Névé

“ The Magic of Names.—For primitive peoples the name is as much a part of the person as a limb; consequently the magical use of names is in some of its aspects assimilable to the processes dependent on the law of sympathy. In some cases the name must be withheld from any one who is likely to make a wrong use of it, and in some parts of the world people have secret names which are never used. ”

“ She never called her son by any name but John; "love," and "dear," and such like terms, were reserved for Fanny. ”

“ when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; ”

“ Howbeit, though no scholar, I am not one of those who misuse the English speech, and, being foolishly led by the hasty custom of scriveners and printers to write the letters "T" and "H" joined together, which resembleth a "Y," do incontinently jump to the conclusion the THE is pronounced "Ye,"—the like of which I never heard in all England. ”

“ Yon hawthorn bower beside the burn, I never shall forget;
Ah! there my dear departed maid and I in rapture met:
What tender aspirations we breathed for other's weal!
How glow'd our hearts with sympathy which none but lovers feel! ”

“ And a gallant fleet was sailing there whose fighting days are done,
Sloop and galleon, brig and pinnace, all the rigs you never met,
Fighting frigate, grave three-decker with their snowy canvas set;
Dozed and dreamed, when, on a sudden, ev'ry sail began to swell,
For the breeze has spoken strangers, with a stirring tale to tell,
And a thousand eager voices flung the challenge out to sea:
"Come they hither in the old way, in the only way that's free?" ”

“ If a childhood and youth like Linné's suggests a spring morning, so the passing from that youth into the fullness of life is like the passing into a sunshiny day, a day so beautiful that it never loses the color and the freshness of the dawn. ”

“ I will take one more instance of a name presumed to be common to the Germans and to the Celts as an illustration of the manner in which—men's names being handed down from generation to generation without, even in ancient times, any thought of their meaning—a name may survive, while the word from which it was originally derived has perished out of the language, or is retained in a sense so changed as hardly to be recognised. ”

“ Crevasse—A fissure or crack formed in a snow-field or glacier; caused by non-elasticity of the ice when moving down the uneven surface of its rocky bed. Longitudinal crevasses are formed in the direction of the flow; transverse crevasses, at right angles to the flow. ”

“ Every social casualty had an effect upon our names which it could not have upon our words. The names found in Domesday Book, casting aside the new importation, were, in the great majority of cases, obsolete by the end of the twelfth century, and of those which have survived and descended to us as surnames, well-nigh all are devoid of diminutive or patronymic desinences—a clear proof that they were utterly out of fashion as personal names during the era of surname formation. The Norman invasion was not a conquest of our language, but it was of our nomenclature. ”

“ There, hour by hour, the lazy tide creeps in
Upon the sands I shall not pace again —
Save in a dream, — and, hour by hour, the tide
Creeps lazily out, and I behold it not,
Nor the young moon slow sinking to her rest
Behind the hills; nor yet the dead white trees
Glimmering in the starlight: they are ghosts
Of what has been, and shall be never more.
No, never more!
Nor shall I hear again
The wind that rises at the dead of night
Suddenly, and sweeps inward from the sea,
Rustling the tussock, nor the wekas' wail
Echoing at evening from the tawny hills. ”

“ It is an improvement, but in most cases at the expense of nothing but imitation, the sound and the fashion being the only guides. After all, nomenclature cannot be otherwise than imitative, but the results are most curious and interesting, when it is either the continuation of old hereditary names, like the Algernon of the Howards or the Aubrey of the de Veres, or else the record of some deeply felt event, like the Giustina of Venice, in honour of the battle of Lepanto, or our own Arthur, in memory of the deeds of our great duke. ”

“ Dip to tranquil shores of jasper, where the watching angel beams.
But, behold! our eyes are human, and our way is paved with pain,
We can never find Hy-Brasil, never see its hills again!
Never look on bays of crystal, never bend the reverent knee
In the sight of Eden floating — floating on the sapphire sea!
Outre Mer
I see, as one in dreaming,
A broad, bright, quiet sea;
Beyond it lies a haven —
The only home for me.
Some men grow strong with trouble,
But all my strength is past,
And tired and full of sorrow,
I long to sleep at last. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And never comes darkness down, yet he greeteth a million morns.
He whom a dream hath possessed knoweth no more of roaming;
All roads and the flowing of waves and the speediest flight he knows,
But wherever his feet are set, his soul is forever homing,
And going, he comes, and coming he heareth a call and goes.
He whom a dream hath possessed knoweth no more of sorrow,
At death and the dropping of leaves and the fading of suns he smiles,
For a dream remembers no past and scorns the desire of a morrow,
And a dream in a sea of doom sets surely the ultimate isles. ”

“ Garrick, a Huguenot name, is Fr, gangue, an old word for heath.
TREE NAMES
Trees have in all countries a strong influence on topographical names, and hence on surnames. Frean, though usually from the Scandinavian name Fraena, is sometimes for Fr. frêne, ash, Lat. fraxinus, while Cain and Kaines [Footnote: There is one family of Keynes derived specifically from Chahaignes (Sarthe) .] are Norm. quêne (chêne) , oak. The modern French for beech is hêtre, Du. heester, but Lat. fagus has given a great many dialect forms which have supplied us with the surnames Fay, Foy, and the plural dim. Failes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ E. H. Y. will find the question, surname or sirname, slightly touched upon in my English Surnames (3rd edit., vol. i. p. 13.) , and argued at length in the Literary Gazette for Nov. 1842, in a correspondence originating out of a notice of the first edition of my book. I think the balance of evidence is in favour of surname; that is, a name superadded to the personal or baptismal appellation, which applies with equal propriety to the sobriquets given to monarchs and distinguished men, and to the hereditary designations of people of humble rank. ”

“ There is another point connected with family portraits that has given me occasion of thought and speculation; and that is, the way in which those [230] children who are named after an ancestor or ancestress sometimes, I do not say often or always, but certainly sometimes, do in a very remarkable manner receive the stamp of the features of that ancestor after whom named. This has nothing to do with the naming of the child at baptism because of a supposed resemblance, for in very young infants none such can be traced, but the likeness grows in the child to the person whose name it bears. ”

“ The study of the origin of family names is at the same time quite simple and very difficult. Its simplicity consists in the fact that surnames can only come into existence in certain well-understood ways. Its difficulty is due to the extraordinary perversions which names undergo in common speech, to the orthographic uncertainty of our ancestors, to the frequent coalescence of two or more names of quite different Origin, and to the multitudinous forms which one single name can assume, such forms being due to local pronunciation, accidents of spelling, date of adoption, and many minor causes. ”

“ Nor fairer garden yet was never known:
The maidens danced about it morn and noon,
And learned bards of it their ditties made;
The nimble fairies by the pale-faced moon
Water'd the root and kiss'd her pretty shade.
But well-a-day!—the gardener careless grew;
The maids and fairies both were kept away,
And in a drought the caterpillars threw
Themselves upon the bud and every spray.
God shield the stock! If heaven send no supplies,
The fairest blossom of the garden dies. ”

“ CHAPTER VI.
1ENGLISH SURNAMES.
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. To review the sources of a people’s nomenclature is to review that people’s history. When we remember that there is nothing without a name, and that every name that is named, whether it be of a man, or man’s work, or man’s heritage of earth, came not by chance, or accident so called, but was given out of some nation’s spoken language to denote some characteristic that language expressed, we can readily imagine how important is the drift of each—what a record must each contain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most people nowadays have one or more Christian names and a surname, but this was not always the case. Every Christian from the earliest days of Christianity must have had a Christian name given to him at baptism. And before the days of Christianity every man, woman, or child must have had some name. But the practice of giving surnames grew up only very gradually in the countries of Europe. ”

“ Even a casual examination of the family names of men discloses the fact that many of the most common must have originated in the adoption, by an individual, of the name of his occupation as a surname, to distinguish him from other men of the same given name. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some, once so popular that they scarce gave identity to the bearer, are now all but obsolete, while numerous appellations at present generally current were then utterly unknown. There are surnames familiar to our ears whose root as a Christian name is now passed out of knowledge; while, on the other hand, many a Christian name now daily upon our lips has no surname formed from it to tell of any lengthened existence. The fact is, that while our surnames, putting immigration aside, have been long at a standstill, we have ever been and are still adding to our stock of baptismal names. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing could be more natural than that children should often pass current in the community in which they lived as the sons of ‘Thomas,’ or ‘William,’ or ‘Richard,’ or ‘John;’ and that these several relationships should be found in our directories as distinct sobriquets only shows that there was a particular generation in these families in which this title became permanent, and passed on to future descendants as an hereditary surname. ”

“ A certain number, too, of a fanciful kind, as we have already seen, have been added within the last two centuries, but these latter have not of course affected our surnames. Nicknames, which form so large a proportion of our nomenclature, remain much the same; for a nation’s tongue, while receiving a constant deposit and throwing off ever a redundant phraseology, still, as a rule, does not touch these; they are taken from the deeper channel of a people’s speech. But the fashion and custom of living is ever changing. New wants spring up, and old requirements become unneeded ”