:pokes naming conventions:

[burntcopper]

Huh. Most north european countries, when the surname denotes that someone comes from somewhere, stick the equivalent of the prefix 'of' or 'from' in the front - de, van der, von, de la, te, van t', da, di and so on. How the hell did the English escape this? Our language is descended from germanic/dutch/friesian with Norman French laid over the top of it. Was it a post-invasion of Britain by Saxons thing? The only example I can think of is 'a' - and the only actual name I can think of that has it is Allan a Dale, and that's medieval which appears to have died out completely. Cornish uses Pen, Tre and Pol, but that's Celtic, not English.

All the prefixes I can think of in English surnames mean 'son/daughter of', (o', mac/mc, fitz) and they're all other languages, since 'son of' in northern european non-latin non-celt languages tends to be a suffix.

Comments

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

FWIW, in Swedish you'd sometimes have "från", meaning "from", in front, but you could also have the equivalents of "on" or "by". However, these tended to disappear reasonably quickly, so that "John of London" would become "John London".

You could also get a location prefix: "Åsa-Nisse" being "Nisse on the ridge" ("ås" meaning ridge).

My impression is that when you got to know someone for something else than where they were previously from (or what they do), it ceased to be a descriptor and became part of the full name. (Compare with "John the thatcher" becoming "John Thatcher".)