Category: Names

Lost Alphabet Letters

Lost Alphabet Letters

by Justin Durand

In the modern Western world we use the Roman alphabet with 26 letters. Usually. The Swedes actually have 29 letters. What’s surprising to some folks is that we might have had more letters ourselves. Who thinks about what might have been? Except when you see an extract from an olde manuscript and spot a letter or two you’ve seen before but don’t know to pronounce.

Here’s a list of the lost letters. I particularly grieve losing eth and thorn. 

“You know the alphabet. It’s one of the first things you’re taught in school. But did you know that they’re not teaching you all of the alphabet? There are quite a few letters we tossed aside as our language grew, and you probably never even knew they existed.“

Funny side story here. My grandfather, just to be a bit ornery sometimes, kept up the idea that Swanstrom is spelled Swanström. (“Fine. As Americans we’ll change the v to a w but we’re keeping the ö.“) Didn’t bother him a bit when people laughed uncertainly but didn’t change it. After all, how could anyone change it when there is no key for it on American typewriters? The point, I think, was not to insist on it but to say it just often enough so that everyone knows you haven’t abandoned your rights.

When I got to college, I took Swedish 101. One of the first things we learned was that the Swedish alphabet has three extra letters — å, ä, and ö. They are really, truly separate letters, not just ordinary letters tarted up the way Germans do. That ö is an /øː/ not an “o with two dots” or an “o umlaut“.

I promptly swapped out the o in Swanstrom for an ö, joining my mother and grandfather in the family tradition of fancy spelling.

Now here’s the point of this little story. I have many friends who do numerology. I dabble in it myself. Modern numerology–and it is very modern, no earlier than the 1920s, I don’t think–operates by reducing each letter of the alphabet to a numeric value, then adds the numeric value of all the letters in a word or name to come up with a number. And that number has a meaning.

As a quick example, let’s do cat. C (3rd letter)=3, A (1st letter)=1, T (20th letter, 2+0)=2. So cat would be 3+1+20=24, and 2+4=6. Then, the number 6 has a particular meaning in numerology. “The number 6 is the number of domestic happiness, harmony and stability“. That’s one interpretation, anyway.

So, if the Swedes have extra letters then ö is the 29th letter, different from o the 15th letter. Swanstrom spelled Swanström will end up with a different number. My numerology chums are dubious. They’re uncomfortable. They won’t come out and say it, but they seem to be operating in a world where the American way is the right way and everyone else is wrong or misguided. I’m not getting a coherent analysis from any of them. The best argument I’ve heard so far is that I’m an American, so I can’t have Swedish letters in my name. “Those two dots over the o are just decorative.“

But, luck of the draw. The ö is the 29th letter of the Swedish alphabet, so 2+9=11. In the reductionist methodology of numerology, this means is that changing my o to an ö, doesn’t change the final outcome.

Why and how that works is one of the mysteries of math. I didn’t get far enough to understand it, but it does give me a reason to think about those other letters and how they might change the numerology of a name, and those 12 letters we’ve lost and what impact they might have had on modern numerology. If only we knew the order in which they would have appeared in our alphabet.

Re-Surnaming

Re-Surnaming

by Justin Durand

How would it be if we all had double surnames, one from our paternal line and one from our maternal line. Sort of like the Spanish do, but modified slightly so the maternal surname really is a surname that passes along the maternal line and not just the mother’s paternal surname.

That’s the idea thrown out by Burgerkrieg.

I tried it for about six weeks. I thought it might mitigate the perpetual confusion about my name change from Howery to Swanström. I don’t know whether it helped or not. Mostly it just drove me crazy because I’m a minimalist at heart. In my world even middle initials seem pretentious, an affectation of the petit bourgeoisie.

I do like, though, a particular “system” I see among some of my European cousins, where the last name comes from one parent and the middle name from the other. No long strings of given names there, so nicely minimalist.

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Women’s Names among the Scots and Irish

Women’s Names among the Scots and Irish

by Justin Durand

Genealogists tend to make a hash of women’s names because they don’t know, or don’t acknowledge, the cultural rules that would have applied at a particular time and place. The names of pre-Modern women in Scotland and Ireland is a particularly difficult area.

So often people tell me they just want a rule of thumb. My response is that it would be much better to use the names they’re found in primary sources.

Admittedly, that begs the question of how to understand and interpret the names we find. I’m watching for a good, introductory level discussion. In the meantime, I’ve come across this short piece by Barry McCain.

“A married woman would take her husband’s surname, but the prefix form was different than the male form. Ó became Uí and Mac became Mhic. This name change did not always hide the surname of the woman’s father however. In traditional Gaelic society some women retained their father’s surname due to the strong sense of family and clan affiliation. This was done when the woman was the daughter of a land holding family and had high status within society.

“Two examples from the mid to late 1500s that I located in my own research are: Fionnuala Nic Eáin married Dónaill Mac Ailín. Her “married name” becomes Fionnuala Mhic Ailín. In actuality, she retained her maiden name in the community and is listed by that name in the records. Her name appears crudely anglicised as Finvall Nikean.“

If that sounds like the kind of thing you need to know, I encourage you to read the entire article.