Appellee

“ Kemble was the first to call attention to the fact that very many of the names of places in England, as disclosed by the forms in which these names appear in ancient charters, consist of a personal name in a patronymic form. Some of these names consist simply of a nominative plural in ingas, as Æscingas, the sons or descendants of Æsc, others of a genitive plural in inga, with ton, ham, &c., appended, as in Billingatun, the town of the Billings, i.e. sons or descendants of Billa. ”

“ Noun,” said Serjeant Parsing, “you do claim a big share of words. You will be making out that the names of persons belong to you next.”
11 “So they do,” replied Mr. Noun; “no matter who the persons are, their names belong to me. I have the name of every person in the world from good Queen Victoria on her throne to the raggedest beggar-boy in the street. There is not a child in Schoolroom-shire whose name is not a noun. And I have not the names of people only, but of all pet dogs, cats, birds, horses, or rabbits: Fido, Tabby, Bright-eye, Tiny, Shag, and any other pet names you can think of. ”

“ It is impossible to keep one’s name out of print. Or even one’s portrait. This veil and this hat of my maid furnish me with an incog. You should have seen the chauffeur stare at it when he thought I did not see. Candidly, there are five or six names that belong in the holy of holies, and mine, by the accident of birth, is one of them. ”

“ During the last seven years I have devoted the whole of my spare time to the preparation of a ‘Dictionary of English Surnames.’ But about two years ago it struck me that perhaps a smaller work dealing with the subject in a less formal and more familiar style might not be unacceptable to many, as a kind of rudimentary treatise. In the course of my labours I have come under obligations to several writers and several Societies. To long-departed men, whose works do follow after them, I must give a passing allusion. ”

“ Such are the strange humours that pass over the hearts of men and communities. Such are the changes that the nomenclature of peoples, as well as of places and things, undergo through the more extraordinary convulsions which sometimes seize the body corporate of society. Truly it is a strange story this that our surnames tell us. ”

“ But there is another class of surnames we may fitly introduce here, which, I doubt not, forms no small proportion in the aggregate mass of our nomenclature—that of sign-names. We in a cultivated age like that of the present fail, as we must, to realize the effect of these latter upon the current life of our forefathers. ”

“ After all, however, it is, perhaps, complexion which has occupied for itself the largest niche in our more general nomenclature. Nor is this unnatural. It is 444still that which, in describing people, we seize upon as the best means of recognition. Sobriquets of this kind were so numerous, indeed, that there was no term in the vocabulary of the day which could be used to denote the colour of the dress, the hair, or the face, which did not find itself a place among our surnames. ”

“ When we reflect upon the large number of retainers, the ceremonious list of attendants, the greater impediments to early travel, and the difficulties of forwarding information, we shall see that these officerships were by no means so formal as we might be apt to imagine. To give illustrations of all the above-mentioned surnames were easy, were it not that the number is so large that it becomes a difficulty which to select. ”

“ Proper names of foreigners to be alphabetically arranged under the prefixes Dal, Del, Della, Des, Du, Le, La; but not under the prefixes D', Da, De, Von, Van, Van der. English names to be arranged under the prefixes De, De la, Van, Mac, O', etc. [80] [236]
4. Peers to be arranged under their titles, and not under their family names, except in such cases as that of Horace Walpole, where a man is seldom known by his title. Bishops, deans, etc., to be sought under their family names. [87]
5. Sovereigns, saints, and friars to be registered under their Christian names. ”

“ Prefixes and Suffixes The work of the eighth grade continues the work of the seventh grade in word building by a careful study of prefixes and suffixes. The addition of a prefix or a suffix makes a longer word and, because it is longer, the word becomes harder to visualize as a whole. It is highly important that the root part of the word should be pointed out, and it will be found that in most cases it is a familiar word. ”

“ The Signature consists of your Christian name and your surname. In addressing a stranger write your Christian name in full. A lady addressing a stranger should prefix her title—Miss or Mrs.—to her own name, enclosing it within marks of parenthesis, if she prefers.
+How Written+.—The Conclusion should begin near the middle of the first line below the Body of the Letter, and should slope to the right like the Heading and the Address. Begin each line of it with a capital letter, and punctuate as in other writing, following the whole with a period. ”

“ Communities 171were fast being formed, and as circumstances but more and more induced men to herd themselves together, so did the necessity spring up for each to have a more fixed and determinate title than his merely personal or baptismal one, by which he might be more currently known among his fellows.
172 CHAPTER III.
SURNAMES OF OFFICE. A class of surnames which occupies no mean place in our lists is that which has been bequeathed to us by the dignitaries and officers of mediæval times. ”

“ If the nominative suffered a syncope in forming the genitive, or if the last vowel of the genitive is broad, the dative is like the nominative; as, buidheann f. a company, g. s. buidhne, d. s. buidheann; piuthar f. a sister, g. s. peathar, d. s. piuthar.
The Vocative of masc. nouns is like the genitive; of feminine nouns is like the nominative; as, bàs m. death, g. s. bàis, v. s. bhais; cu m. a dog, g. s. coin, v. s. choin; grian f. the sun, v. s. ghaoth. {49}
Plural Number.
Nominative. Masculine nouns which insert i in the gen. sing. have their nom. plur. like the gen. sing.; as, oglach m. ”

“ NAMES AND NICKNAMES. BY GILBERT NASH.
To the antiquarian, the historian, or the general scholar, there are few more interesting studies than that of names. It is a pursuit of rare delight to trace out the derivation of those with which we have been long familiar, and to follow up the associations that have rendered them dear, curious or ridiculous, as the case may be. The names themselves may be of no value, but the spot or circumstance that gave them birth cannot fail to throw around them an atmosphere of peculiar interest. ”

“ Hence the nominative or naming case may apply as correctly to the object as the agent. "John strikes Thomas, and Thomas strikes John." John and Thomas name the boys who strike, but in the first case John is the actor or agent and Thomas the object. In the latter it is changed. To use a nominative name is a redundancy which should be avoided. You will understand my meaning and see the propriety of the change proposed, as the mind of the learner should not be burthened with needless or irrelevant phrases. ”

“ The roughest humour of those rough days is oftentimes found in these early records, and the surnames which, putting complimentary and objectionable and neutral together, belong to this day to this class, form still well-nigh the largest proportion of our national nomenclature. ”

“ Before, however, we enter into the history of these, and with regard to England that is the purpose of this book, it will be well to take a brief survey of the actual state of human nomenclature in preceding times. Surnames, we must remember, were the simple result of necessity when population, hitherto isolated and small, became so increased as to necessitate further particularity than the merely personal one could supply. ”

“ Instrumental.—When an instrument is the remote object of the verb, the accusative remains unchanged, but the instrumental case takes the same suffix as the nominative-agent; thus, mêndu wagan bŭrgandu bume, the man hit a crow with a boomerang. Inarru burumain kunnedu bangabe, the woman cut a dog with a yamstick.
In the above examples, as well as in the sentences illustrating the nominative-agent, it will be seen that the agent suffix has euphonic changes according to the termination of the word it is attached to. This may be said of the suffixes in all the cases of nouns and adjectives. ”

“ It is a peculiarity among them to address one another by the Christian name, or to speak of a man by the Christian name along with the surname, should there be need to distinguish him from another. The term "Mr." is rarely employed. ”

“ Sometimes the mildest and quietest one of us all would be called by some appellation so suggestive of ruffianism and bloodshed that it was the extreme of the ridiculous to associate the person and the name together. ”

“ It will be found that spelling was often so vague that even a lawyer in writing an old record or will may spell a name differently in the same document, and in most cases in mediæval times the sound of the word ruled its spelling. ”

“ These are declined like nouns, of which latter there are six forms, the masculine in â, o, and y, the feminine in a, oo, and e; the plurals being formed exactly as in the pronominal suffixes of the verb. The root-word, without inflexion, alone is used where the name is employed in no connection with a verb, where in every terrestrial language the nominative would be employed. ”

“ For it might be argued that the first name is meant to be an individual and even isolated thing; but the last name is certainly meant, by all logic and history, to link a man with his human origins, habits, or habitation. ”

“ Greek or Roman-Greek, names. The present fashions in nomenclature are, however, best explained in the following letter from an English lady residing in Russia:—
'Children (and grown-up persons in their own family) are, I may say, universally called by their diminutives. In society the Christian name and patronymic are made use of, and you seldom hear a person addressed by his family name, though he may be spoken of in the third person as “Romanoff,” or “Romanova” (surnames take the gender and number of their bearers) , except by his superiors, such as a general to his young officers, &c. ”

“ The object possessed is inflected to express its relation to the foregoing substantive or pronoun, and as the possessor is the speaker himself, the person spoken to, or the person or thing spoken of, the object will express by means of suffixes whether it belongs to the first, second, or third person, wherefore these suffixes are called personal suffixes.
The first and second persons can of course only represent rational beings; the third person comprises persons or things alike. ”

“ Examine the construction of the italicized nouns in the following sentences:—
1. Subject nominative. The noun may be used as the subject of a verb; as, Boys play. The subject of a verb is in the nominative case.
2. Predicate nominative. A noun that is used to form a complete predicate, and refers to the same person or thing as the subject, is in the nominative case after the verb; as, John became king. A noun so used is called a predicate noun or predicate nominative. The verbs be, seem, become, appear, look are followed by a predicate nominative. ”

“ To prevent such confusion and difficulties, the author has taken care to insert each individual under his different appellations, viz., under his family-name, his surname, poetical name, under his title or under the name of the place of his birth, referring at the same time, if he is not to be found under one name, to look under the one referred to. ”

“ If a person’s forenames occur differently in different books or different authorities, or occur in a different order, or the person has changed one or more of his forenames, arrange by one form (the best known or the latest) and refer from the others if alphabetically separated.
224. Arrange a nobleman’s title, under which entry is made, and the name of a bishop’s see, from which reference is made to the family name, among the personal names, not with the places. ”

“ The fact that, with but one or two exceptions, the usual pet addenda, ‘kin,’ ‘cock,’ and ‘ot,’ or ‘et,’ are absolutely wanting, or even the patronymic ‘son,’ shows decisively that they cannot be numbered among what we must call the popular names of the period. Introduced here and there in the community at large, they struggled on for bare existence, and have descended to us as surnames in their simple and unaltered form. ”

“ Books are to be entered: 10. Under the surnames of authors, when stated on the title-page or otherwise certainly known, followed by the forename and other necessary prefixes in round brackets. 11. When only the initials or pseudonym of an author occur in the book, it is to be regarded for the purpose of headings as anonymous; and a cross-reference is to be made from the initials or pseudonym to the first heading, the last initial being placed first, followed by the others in round brackets. ”

“ A different Latin suffix -culum, forming substantives from verbs, is represented in the form -cle in several words adopted through French, as miracle, oracle, spectacle.
-um, neuter term., as medium. [L. -um, Gr. -on.]
-uncle, little, dim., as peduncle. [L. -un-cu-lus, A.S. -incle; conn. with -en and -cule, diminutives.]
-ure, noun suffix, denoting act of, as capture; state of being, as verdure.—In leisure and pleasure, -ir has been replaced by -ure, O. Fr. leisir, plaisir. [L. -ura; Fr. -ure.] ”