The Arabic-speaking Syrians in the United States occasionally bear surnames that fit into the American pattern easily enough, e.g., Kassab, Totah, Barsa, Azar, Saliba and Katibah, but more often they have to make changes. Sometimes it is sufficient to substitute new spellings, e.g., Arbeely for ’Arbīli, Beetar for Bītār, Mallouk for Mallūk, Boutross for Butrūs, Lian for Liyān, Mouakad for Mu’aqqad, David for Dāwūd or Da’ud, Diab for Diyāb, Jemail for Jumayyil, Gibran for Jubrān,1 Namora for Nammūrah, and Arout for ’Ayrūt, but more frequently there are more substantial changes, e.g., Sleyman for Sulaymān, Moran for Mārūn, Corey for al-Khūri, Malooly for Ma’lūli, Bonahom for Bū-Na’ūm, Jacobs for Yaqūb, Kadane for Qa’zān, Bourjaily for Abu-Rujayli, Boujalad for Abu-Jalad, Beters for Butrūs, Abbott for ’Abbūd, De Bakey for Dabaghi, and McKaba for Muqabba’ah.2 The most distinguished of Armenian-Americans, William Saroyan, born in Fresno, California, has been able to keep his family name, but only at the expense of consenting to putting the accent on roy, where it does not belong in Armenian.3 Many of his Landsleute have been less fortunate, for such names as Megerditchian, Khatchadouryan, Soonkookian and Hovsepian seem to be difficult to Americans.4 As a result, the usual translations and transliterations are not infrequent. Jermakian, for example, becomes White (Arm. jermak, white), Novsepian becomes Joseph, and Boghossian becomes Paul. Fresno once had a citizen named Paul Paul whose original name was Boghos Boghossian. A Nazicide who made some stir during World War II under the name of John Roy Carlson came into the world as Derounian.5 Many Armenians arrived in the United States bearing names imposed upon them by their Turkish overlords. These, in some cases, have been turned into true Armenian names, as when Chilingirian became Darbinian, both meaning Smith.6
The Gypsies, who originated in Northern India but came to the United States by way of Europe, sometimes bear Slavic names, but these are usually converted in this country into what they call nav gajikanes, or Gentile names. Thus Ivan Stefanovitch becomes John Stevenson and all the MiXails become Mitchells. Gypsy names are often patronymics. Giori, the son of Tsino, becomes O Giorgi de Tisasko, and Mary, the daughter of John, becomes Mary John. Such grotesque forms as Millie Mike and Rosie Pete are not uncommon among the women.1 In England most of the Gypsies have taken British surnames, e.g., Burton, Hughes, Jenkins, Taylor, Gray, Lewis, Lee, Lovel and Smith. Many of these are translations or transliterations. Thus Taylor comes from Chokamengro, a tailor; Gray from Gry, a horse; Lee from Purum, a leek; Lovel from Kamlo or Kamescro, a lover; Marshall from Makkado-tan-engree, a dweller in a marsh; and Smith from Petulengro, a blacksmith. Some of these names are also common among the Gypsies in the United States, notably Lee.2
The Chinese in the United States have only about sixty different family names, of which Chan, Wong and Lee (Li) are the most often encountered.3 The number to be found in all China has been variously estimated at from 150 to 400. The Chinese seldom change their surnames, which are really clan-names, but the business of representing them in English presents serious phonetic difficulties, and as a result there are many variants. Thus the same name is encountered as Lok, Look and Luke, and another common one appears as Hiu, Heu and Hew.4 Even worse difficulty is caused by the fact that the same ideograph is pronounced differently in different parts of China, so that a Northern man named Tsur may be called Chow in the South and Jo elsewhere.1 But though surnames, which are proud possessions, are almost always retained, the Chinese frequently and in fact even usually adopt American given-names when they come to this country, as we shall see in the next section of the present chapter. Also, they often change the order of their names, for at home the surname goes first, as with the Hungarians, and this causes misunderstanding and confusion among Western strangers. Thus Lee Loy, in order to avoid being called Mr. Loy, becomes Loy Lee.2 In the early days of Chinese immigration Americans mistook the honorific Ah for a given name, and many Chinese became Ah Fu, Ah Sing, and so on. This preserved their surnames, but some of their descendants have since adopted such combined forms as Asing and Afong.3 In Hawaii a few of the younger Chinese have taken Hawaiian names, e.g., Akana and Ahuna, for they carry a certain amount of social prestige in the islands. But very few have taken American names.4
Japanese personal names follow the order of American names, with the surnames last, and most of the latter are easily pronounceable, so there is no motive for changing them. Says Reinecke of Japanese nomenclature in Hawaii:
In contrast to the diversity of spellings of Chinese names is the uniformity of the Japanese. The Hepburn system5 is followed pretty consistently, with some minor variations such as Shimizu, Shimidzu; Inouye, Inoue; Okazaki, Okasaki; Hirata, Hilata. The phonemic difference between short o and long o is ignored in Anglicization except in the name of Ohta and sometimes in a few other surnames; Ono and Onoh are found side by side. The syllable ji is often wrongly transliterated gi, so that the given-name Mitsuji and Mitsugi are confused. While Chinese and Koreans can sometimes deliberately Anglicize the spelling of their names, e.g., Young instead of Yong, Park instead of Pahk, the Japanese cannot. The very numerous Japanese surnames represent for the most part highly distinctive combinations of a limited number of ideographs, mostly denoting geographical features, which cannot well be Anglicized, translated, or shortened. Virtually no Japanese have tried to alter their names.1
The surnames of the American Indians are in a state of apparently hopeless confusion, as the Indians themselves are in confusion. Some of them have adopted names wholly American, e.g., Philip Marshall, George Williams and Alfred B. Richards;2 others have hitched their native surnames to American given-names, e.g., Moses Bull Bear, Charles Little Dog and Fred Cut Grass; yet others have retained their native names unchanged. This last category, alas, is small and seems to be vanishing. I can find no example among the signatures to the petition just cited, nor among those to a similar petition from Choctaws,3 nor in a list of graduates of the United States Indian Industrial and Training School at Carlisle, Pa., running from 1889 to 1913.4 The original Redskins bore nothing properly describable as fixed surnames, and even their given-names were frequently changed. Said a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly in 1881:5
Ordinarily, the appellation an Indian receives is obtained at random, and is likely to be changed any time, either by the wearer or his friends. In fact, it is quite the thing for a warrior to change his name after each exploit, always adopting some descriptive and complimentary title; or perhaps, – unfortunately for him, – in case of failure in an expedition, cowardice, or some evidence of weakness, he has it changed for him by his friends. All Indians seem to possess a very remarkable fondness for nicknaming; and while the leading man in the tribe may insist on being called by his own choice title, nothing prevents his being known and designated by a very different, and perhaps uncomplimentary, name. As deformities, peculiarities and character, or accidents to limb or feature often suggest fit names, it is sometimes impossible to know by the appellation whether the warrior is in contempt or honor amongst his associates. Daughters’ names are never altered, and as married women do not take their husbands’ names there is nothing to indicate whether an Indian woman is married or single.
When Indians began to come in from the warpath and settle on reservations this chaos gave great difficulty to the Indian agents, and eventually the Indian Bureau issued orders that every individual must have a surname and stick to it. The need for the regulation became even more pressing in 1887, when the passage of the Allotment Act made it necessary to identify precisely every Indian who received a parcel of the tribal land. In 1903 the Indian Bureau employed Dr. Charles A. Eastman to overhaul the surnames of the Sioux1 and various others were put to work at the same task among other tribes. Whenever a child entering school or an adult entering a government hospital lacked a name in the American fashion one was supplied. If there was already a native name it was commonly translated, which explains the origin of such surnames as Little Cloud, Fast Horse and Lone Wolf. Unhappily, many a poor buck, at
the time of the registration, was bearing a derisive name, and in consequence it still afflicts his progeny, e.g., Fool Head, Long Visitor and Broken Nose.2 Even more unhappily, the average Indian agent had only a meagre grasp of the native languages, and thus made some bad mistakes in translation, as when a name meaning Young Man Whose Very Horses are Feared became Young Man Afraid of His Horse. In the early days there were many names of like length, but the Indian Bureau discouraged them, and now it is rare to find an Indian bearing one. The surnames that survive mainly relate to personal characteristics, e.g., Black Eye and Yellow Boy,1 or were suggested by a fancied likeness to some bird or animal, e.g., Red Owl, Flying Hawk, Fast Horse and Crazy Horse, or some feature of the landscape, e.g., Howling Water, High Pine or Red Cedar.2 It is not surprising that many of these surnames should be opprobrious: the same is true of many Indian tribal names.3 In the Indian tongues they tend to be jaw-breakers, and the early white colonists found them difficult. William Nelson lists the following monstrosities from the early days: Abozaweramud (1681), Mokownquando (1708), Wallammassekaman (1687), Kekroppamont (1677) and Rawautoaqwaywoaky (1709).4 Sometimes these names embodied syllables which passed on from father to son, to become primeval equivalents of surnames, e.g., baq (bone), ik (pepper), kok (tortoise), may (tobacco), pek (stone), seb (clay), yat (fly), gwuq (seven) and sam (snot).5
The surnames of American Negroes have been studied by Howard F. Barker,6 Newbell Niles Puckett,7 and Lorenzo D. Turner.8 Barker estimates that of the 10,000,000-odd Negroes living on the American mainland in 1924, 7,500,000 bore English or Welsh surnames, 1,300,000 Irish names, and 1,200,000 Scottish names, with a very small minority bearing Dutch, German, Spanish, French or Jewish names.1 It is commonly assumed that the surnames of Afro-Americans are those of the masters of their ancestors in slavery times, but Barker shows that this is by no means always the case. The name of Samuel Hairston, the largest slave-owner in the South at the outbreak of the Civil War, is very rare among colored folk, and those of other large slave-owners, e.g., Hampton, Haynes, Pinckney and Rutledge, are anything but common.2 The favorite is Johnson, which accounts for no less than 190 Negroes in every 10,000. Next in order come Brown, Smith, Jones, Williams, Jackson, Davis, Harris, Robinson and Thomas. It may be that the popularity of John Brown of Ossawatomie put his surname into second place, and the fame of George Washington apparently accounts for the fact that Washington is far commoner among Negroes than among whites,3 but how are we to account for Johnson? It can hardly be a patronymic, for relatively few slaves had the given-name of John, and Andrew Johnson was certainly not its eponym, for Dr. Carter G. Woodson has shown that it stood in first place, and among free Negroes, so early as 1830.4
The fact is that freed slaves probably adopted the names of overseers as often as they took those of masters, and in even more cases chose names that were simply common where they lived and thus seemed regular and proper and suitable to their station in life. Very few of them named themselves after Abraham Lincoln, and even fewer after Garrison, Grant and Sherman. Their favorite among all their liberators was General O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau from 1865 to 1874. Barker says that more than one-third of all the Howards in the United States are now colored. Unusual surnames are rare among Negroes, though Barker calls attention to the fact that, as is the case with whites, they are relatively frequent among persons of distinction, e.g., Du Bois, Chesnutt, De Priest, Vann, Douglass, Hastie, Schuyler, Robeson, Garvey, Bethune and Carver. The female students in the Southern Negro colleges and normal schools, when they marry before graduation, often hook their surnames to those of their husbands, but this is not done to enhance their social prestige, but simply to identify their credits on the registrars’ books.1 Otherwise, hyphenated names are very rare among colored folk.2
The popular literature of onomatology is largely given over to discussions of strange and unearthly surnames. Their collection was begun by William Camden, who listed some interesting specimens in his “Remains Concerning Britain,” first published in 1605,3 e.g., Bigot, Devil, Pentacost, Calf, Hoof, Loophole and Gallows. The bibliography in the United States apparently began with N. I. Bowditch’s “Suffolk Surnames,” published privately in Boston in 1857 and brought out in enlarged form the year following. The Suffolk of the title was the Massachusetts county, but Bowditch also included names from other parts of the country. Some of his prize specimens were Ague, Cheer, Darkies, Dudgeon, Gotobed, Lighthead, Oxx, Rain, Strachatinstry, Ugly and Wedlock. Edward Duffield Ingraham, a Philadelphia lawyer, followed in 1873 with “Singular Surnames,” the materials for which came chiefly from the Philadelphia newspapers of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. He listed, among others, Allchin, Bitsh, Christmas, Forthfifth, Glue, Oyster, Toad, Whisker and Yeast. The collection of such monstrosities still goes on, and the newspapers frequently report the discovery of one hitherto unwept, unhonored and unsung. I offer a few from my own archives:
Acid
Acorn
Anger
Argue
Army
Baby
Barefoot
Beanblossom
Bible
Bilious
Boop1
Breeding
Brightfellow
Buffaloe
Buggerman
Bulpitt
Burp
Buttermilk
By
Cabbage
Camphor
Cashdollar
Casebeer
Cheesewright
Clock
Cobbledick
Crysick
Death
Dialogue
Dingbat
Dippy
Dose
Dumbell
Fatter
Flowerdew
Girl2
Glymph
Goforth
Gotoff
Guitar
Gubernator
Hailstone
Hair
Hark
Hash
Hatchet3
Hogshead
Holy
Human
Hush
Ice
Ill4
Inch
Itt
Ix
Jelly
Junk
Kick
Kidney
Killbride
Laughinghouse
Laughter
Lillywhite
Liver
Louis XVI5
Loveall
Lung
Matches
Mayhem6
Midwinter
Minx
Mossaback
Necessary
Nicht
Oatmeal
Only
Organ
Outhouse1
Oxx
Pancake
Parsonage
Permission
Piano
Pickle
Pimple
Pinwheel
Plaintiff
Purple
Ram
Ratskin
Roast
Secundo
Sewer
Sex
Shortsleeve
Shovel2
Sickman
Sinner
Sinus3
Six
Snowball
Sodawasser4
Sofa
Spinach
St. Clergy
Stolen
Such
Sugarwater5
Sunshine
Swill6
Sycamore
Tank7
Tart
Teats
Tickle
Ut
Veal
Walkingstick
Wash
Whale
Wham8
Yopp9
Miss Mary C. Oursler, formerly administrative assistant in the Census Bureau, is authority for the statement that 30% of the heads of families in three of the thirteen original States in 1790, when the first census was take
n, bore “names appearing as parts of speech in everyday conversation,” e.g., Dumb, Looney, Gushing, Soup, Vinegar, Waffle, Grog, Grapevine, Petticoat, Hornbuckle and Turnipseed.10 Many of these have succumbed to the ribald humors of the populace, but the foregoing list shows that a liberal sufficiency remains. When such names are combined with the weird given-names that will be considered in the next section the effect is often startling, e.g., Uffie Grunt, Sunny Piazzi, Ima Hogg, Byzantine Botts, Joline Joy and Sudis Fat.11 A learned man in Canada tells me of a pretty immigrant girl who came to school in Manitoba bearing the name of Helen Zahss, and was much upset when the first roll-call produced titters. All surnames in the foregoing list were gathered in the United States, but England can match them hands down. Charles Wareing Bardsley, in his “Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames,” lists Barefoot, Brass, Caitiff, Coiner,1 Dam, Evilchild, Foulfish, Godspenny, Ham, Ironfoot, Jericho, Killer, Lent, Makehate, Obey and scores like them, and other English professors of morbid onomatology have reported Smallbones, Gotobed, Hogflesh,2 Allways, Body, Burnup, Calf, Catchpoll, Cheese, Cuss, Doll, Egg, Eye, Galilee, Gent, Goodbeer, Hustler, Kisser, Maggot, Pink, Poorgrass, Shoppee, Smelt, Tout, Venus,3 Candy, Shakelady, Ughtynton,4 Trampleasure,5 Hiccup,6 Bugg,7 Sucksmith, Smy, Ghost, Maw, Pitchfork,8 Eighteen, Whist, Gumboil, Handsomebody, Cutmutton, Sleep,9 Yallow, Gathergood, Gee and Rump.10
American Language Supplement 2 Page 62
