Friday, September 10, 2010

who made up last names?

Nobody actually invented last names. They developed as population grew, and the number of people in the tribe (or town, or village) got too big and became confusing. One Samuel in a town was fine, maybe even two. But any more than that, and society needed some way to differentiate. So Samuel son of John became Samuel Johnson, Robert son of Richard became Robert Richardson, and so on. Sometimes people were identified by the work they did: Michael Smith might have been a blacksmith, Ellen Cohen was the daughter of a Jewish rabbi (a Cohen), and Elwood Diamond might have been a Jeweler.

There's no way to know what the first one was; names developed in every country of the world at different times. Clearly there were a lot of blacksmiths in English speaking countries - the name Smith is the most common name in the English language. In German, that's Schmidt, and so on.

In Korea, Park is a very common name. In China, it's something else. If you dig deep enough in each culture, you will see that names are ways of uniquely identifying people in a crowd.

Thursday, September 9, 2010