name construction and Appendix A

[ursula]

sporky_rat asked for, "More information on the basics of onomastics on the not-English and not-French. Like Spanish names. How does one find the general usual rules for a woman's name in Christian Spain, 1500's?"

(If you'd like to suggest a topic for me to post about in January, the collection of questions is here.)

If you want basic information about medieval name construction in a reasonably popular European language, the place to start is SENA Appendix A. ("SENA" stands for "Standards for Evaluation of Names and Armory".) There's some general information about abbreviations at the beginning of the appendix, and then tables for different languages. The tables are grouped by big geographical regions; you may have to use the search function in your browser, or scroll a bit, to find the exact culture you're interested in. Castilian Spanish is in the Iberian table.

The table has columns for different types of name structures that often show up in medieval documents: Double Given Names, Locative, Patronymic, Other relationship (such as relationships to mothers, siblings, or spouses), Descriptive/Occupational, Dictus (for "also known as" names), and Double Bynames. The final column, Order, tells you how different types of name were typically combined.

Underneath the table, there are notes. The notes may explain more complicated constructions. For example, the notes for Spanish suggest some ways to form a name based on the father's name. Usually, the notes also link to one or two articles that provide a more detailed discussion.

You can also find information on medieval names from specific cultures by going to The Medieval Names Archive or the heraldry.sca.org name articles page and following links for the culture you're interested in. However, for popular cultures there may be quite a few links to wade through. Appendix A is supposed to highlight the articles that an expert would check first.

Maintaining Appendix A is one of my jobs as the SCA's Palimpsest Herald, so if you have questions about how to use it, or are particularly pining for more detail on a specific culture, let me know!

Comments

[eller]

Great! :) About writing Low German, you don't need to worry much: most of these languages were never meant to be written down, so there are no standardized spellings. Also, almost every village had its own dialect, so unless you need to generate a correct name for someone from a specific village (of maybe 1000 or less inhabitants) anything vaguely correct-sounding is correct. XD I think most of the written versions of names would be church records, so name spellings usually depend on what the priest in charge thought a name should be spelled. My father did a bit of genealogical research, and even less than 100 years ago, the name entries at a person's birth and their marriage and death can be spelled entirely different. (No one can tell if my great-aunt was officially called Dorothee, Dorette or Dredde; she even had different name versions on her passport and travel documents! And she didn't live that long ago - I still met her.) I think the whole concept of "things should be spelled in a certain way" is fairly new in Germany. Anything recorded before the Third Reich has a certain random element thrown in. :)

[ursula]

Um, I think you're underestimating the depths of my nerdiness on the topic of historical spellings? There's a big difference between "variations existed" and "there are no rules"!

[eller]

Nah, but in this case, there are no rules. ;) While my native language is High German, I have native Low German speakers in my family (my father among them). And, really, if the spelling rule is "names in village A in the first half of century X are spelled in the way priest Z, who was responsible for church records because no one else wanted the job, thought they should look like when written down" - that's not really a spelling rule. Especially not if a person born in village A but died in village B, five kilometers from village A, is recorded in two fundamentally different spellings. (Of course, we're talking about people who were usually not able to write and thus could offer no opinion what their names should look like in written form.)

[ursula]

No, but there is a rule: the spelling has to be something that phonetically represents a sound that a person from that time and place would actually have made. Furthermore, it has to make sense using the correspondences between sounds and letters that people in that time and place actually believed in. Moreover, I have to be able to recommend a plausible pattern to people who might only speak modern English.

So, for example, in English, zer, zir, zerr, zirr, zur, zurr, zerre, zurre, zirre, zyr, zyrr, zuhr, zuhrre, and zyrre can all represent the same sound, but I suspect you wouldn't find all of those forms in medieval Low German documents. (Indeed, I assume you will immediately tell me that some of those are Just Plain Wrong.)

[eller]

I wouldn't rule out several of these forms showing up not only in the same area and time but even the same document! (Except for zuhrre, I've never seen that one.) Low German spelling (or rather, the lack thereof) sucks. There have been attempts to link phonetics to certain letter combinations, but these efforts have all been made within the last 50 years. They also tend to contradict each other.

Something that might amuse you: during the Third Reich, there were active attempts to extinguish northern Low German dialects, because it was assumed that the lack of phonetic order would damage children's brains if they grew up speaking Platt as native language!

[ursula]

Eek.

What about x's? Could you do xer or xir?

(I feel like you're expecting me to manifest a level of astonishment at spelling variation that is just not going to happen. I mean, I just wrote an entire story in Middle English.)

[eller]

I can only talk about Northern German Platt in the fen areas around Bremen, but... no. Starting any word with an X is highly unlikely. You could try "ßer", though - I've seen that at least once. (In High German, of course, words can't start with ß. In Low German, however, there are no spelling rules, so...)

I don't expect you to be astonished at all - I just feel that trying to find standardized spelling for Low German is a futile exercise. People around here (native speakers) are trying, and failing badly. Even Platt phonetics differ from village to village, and there are dialects around that are spoken by only a few hundred people.

[ursula]

Oh, I don't want a standardized spelling, I just want a popular spelling! Popular in the sense of "frequent in medieval documents", that is.

[eller]

At least modern attempts to write Platt down do not contain the letter x at all, so probably any spelling without x is safe? Unfortunately I don't know which spellings are likely to be found in medieval documents. If you're interested in (semi-)modern Platt, you could look at this: http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/ut-mine-stromtid-1383/1 "Ut mine Stromtid" by Fritz Reuter, from 1862, is one of the best-known Platt texts (it's Mecklenburg Platt) and there are not many older Platt texts around, LOL - Platt was always the language of un-educated peasants who can't write, and educated people wouldn't have used such a vulgar language!
Of course, a Mecklenburg Platt speaker wouldn't necessarily be able to communicate with a Platt speaker from the northern coast, or worse, someone from Bavaria. (In fact... If I need to talk to someone from Bavaria, we usually speak English because I don't understand a word of Bavarian.) So it would have to be "popular in the correct area"...