[ANSTHRLD] Fwd: Name research question

[Tim McDaniel]

An old message that I found in my "drafts" folder.

Solstice Herald forward the question to the Ansteorran Heralds' list.
Others are working on finding Rosenburg itself in period, and from the
atlas citation, apparently with success.  (I don't know about
combining Eric with it -- I'm not an expert.)

I thought to address one point.

> but with Rosenburg, I was having problems finding credible sources
> for it.  With my SCA name, the herald put it together using
> mongolian words.  Could do the same thing?  Basically find the terms
> in the Old German language, put it together and do that?

In general, you cannot take words out of a dictionary and glue them
together, and thereby ensure a plausible period-style name.

In period, they had some words and names that were used as given
names, or as surnames, and some that were not.  For any particular
language, culture, time period, location, whatever, you need to look
at the patterns of names that were used, and extrapolate.

For example, you can't just take a modern Irish given name, or a
medieval saint's name, and decide based on that that it's a plausible
medieval Irish name.  They generally considered a saint's name to be
too holy for people to use unmodified.  So the stereotypical Irish
names today, the Michael Fitzpatrick and Mary O'Donnell kinds of
names, are essentially impossible in medieval Ireland. [1] "Servant of
X", "devotee of X", "veiled servant of X", they're known.  And by the
end of period, saint's names were trickling in.

In contrast, English people gave children saint's names all the time.

In England, so far as I know, any occupation (career, a thing you do a
lot to keep yourself in pence) can make a plausible surname.  Certain
physical descriptions, like hair color or height.  Location, things
meaning like "of Lincoln".  Many toponyms, "atte Wood".  But not, for
example, abstract qualities like "the Easily Distractable".

The patterns may be more subtle than you realize.  Knowing Oxford and
Swinford, you can infer a pattern of "large domesticated animal +
ford".  There's Hartford too, so it's probably that "large four-legged
animal + ford" is the real pattern.  But that data alone does not
justify Snailford or Treeford or Sunford.

Danel de Lincoln

[1] "Essentially" because I am not enough of an expert to know that
*none* of them were used with 100% certainty, and because Anglo-Irish
living in the English Pale often had English names, and they might
have been recorded in Gaelic-language sources.

-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com