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Skimmed through that one a bit.. I think he misses that having a patronym surname (ending with son) is very much out of fashion in Sweden today (and has been fo
by amag 11y ago
Skimmed through that one a bit.. I think he misses that having a patronym surname (ending with son) is very much out of fashion in Sweden today (and has been for quite some time), so people change it. The people most likely to change it are probably found in the more "elite" professions the author lists. If you're a blue-collar it may feel a bit presumptuous to change your surname, you will be ridiculed by your coworkers. OTOH if you're an attorney, it's almost mandated, "no one" will trust you if you have a patronym surname.
- civilian 11y agoGood point, but I believe he addresses that: > One thing we have to be wary of in this calculation of persistence is surname changing. If people going to the university born with the surname Anderson were changing this to Wigonius, then there would appear more persistence than there really was. The biographical sources for some of the student nations at Lund and Uppsala, Blekingska, Göteborgs, Skånska, Smålands, and Vermlands at Lund, and Östgöta at Uppsala, allow us to estimate the fraction of Latinized surnames which were newly adopted in each generation at the universities, since it gives fathers’ and mothers’ surnames for most students also. Figure 19 shows what fraction of students in each generation inherited rather than adopted a Latinized surname.18 For the earlier generations, 1730-1819, 96% of students acquired the name by inheritance from their father. However, 1820-1909 that proportion fell to 88%, even though by design these are all surnames that first existed before 1730.19 This will bias upwards my estimate of b, but can be corrected for by calculating for each period a b based just on the relative representation of the surname among the inheritors in that period.