[ANSTHRLD] Hello Sybil

[kobrien at texas.net]

> > Just how many of you are there?
> 
> I found a number of attested forms of my given name and my surname in
> English.  I generated every possible pairwise combination.  I did the
> same in Latin.  This doesn't *guarantee* a plausible combination, as
> the forename spelling might date to 1400, say, when the surname
> spelling might date to the Venomous Bede.  But I don't think it's
> unreasonable.
> 
> Every time I do an e-mail signature, a program selects one at
> random (though English is weighted twice as much as Latin).


That's too cool!  You don't even have to pick one by hand!

I figured out a number of forms of my name and it's incredibly useful when I 
teach.

And the variant spelling thing is so period.  In one set of registers I've 
studied, I collated all of the entries by family.  I'm not on the correct 
machine to access it right now (I could pull it tomorrow), but for the 
mother in one large family, her name is listed something like at least 8 
different ways among all the entries for her family.  And that's just in the 
a single set of parish registers.  Imagine if we accessed other documents 
that might mention her.

Mari