34.1307, Review: Lexicography: Robertson

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1307. Mon Apr 24 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1307, Review: Lexicography: Robertson

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Date: 08-Apr-2023
From: David Robertson [ddr11 at columbia.edu]
Subject: Lexicography: Hanks, Lenarčič, McClure (eds.) (2022)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3601

AUTHOR: David Douglas Robertson
TITLE: Dictionary of American Family Names, 2nd Edition
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: David Robertson

SUMMARY

(clxxx + 3633 pp.) This is a methodical and significant expansion of a
landmark work. Fitting acknowledgment for enabling so much improvement
goes, in the Preface, to the democratization of information by the
Internet, which has grown to provide access to “vast quantities of
data, scholarly reference works, and historical documents” (vii). As a
result, every surname borne by 300 or more people in the latest US
Census results is included and analyzed here. In point of fact, a
large number of names tabulated here have fewer bearers, e.g.
“Haertling” (frequency=228) and “Joline” (f=141). The 80,000 most
common US surnames are recorded here, representing about 87% of the
population (xv).

An impressive array of language and culture specialists have been
newly brought into the project to contribute essays and etymologies
for each of these, as the long list of “Contributors and Consultants
for the First and Second Editions” shows (ix-x). The tabulated
“Contents” (xi-xiii) reinforce one’s sense of the huge scope of this
project; 180 pages of prefatory material accompany five volumes of
alphabetized surnames. The largest part of that matter is the “General
Introduction” (xv-xxxii), covering both the origins and development of
surnaming worldwide – which has many sources but is virtually always
historically recent – and the typology of family names.

Thirty-four specialist Introduction essays follow, examining patterns
among family names associated with various communities, arranged by
geographic and cultural area: Native and African American; Britain and
Ireland; Western Europe; Scandinavia, Finland, and Estonia; Southern
Europe (the Mediterranean); Russia and Eastern Europe; the Jewish
Diaspora; Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Subcontinent; East
Asia and Southeast Asia. Each makes reference when appropriate to the
other essays, and provides a Bibliography for further research.

The alphabetized dictionary entries themselves take up pages 1-3633,
occupying five Volumes. Each entry begins with a (particular
normalized spelling of a) family name, followed by its “frequency” in
the 2010 US Census, i.e. the number of people found to have that
specific name variant. Following this is a section that specifies
original spellings in source languages; any known and suspected
geographical and cultural origins (“Abaya” is one that is labeled
“unexplained”); as well as etymologies for the name, often specifying
the type of name according to the Introductory essays’ typologies, for
example “ornamental name” or “habitational name”. By the words
“Variant of”, cross-reference is made as needed to a designated main
entry or multiple such; many names are cross-indexed with others we
should “Compare”. To all of this data is sometimes appended a
paragraph or so on the history of people bearing the name, e.g. for
“Abbadi”. The majority of entries conclude with a listing of “some
characteristic forenames” found to be associated with the surname. The
average entry is perhaps 60 words in length, many being much shorter
(e.g. “Schichtel”) and a few far longer (such as “Fisher”).

EVALUATION

For North Americans, genealogists, and scholars investigating family
names here, this dictionary (“DAFN2”) will be a valuable, convenient
introduction to further research. The intended depth of each entry is
not great, yet typically an enquiry will yield information not
otherwise easy to access, such as the English counties or Polish
voivodeships most closely associated with a surname, and something
about the reasons for its earliest use. The extent of coverage is
stunning; promising to include all family names held by 300+
Americans, the book actually overdelivers with entries on many names
even less frequent than that. It is therefore a refreshing reminder of
the staggering cultural diversity of the USA (not a failure of DAFN2)
that I noticed the last names of numerous of my fellow-citizen friends
to be absent from DAFN2. Thus, while this dictionary is an enormous
achievement in sociolinguistics, it is no substitute for informed
genealogical, philological, and other approaches, in tandem with which
it should be used. One hopes that added goals can be set for a DAFN3,
guaranteeing analysis perhaps of all family names held by 100+ people
here, though such “long tail” data on the remaining 13% of the
population will probably exponentially increase the size of the
project.

To pursue the idea of looking up names familiar to oneself as a gauge
of DAFN2’s performance, I went  to the entry for a surname fairly
common in my home town of Spokane, Washington: “Robideau”. There, I
was directed to a main entry “Robidoux”, where I found that the
diagnostic forenames are all native French: “Lucien, Armand, Cecile,
Normand, Alcide”, etc. Nowhere are we told by what methodology these
associated names were determined, but these are clearly from the
earliest French-Canadian generations to immigrate into the States.
None will be found among my present-day neighbors, who carry
English-language forenames in the same apparent frequency as the
typical Spokanite. Similar results obtained for “Laplante”,
“Littlejohn”, and “Marchand”, despite the dictionary’s goal “to give a
brief, clear summary of what is known about the origin AND HISTORY” of
each name (xv; my emphasis). Such a data gap of centuries, typical for
these entries, would be another desideratum for rectification in
future editions, where it could be pointed out in less than a sentence
that these have come to be Canadian Métis surnames, which helps
explain their pronunciations ([ˈɹubɩˌdu] is normal, for instance) and
helps genealogists to direct their inquiries properly. With a larger
team of collaborating specialists, far more granular information could
be added, e.g. that the tribal surname “Seymour” in northeast
Washington and southern British Columbia is often from the Chinook
Jargon pronunciation, [simo], of the baptismal French “Simon” bestowed
by late 19th-century Catholic missionary priests. DAFN2’s reference
only to “Cinq-Mars”, “Saint-Mars”, and “Saint-Maur” will be a
frustrating irrelevance to most people living near me who carry this
name and want to know more about it.

DAFN2 might more accurately be titled an encyclopedia of names. Unlike
typical dictionaries, it lacks pronunciation information, which would
be useful data in many cases. Passing acknowledgment is made (xviii)
of the variability in pronouncing especially non-English names in the
USA, but some system cross-indexing actual phonetics to legal
spellings would be a useful tool. Giving an example from my
acquaintance, few Americans would know from conversation or an
audio-media occurrence that [ˌbɹɑzˈnawski] is <Brzoznowski>, not that
that uncommon surname shows up in this dictionary. Nor would many
realize that in northeast Washington “Ignace” is more commonly
“Aeneas”.

On a related note, I found it somewhat frustrating that current
geographical distribution data are scarce in DAFN2. Little mention is
made of even broad US regions where a name is especially common. For
large numbers of American surnames, there are decided regional
tendencies, e.g. the prominence in eastern Washington of Volga Germans
such as the “Mielke” family and of Roma such as the “Marks” family.
Such information, perhaps in the style of small maps such as the
Dictionary of American Regional English provides, would no doubt help
users to narrow and speed their genealogical inquiries.

Future editions conceivably might add, in just a few pages’ space, a
table showing which surnames are the most common in the United States,
or else a number in each entry showing a name’s ranking, or both of
these. It is one thing to tell us an absolute frequency, but it would
be another to supply a tool for comparison among individual names and
(with a little work) categories thereof, e.g. by ethnic origin, by
etymological type (occupational, habitational, ornamental, etc.) and
so on. Again, even more helpful would be a ranking within more
constrained regions, even—in an online supplement perhaps—down to
single census tracts.

The “General Introduction” provides a surprisingly small Bibliography,
unfortunate since this essay makes really illuminating generalizations
that succeeding scholars ought to be able to make use of. The
specialist Introductions, however, typically provide concise yet
authoritative lists of reference sources. Some of the websites cited
in DAFN2, while important in the genesis of this work, are now ancient
by Internet standards, and not only their appearance but e.g. their
search functions show it. One imagines newer online resources, such
the US Library of Congress’ Genealogical Research Portal
(https://www.loc.gov/rr/genealogy/), can now be highlighted as more
highly functional tools.

The essay on “English, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish Family Names”
(xxxviii-li) is exceptionally good at charting the historical
development of a semantic domain, and would be a stellar component of
a university-level course in the history of the English language, in
historical linguistics, or in anthropological linguistics.

A theme repeated and exemplified with great consistency through the
various Introductory essays is that “[o]riginally all
names...were...bestowed on the basis of semantic content” (lxxiii),
and that that originally obvious meaning routinely becomes opaque with
age (e.g. lxxx-lxxxi). Thus DAFN2 is a superb source for instances of
historical linguistic change, be it semantic, phonological,
orthographic, or other types.

It is not clear to me whether the comprehensive Tables showing East
Asian royal dynasties through known history (e.g. Chinese, clxviii;
Vietnamese, clxxiv) will be of particular use to DAFN2 readers. In
explaining surnaming trends, the specialist essays make use mainly of
fewer and broader eras than those.

The various introductory essays use a fairly consistent typology of
names, and they explain what is meant by calling a surname
“ornamental”, for example. One can imagine, however, that the average
user of DAFN2, probably a non-academic and perhaps consulting only
individual entries without looking at this explanatory matter, will be
confused by the frequent terse characterizations “humanistic name” and
so on. Perhaps a minor measure like initial capitalization of such
category terms would help.  We can also note undefined specialist
terms, such as a southern Chinese “provocative affix”, that need
addressing (clxix).

The most linguistically useful essays here specify what sorts of
elements combine in the various subtypes of surname in a given
language. The Dutch names essay is superb in this regard, explaining
the distributions of various formative suffixes, dialect
pronunciations, and more. It is similarly useful to learn that among
Russian surnames, “Almost all take the form of adjectives” (cix), and
that Ukrainian metronymic names (i.e. originally formed from a
mother’s name) can be spotted by their suffix -in, and  “are common
only in...the Lviv area” (cx). Few of the essays, however, approach a
comprehensive morphological analysis that might be called a “grammar
of surnames” in a language, specifying whether a certain syntactic
category (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) can validly be the base of a
surname, and if so, in which inflected forms. Possibly a thumbnail
sketch paragraph to this effect for each ethnolinguistic group would
help future researchers in deciphering the many surnames and name
elements listed as of “obscure” origin in DAFN2.

Particularly excellent work showing the historical changes in
surnaming are to be found in the commendable Chinese and Italian area
studies. It is probably no coincidence that both deal with a greater
time-depth than most of the other essays do. Certain essays clearly
deserve to be fleshed out in future editions, including (as I have
hinted) that on Native American names and the surprisingly skeletal
one on Indian family names (from the Indian subcontinent), which are
rapidly becoming common in the USA.

Of course small errors creep into any sufficiently large project.
“Flórez” is probably “Flores”, and “florezca” would be a
third-person, not second-person, singular subjunctive, just as the
supplied translation shows (1081). Reference to an Indic “language
family” ought to be corrected to a “branch of the Indo-European
family”.

None of the tiny mistakes that made it past proofreading detract from
the wonderful achievement of scholarly work that DAFN2 represents.
This dictionary has no peer, and looks to remain the standard in its
subject area for years to come.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Robertson, PhD (University of Victoria, 2012) specializes in
Pacific Northwest language contact and history, especially Métis
languages, pidgins and creoles such as Chinook Jargon, Salish
languages such as ɬəw̓ál̓məš a.k.a. Lower Chehalis, and onomastics.



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