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I imagine many ~son names are Scandinavian imports. Scandinavian surnames, until quite recently, were formed from the (usually) paternal forename. Iceland still

• JJMcJ 2y ago
  The singer's name is Björk. Guðmundsdóttir just tells us her father's name. It's not a family name in the sense that e.g., Swift is for Taylor Swift. If she was Icelandic, it would be Taylor Scottsdóttir.
  • simiones 2y ago
    Depends on how you define "family name". In the most pragmatic sense, as in "what should you put in the family name field in legal contexts", then "Guðmundsdóttir" is her family name E.g. her passport will have that value under "Surname". And if she found herself in Iceland, in any paper where Björk would write down "Guðmundsdóttir", Taylor Swift would write "Swift", not "Scottsdóttir".
    • pavel_lishin 2y ago
      We visited Iceland recently and asked a tour guide some questions about naming conventions; apparently that's fine for visitors, but to get Icelandic citizenship, you're apparently required to have an Icelandic name. (Granted, maybe there was a communication gap there; maybe it would only be required of any children we had there?)
      • icepat 2y ago
        This is an old law that was changed recently. It's no longer needed that you adopt an Icelandic name to obtain citizenship.
      • arnarbi 2y ago
        You used to be required to adopt an Icelandic forename - not surname. You still kept your original name (if you wanted) and it was up to you which one you used on practice. But as sibling comment says, that’s been dropped. For surnames, anyone (including Icelanders) is allowed to use a family name if they have a claim to one, which is defined as having a parent or a grandparent carrying that name as a surname. So foreigners with family names can pass those to their children if they like and skip the patronym.
    • amiga386 2y ago
      OK, then if Taylor Swift were born in Iceland, she'd have been called Taylor Scottsdóttir, because that would be the naming tradition. And if she were a man, and her wife had children, they'd take the surname "Taylorsson" or "Taylorsdóttir". But more realisticly, if she married her current boyfriend and they moved to Iceland and followed the Icelandic tradition, their children would take the name Travisson or Travissdóttir However, if she moved to Iceland, at a time when they still used phone books, people would look in the phonebook under "T" for "Taylor", as they'd look under "B" for "Björk", as in Icelandic society the "surname" doesn't have the same importance, given it changes every generation and isn't passed on like it is in other societies.
      • NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
        Even in Iceland, it's still used primarily in the same way that it's used everywhere else... disambiguation. Which "Taylor", which "Björk", since given names are reused so often there are typically are many Taylors and many Björks. That their phone book chooses to use a different name for sorting doesn't change this, and given the nature of the second name, it would hardly be more efficient to use one or the other.
        • amiga386 2y ago
          True, and even then, there are currently 7 Björk Guðmundsdóttirs according to their online phonebook... as you might expect https://en.ja.is/?q=bj%C3%B6rk%20gu%C3%B0mundsd%C3%B3ttir&people_scope=true https://en.ja.is/?q=bj%C3%B6rk%20gu%C3%B0mundsd%C3%B3ttir&pe... Obviously, there are a lot more John Smiths...
        • kridsdale3 2y ago
          At least for those two women, disambiguation is not necessary. Checking Google.com autocomplete, Bjork is returned for the substring "bjo" and Swift is returned for the substring "t". Making her the eponymous global entity for that entire letter. Her father should renaming himself Scott Taylorsdad.
          • 2y ago
    • weinzierl 2y ago
      Family Name has a common definition. It is a type of surname passed down through generations. So Taylor Swift has a family name, Björk has not. That is also why passports have a surname field but not a family name field. Not everyone has a surname but conventions to deal with this vary. Similarly, passports use the terminology given name because not everyone has been christened and not everyone has a first name - for example I don't.
      • kgwgk 2y ago
        > not everyone has a first name - for example I don't. > E-Mail is first name at my domain.
        • weinzierl 2y ago
          Good catch! Fixed it, thanks.
          • kgwgk 2y ago
            Or you could have "fixed" the comment. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/first-name https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/first-na... the name that was given to you when you were born and that comes before your family name
            • weinzierl 2y ago
              I have a set of multiple given names, each of them given by a godfather. In our tradition and law they are equal because treating one of them specially is insulting to the godfathers (which you caught me guilty of). If given name or surname comes first is regional. Where I come from (Bavaria) traditionally the surname comes first, so even by that metric I wouldn't have a first name. Source: Die Reihenfolge der Vornamen stellt keine Rangfolge dar. Nach höchstrichterlicher Rechtsprechung (BGH, Beschluss vom 15. April 1959 – IV ZB 286/58) steht es in Deutschland dem Namensträger frei, zwischen seinen standesamtlich eingetragenen Namen zu wählen. [..] Die in der Geburtsurkunde eingetragenen Vornamen dürfen von den Namensträgern im privaten Rechts- und Geschäftsverkehr nach Belieben genutzt werden und sind gleichberechtigt. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorname_(Deutschland) https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorname_(Deutschland)
    • cyberax 2y ago
      Not really. It's a patronymic. Some Slavic countries also use them, in addition to family names. > E.g. her passport will have that value under "Surname". Icelandic passports don't have a separate field for "Surname": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/File:Icelandic_Passport_(2019)_-_Biodata_page.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/File...
      • kgwgk 2y ago
        > Icelandic passports don't have a separate field for "Surname" I may be missing your point but there is a "Surname" field in that photo, just above "Given names".
        • taejo 2y ago
          Moreover, in a later picture on the page you can see an example showing a -dóttir name in that field (I had wondered if perhaps it was only used for people who happened to have a "real" surname as opposed to a patronymic, e.g. foreign-born citizens) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/File%3AISLpassportdatapage.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/Fi...
          • cyberax 2y ago
            Facepalm. I don't know how I missed that.
• msh 2y ago
  Not until recently as such. In Denmark it became illegal to form them from the fathers name in 1828.
• arrowsmith 2y ago
  Wouldn't it be -sen, not -son, if it was Danish or Norwegian? And -sson (double S) if Swedish. I imagine the vast majority of -son Anglo surnames come directly from the English word "son", not from immigrants.
  • pavel_lishin 2y ago
    A lot of names get transliterated and/or misspelled when people move around.
    • plasticchris 2y ago
      Someone with the last name Blank told me their family lore was that the (Ellis island era) immigration paperwork person just gave up.
      • smt88 2y ago
        “Name changed by staff at Ellis Island” is a myth. Some people, including many Eastern Europeans, did change their own names to make their ethnicity less obvious or to shorten the name (Schwarzenegger => Schwarz, Stein => Stone, etc.)
        • nemomarx 2y ago
          Certainly we could rule it out as a widespread normal practice, but transcription errors or spelling changes would happen, right? Especially from languages that have letters that don't exist in English.
          • pavel_lishin 2y ago
            Yeah, I can't imagine that a lot of Russian or Polish immigrants - who wouldn't have spoken English - would have had any idea how to consistently transliterate their last names. How do you transliterate Жижщенко? Anything with a ё in it? Or an ы, or й? Was there a policy on differentiating between "е" and "э"?
• asveikau 2y ago
  Scandinavians were pretty active on the British isles in prior centuries. It's a pretty influential source of English language. "Scandinavian import" sounds very modern, like you're buying a Volvo. The import would probably be more like: Britain and Scandinavia having a common ancestral source.
  • nkrisc 2y ago
    True, though there of course have been many different waves of Scandinavian migrants to the British Isles over the past ~2000 years or so. In an American context, many -son surnames likely are from modern Scandinavian migrants (within the past 200 years), particularly for anyone from the Great Lakes/Midwest regions. The site seems to have succumbed to HN traffic so I can't read it to see if it's specifically about surnames in the British Isles.
• troupo 2y ago
  As is "Simme" for Simon and possibly many other "nicknames" in the article which are not nicknames but versions of the name used by family, close friends, or used when calling a child.
• decimalenough 2y ago
  Obligatory: https://youtu.be/I-OOpZitfd0?feature=shared https://youtu.be/I-OOpZitfd0?feature=shared