloon names (Anjou, Bedoire, Boivie, etc.), military names (Dolk, Granat, Kanon), and foreign names (Fleetwood, Giron, Dominique). I found the paper by googling Pontoppidan, an odd-looking name I’d often wondered about. And those -ius names reminded me of Aleksandr Sumarokov’s comedy Tresotinius, whose titular pedant was named after Molière’s Trissotin from Les Femmes Savantes; other names in Sumarokov’s cast of characters are Bobembius, Bramarbas, and Xaxoximenius (Ксаксоксимениус). I might also note that Ludvig Holberg, the author of the “delightful comedy” Jeppe på Bjerget, was Norwegian. Ja vi elsker!
Surely not “Boethius”?
What about Pontoppidan? Do drop the other shoe!
OK, it’s from pons + oppidānus, i.e. ‘Bridgetowner’. Erik Pontoppidan the Elder formed it from a Latinized version of his birth parish of Broby.
Linnaeus, adopted when Carl’s father entered university and needed a surname. The rest refers to a linden tree on the ancestral farm or something.
Carl himself if an example of the lopping-off thing: when he was ennobled, he became von Linné, in his Latin works a Linné (not de – his Latin was properly Classical).
According to Wikipedia:
I’m not sure why Cordwainer Smith picked Pontoppidan for the name of one of his more (indirectly) habitable worlds, the gem planet.
I first heard the surname as a teenager, when I was very excited by sea-serpents, discussed (along with mermaids) by Erik P. (the younger) in his work on the natural history of Norway.
…supposedly supported by reference 2 (“in Danish”), which is a casino site (in Danish).
reference 2: I don’t know what e-poke.dk was when the reference was put in, but the casino link page was clearly put up by a domain squatter. The Wayback Machine has this (which is still in Danish and at first glance seems to be copied from an encyclopaedia published in his lifetime, since it uses the present in the intro [“HP is…”]. Or maybe it’s just the historical present, since it’s also used for his childhood, including with people whose year of death are given. Publication date is given as 2004, but the present tense grates on my Sprachgefühl).
The site was called Epoke, Danish for “epoch,” with reference to the Danish novel of the 19th century which is a distinguished period in Danish letters. The dash in the domain name makes it more or less opaque, hinting as it does at a first syllable stress. (Da epoke stresses the second).
@lm
I think
https://aldus.dk/e-poke.dk/
Is a better link, because you can click through to all the authors. Still Danish though.
From that link:
I first read the second word as “Nekromantik.”
Here’s the Pontoppidan page.
It’s perhaps worth noting that the differences Vättern~Wettern and Vänern~Wenern are purely orthographical.
The Pontoppidan reference from WP is here, in fact, but Hat’s link is probably a better place to start. (It’s a biography in 14 parts). If you get stuck on translations, just ask me.
(For those following along at home, I didn’t find a good translation for [påfugle]ham, which is the kind of disguise used by Loki in the sagas).
My impression is that general Swedish adoption of surnames as used in English-, French- and German-speaking countries is surprisingly recent, as recent as the 1960s. I know a Swedish scientist with two brothers, all of them born as Eriksson (a nice common patronymic that will make it impossible for you to work out who I’m referring to). They chose three different family names when they became adults, so there is nothing to suggest that they are brothers if one doesn’t know.
The Icelandic practice of listing people in alphabetic order of given names is also found occasionally in Portugal and Brazil (I’ve seen it in both), presumably for completely different reasons. Portuguese names can be incredibly chaotic and complicated (nowhere near as systematic as they are in Spanish), and if someone is called, say, João Pedro
Gonçalo da Silva Nunes Almeido Andrade Fernandes it isn’t easy to guess which name is appropriate for an alphabetic sequence.
I have seen (but could not re-find with one minute of googling, so discount accordingly) a claim that 19th-century Swedish immigrants to the U.S. (where surnames were an established thing you had to have) were often so lightly attached to whatever surname-like thing they had borne in the Old Country that many of them changed them upon arrival in the U.S. The alleged dynamic was that many of them tried to one-up their fellow immigrants by adopting surnames that connoted nobility or high social status back in Sweden, but so many of them had independently had the same clever idea that it didn’t really work – the social signal of those surnames just got diluted and the relative social position of the immigrants vis-a-vis each other remained unchanged.
Pontoppidan is good, although I think my favourite Latin (but not Swedish) name is still Regiomontanus.
The passage doesn’t specify the meaning of the name Celsius – I looked it up, and apparently it’s the Latin for ‘mound’ (Högen).
I keep misreading this in the Comments list as “What’s in a Swadesh surname?” And it would be a fun topic — examining names like Smith, Brown, Hill and Byrd as represented in languages around the world.
Theophrastus von Hohenheim’s weird nom de guerre “Paracelsus”, is, according to WP, “usually interpreted as either a Latinization of Hohenheim (based on celsus ‘high, tall’) or as the claim of ‘surpassing Celsus.'”
I think that if I rejoiced in the name “Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim” I would probably feel no need for a pseudonym at all.
names like Smith, Brown, Hill and Byrd
Absent in Kusaal; the Kusaasi go for more sensible names, like “Tree”, “Shirt”, “Pot”, “Nail” or “God.”
This thread keeps reminding me of physicists at the University of Lund named Ingvar Otterlund and Evert Stenlund, among the developers of the FRITIOF simulation of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, which I used in my graduate work.
For the Scandinavians: FRITIOF had subroutines called INGEBORG, ELLIDA, HALVDAN, etc.
When I did my first year university course in programming in C*, I named my variables IVAR, INGVAR, ODDVAR etc. The source runs dry soon, but I don’t think I needed more than a couple at a time.
* I was quite good at it, I thought, but I haven’t written a line of programming in the 36 years since.
@Athel: Sweden was early with widespread inherited surnames compared to its nearest neighbours. I blame the Swedish military state (1560-1720 (but arguably a century longer)), which enrolled large parts of the rural population.
Speaking of Ludvig Holberg, he too owes his inherited surname to military enrollment, even though his name is toponymic. His father was a military officer who took the name of farm in Trøndelag. There may have been a family connection to the farm, but the name could also have been an allusion to his part in the reconquest of the region from the Swedes in the 1650’s.
@Trond: If you’ll pardon the Scandinavian stereotyping, this puts me in mind of IKEA’s* merchandise names, always in all-caps, which to non–Swedish speakers appear endearingly odd.
* Which happens to have been founded by an Ingvar.
I don’t know much about these tony Swedish families who attended universities and so on. But I have encountered the names of more humble Swedes in the 19th century who played fiddle. It seems that in this era people were often known by the name of their farm followed by their given name. So, for example, father and son fiddlers from Bingsjö in Dalarna, Pekkos Olle (1787–1858, official name Olof Hansson) and Pekkos Per Olsson (1808-1877). Pekkos Per lived on Pekkosgården, then the largest of the farms in Bingsjö.
“Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim”…feel no need for a pseudonym
but how could you resist, with so many possible nicknames! especially if you’re willing to play a little fast and loose and take your lead from the calquing and armorial punning… theo the bomb! phil halo! rosy-fingered ted! the golden horse!
By the 1960s surnames were firmly established in Sweden. My originally patronymic (and utterly plebeian) surname goes back to my great-great-grandfather Johan Ernst, whose sons were named patronymically, but whose grandsons (born in the first couple decades of the 20C) simply inherited the name.
It remains more common than in the Anglosphere, though, to simply change one’s surname, a practice that’s been officially encouraged to reduce the vast numbers of Anderssons, Johanssons, Carlssons, etc. It’s tolerably common, frex, for married couples to adopt a new common surname than either party adopting the other’s.
Regarding Swedish immigrants to the US, when my great-uncle emigrated in the 1920s, he simply anglicized Johan Svensson to John Swanson.
@Y: Now that you say it… The name Ingvar and the all-caps routine names in Jerry’s comment did make me think of IKEA, and now I think that guided the choice of all-caps for my recollected variable names. I don’t know why I chose to tell that story rather than suggest that installatiom of FRITIOF required the assembly language Unbrako*, which came as part of the package.
Gårdsnamn “farm names” are still a thing in Sweden, albeit not a common one. I think it’s essentially restricted to Dalecarlia.
@rozele: I know what you describe as the custom in Dalarna. E.g., it’s explained in descriptions of Övdalska. How far it reached I wouldn’t know.
What I blame on military service are the very common “ornamental” compound names (Blomquist, Sjögren, etc., etc.). I wrote something about those in a comment not long ago, but now I can’t find it.
Added in edit: But I also expect a native Swede with some family history will know more about this than me.
“Nature names” like Blomquist are more likely to have been adopted by upwardly mobile types who wanted to seem a little above the common mass of peasants. Military names are more often single-root things with a more-or-less martial meaning, like Tapper “Courageous”.
My above-mentioned great-great-grandfather’s surname Ernst is another military name. It’s German for “serious” – I don’t know if there’s any particular reason a German form was chosen (he certainly had no recent German ancestry).
What I blame on military service are the very common “ornamental” compound names (Blomquist, Sjögren, etc., etc.). […] But I also expect a native Swede with some family history will know more about this than me.
The linked paper has a whole section on military names (pp. 34-5).
Yeah, I should have read the article before commenting. With that and Andreas against me, I realize that I was utterly wrong about the nature names becoming widespread because of the need for a surname at military enrollment. I didn’t make that up myself, though.
I don’t know why I chose to tell that story
I liked your various variable names.
Dutch clergy, and others, also did that Latinization thing (and the Netherlands is NOT Scandinavian; you all know this, but it’s a popular delusion). For example, the current plague ship MV Hondius, of Dutch registry, is named after Jodocus Hondius (1563–1612), a Flemish and Dutch engraver and cartographer. His name was Latinized from Joost de Hondt (Josiah the Dog). The astronomer’s and geographer’s globes in Vermeer paintings are believed to be Hondius globes.
I go by Martin in the US, but my (Dutch) birth certificate name is Martinus, a latinization that began in 1721, eight generations before me. Before that it was Maerten for five more generations (at least).
The Dutch half of the relevant Caribbean island is Sint Maarten, for yet another option. The Dutch wikipedia article on the underlying saint goes back and forth between Maarten and Martinus, in a way that suggests varying preferences of different contributors rather than a coherent elegant-variation approach.
One of the less high-profile (and less beloved of conspiracy theorists) secret societies for seniors at my alma mater is named for a once-prominent Swedish chemist, but maybe a Swedish-sounding name wouldn’t have been thought posh enough by 19th-century WASPs if it hadn’t been Latinate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzelius_Society
Berzelius
i somehow never thought to look into the source of the name of sinclair lewis’ trumpian president in It Can’t Happen Here (though i’ve spent time with old maps of vermont to confirm my gut sense of its northeast kingdom geography). berzelius windrip, i hardly knew ye!
(i’ve poked a little at protagonist doremus jessup’s name, but it’s always felt clearer to me, perhaps because i have some classic old-line english names in my family tree*)
.
* the best first name among them is “justus” – who appears in other records as “justice”.
“Justus” is a perfectly good “Bible name,” from the fellow referenced in Acts 1:23 as “Joseph, called Barsabas, who was surnamed Justus.” Who is often overlooked because he was the runner-up in the process to find a replacement-apostle after Judas Iscariot had worked out poorly, but the usual view is that he was just as pious and “qualified” as the “winner” (St. Matthias) and can perhaps serve as a role model for people who do not always get picked for the positions they are in fact qualified for. Some question the tradition that he was the first bishop of Eleutheropolis based on the objection that Eleutheropolis was not founded until several centuries later, but haters gonna hate (and there had been another town of another name in the same place back then – before it was destroyed by the underlings of Vespasian – whose bishop he could have been and which could have been referred to in later records by the later name).
*᾿Ιωσὴφ τὸν καλούμενον Βαρσαββᾶν, ὃς ἐπεκλήθη ᾿Ιοῦστος
You can see an image of (“possibly”) him as an infant here; his dad looks pretty sour.
Jerry: I liked your various variable names.
So did I! But I did miss a chance for a snappy reply.
Me (further up): Unbrako*
Um, what did I mean to footnote? Yeah, generic unbrako is often written <umbrako> in Norwegian. This is apparently a result of a longstanding misspelling in IKEA’s assembly guides – with a labial assimilation that probably reflexts oral transmission of its name when IKEA first adopted the hexagon key.
I wouldn’t have gotten it, never having dealt with IKEA. Is “unbrako” just the Scandinavian name for that hex key, which I call an Allen wrench? That’s what Wikipedia seems to suggest.
Oh, probably. I thought it was an international trade mark. I should have called it ALLEN or HEX, then. My IKEA joke would have fallen flat without it.
I have it as umbrakonøgle too, but only in oral transmission. I’m sure I’ve never seen it written, let me just check the dictionaries: What do you know, Den danske Ordbog has it sv unbrakonøgle, allegedly 1911 after a US trademark. I suppose I could come up with hexnøgle if talking to a tool name purist. Hex keys come in millimeter sizes, I think, I have a set of 1 to like 12, Swiss made and color coded, my only souvenir from a family trip there, and a bunch of IKEA ones in the corner of a drawer, all the same size (4 or 5mm, maybe) and with half the leverage or less.
But Fortran IV had a 6-symbol limit on identifiers. UMBRAK or UMBRKO would have been very recognizable, though. (No case distinction, of course. I learned on a PDP-11/RT11 where identifiers and (6+3) file names were packed 3 to a 16-bit word, RAD50 I think it was called because there were octal 50 different symbols. The cube of 50 is 175000 of course, to a DEChead this made perfect sense because the max value in two bytes is 177777. I don’t think punch cards had lower case either).
And I see what you did there, Trond.
Lars M.: I have it as umbrakonøgle too, but only in oral transmission. I’m sure I’ve never seen it written
I too had it orally as umbrako for a long time before being surprised by the wriitten n – and by the k for expected c in an international trademark. I didn’t realize until today that its corporate coiners meant it to be pronounced like “unbreak-oh” in English. I have vaguely assumed it to be Italian, probably from association witb Umbria
I suppose I could come up with hexnøgle if talking to a tool name purist
I call it sekskantnøkkel if I feel purist, or if I think that would help the listener. That’s where I got my ‘hexagon key’ from, after weighing it against ‘hexagonal’ – not remembering ‘hex key’ until seeing it written.