New English (?) name: Jhan

[Margaret Lee]

Jan Matzelinger was the name of the black man who invented the shoe-lasting 
machine. According to Wiki, he was born in 1852 in Dutch Guyana to a Dutch 
engineer father and a Surinamese slave mother. 

Also, there was Jan Murray, a TV game show host in the '50's.
 
 
--Margaret Lee





________________________________
From: Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Sent: Mon, March 21, 2011 10:28:49 PM
Subject: Re: New English (?) name: Jhan

Nothing dark about this--both Jan and Bakker are typical Dutch names.
Jan used to be one of the most popular names (think, John), but it's
been in decline for some time. It's still popular, however, among
Western Ukrainians (closer to Poles than to Russians) and Latvians
(although the latter often shows up with a suffix, as in Janis). I've
encountered a few in the Netherlands, but I would not call it common, at
this point. I know one man from England and one from Australia named
Jan, but one of them is ethnically Polish and the other Dutch and the
parents chose the names, in both cases, for cultural preservation
purposes. One of them mentioned once that he had considered changing it
to Iain or Ian, but decided to keep it as is.

Given the age of the "Jhan" in question (born "at least in the 70s), my
original comment (Saffron)--as sarcastic as it was--still stands. I
suspect counterculture rather than ethnicity is at play here. Will
someone ask?

As for masculine/feminine versions of Jan, I was probably just as
surprised to find Jean to be a woman as Jon was to find a male Jan.
Prior to that, I had always assumed French origin and male Jean. Of
course, that's wrong too, but for entirely different reasons. Still,
Jhan, Jan, Jhon, Jean--it's all the same... In fact, I was already in
college when I first encountered a female Jan--long after I was familiar
with the male Jan. My first assumption was that my classmate's full name
was Janice, but I was wrong about that too. It was just Jan.

    VS-)

On 3/21/2011 9:53 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 9:17 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> The first masculine "Jan" Â I ever heard of in English was the once
>> famous/infamous Jan Bakker.
> Stabbing in the dark, I'd guess that that name is ethnically Dutch.
> Once upon a time, I was acquainted with a guy of Polish ancestry whose
> first name was Jan. He was a "boyfriend-in-law": my girlfriend's
> roommate's boyfriend. Hence, the relationship was so tenuous that I've
> forgotten his surname.
>
> This masculine "Jan" is also unique in my experience. A WAG is that
> perhaps Jhan was originally "Jan," and was motivated to modify the
> spelling in order to avoid being continually mistaken for a woman,
> _Jan_ as a first name for a man being rare in the U.S. BTW, isn't
> there a masculine Jan [Surname] associated with the magazine, Rolling
> Stone? He's also of apparent Dutch ancestry. And there was Jan who
> "loved music.  _He_ loved singing. _He_ could play the noisy drum." A
> brief history of his musical endeavors was contained in the the second
> song that I learned in the first grade, right after Jump, Jim Crow.
> --
> -Wilson

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