At 6:12:56 PM on Sunday, July 10, 2005, Gordon Barlow wrote:
> I sensed some irritation in Brian's posting (below), and
> he will sense some in this of mine. If he had read my
> original posting patiently, he might have noticed that my
> interest was in the personal names of the original
> IE-speakers. I don't care if they had one name (each) or
> ten. The question is: what names might they have borne?
But your question also included a fair bit of misinformation
that I thought worth correcting.
I doubt that one can say much about the names that they
bore. I think it likely that each bore a single idionym --
a single name that was his or her identifier. In view of
the widespread use of dithematic names in Germanic, Slavic,
and Greek, it wouldn't surprise me if these are an old type,
but unfortunately I know nothing about early naming in the
Indo-Iranian branches. At best the *type* would be old,
rather than the individual names.
> The statement that "between late antiquity and ... the
> year 1000... the vast majority of Europeans bore a single
> name [each]" is not only unproven and unprovable, it is
> based on the false premise that it is knowable. All but a
> few of the very few names recorded during that period -
> and indeed during the period between "late antiquity" and
> the Year Dot - are of persons prominent in clan-politics.
On the contrary, a good many names of quite unimportant
persons are known, both from inscriptions and, especially
later in the first millennium, from early necrologies, the
polyptyques of Irminon, Wadalde, and Reims, etc.
I would not use 'clan' here; no matter what you mean by it,
it's a poor fit for many of the societies in question.
> To those millions living in hereditary clans
Read a bit about the ethnogenesis of the Germanic tribes;
there's a lot more involved than lineage.
> in their clan territories, clan-names were available as
> surnames,
But by and large they do not appear to have been used. To
the best of my knowledge there is no evidence for them in
any of the Germanic or Romance languages. The Irish <Ó
Briain> type goes back only to the tenth century. (There
are a couple of possible earlier Ogam examples, but it's at
least as likely that the word was being used in its earlier
sense 'grandson'.) I know of just one Ogam inscription,
MAQQI-IARI ... MAQQI MUCCOI DOVVINIAS, that shows a tribal
affiliation: this is '[of] Maqqi-Iaras ... son of the tribe
of Dovinias'. I don't know of any Gaulish inscriptions that
identify someone by such a tribal relationship; perhaps
Chris Gwynn does.
Patronymic bynames, on the other hand, are common.
> whether permanent ones or not. In fluid societies,
> individuals of low social rank (including slaves,
> soldiers, migrants, drifters) might remove from their
> clans and adopt new identifiers, permanent or temporary.
'Soldier' is meaningful in Roman society; it's not clear how
meaningful it is in, say, Viking society. If you want to
relate names to a social context -- which you should -- you
have to be clear on what social context you have in mind.
'Western Europe between 400 and 1000', for instance, covers
a hell of a lot of different social contexts.
> The proposal (offered by default) that clan-identifiers
> never existed for those below the upper classes in
> pre-civilisation times is - excuse me - presumptuous in
> the extreme.
I would say rather that it's more than a bit presumptuous to
insist on an uninformed hypothesis without, apparently,
having read any of the scholarly literature on the subject
or even having looked at the available data. I've been
studying the history of western European naming practices
(from Roman times to Early Modern) for many years now, and I
*do* know something of the literature and data.
> The implicit proposal that the practices of either
> 17th-Century North America (Ned) or 9th-Century North
> Italy (Brian) indicate the naming patterns of the earliest
> Indo-European-speakers is absurd.
Neither of us said anything of the kind. You wrote:
It is more likely that personal names (families' surnames
and individuals' given names) began at the very dawn of
speech. As the lineal descendants of other
proto-languages' words survive today (arguably), so may
personal names - in variations decided by the diffuse
speeches of the IE family.
As I read it, this implies a belief on your part that at
least some modern surnames can be traced back --
_as_surnames_ -- to PIE. Ned and I were pointing out that
this is false.
> I will be very glad, if Brian & Ned can put some meat on
> the bones in future postings.
I said nothing that isn't well known to anyone who has
looked into the subject at all seriously.
Brian