Talk:German family name etymology

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Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (January 2007)

To user Cautious: Could you please provide a reference and some more info for your statement concerning the poet Hoffman? Who is he? (Please provide the full name.) Could you create an extra page for him or link an existing one, respectively?

Contents 1 Meyer 2 Requested expansion 3 Colours as family names 4 The Jewish Question

[edit] Meyer

"Yet others adopted traditional German names in order to blend in, most famously Meyer." — *What's your source for this? I know of a small number of Jewish "Meyer" like names, but at least some of them come from other sources, I think -- for example, Louis B. Mayer was a Russian named Meir; Golda Meir's husband was a Meyerson... --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 16:28, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It was something i heard often and just took for granted; but now that you mention it, i realize that i actually don't have a particular source. So it may very well be wrong. I don't think that "Meir" is a Russian name, and i think it may be possible to dig up a few more examples, but i wouldn't want to do that. Why dig in other families' history if they themselves may not want to? I'm fine with just deleting this sentence – i certainly don't want Wikipedia to perpetuate old wives' tales. — Sebastian (talk) 19:03, 2005 Apr 30 (UTC)

Meier or Mayer or Mair or whatever, means a Beamter (civil servant) wich was the administrator of an Lord or Duke.

Later the "Meier" was an Farmer which have a huge farm (Meierhof). --84.175.83.109 09:41, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

See also: Tenant farmer--DanielMrakic 09:50, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Requested expansion

Expanding is good, but we should define a goal. Simply adding large numbers of family names will make the page unusable. There are tens of thousands of German family names. Any suggestions for what an expanded page might look like? --Chl 2 July 2005 14:43 (UTC)

One possibility is along linguistic lines, such as how names vary by region, much as placenames ending in -caster are found in the north of England, versus -chester in the south. For example, one of the variations of Meyer (typically German?) is Maier (typically Austrian?). I also understand that spelling variations such -man or -mann are also significant, I think dividing along Jewish/non-Jewish lines. Trishm 11:32, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Colours as family names

Could someone who knows about the subject please add a mention of the use of words for colours (e.g. Blau) as family names in German? I've heard that these were sometimes, but not always, taken by Jewish people who wanted a name with few connotations. Redluca 12:01, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

From my personal family line I know that some colour names were taken by immigrants as simple translations. E.g. a Scotsman named Douglas ("black river" in Gaelic) chose "Schwarz" (black) as new surname when emigrating to Prussia.

Schwarz, Rot, Weiss, or variants thereof (e.g. Schwartz, Roth) seem to be among the most common colour names. I don't think the Jews are to blame for that as there are plenty of possible origins older than the adoption of German surnames by Jews in the 18th/19th century. It makes sense to chose a very common or simple name like the colour names, though, when deciding to adopt a German surname. -- 62.143.91.56 13:35, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Jewish Question

Since a) there are other discussions of the subject of Jewish surnames within Wikipedia, and b) most "German" Jewish surnames are actually as much Yiddish as German, and c) almost everything in this short discussion is incorrect or highly incomplete, perhaps we should replace it with a link to Jewish name.

Some points of fact:

° Rothschild and Schwarzschild are names of houses, the former in the Frankfurt ghetto. (Click link for reference.)

° Stein is not a two-part name.

° The "assigned by the officials" and "derogatory names" stories are largely myth. There are plenty of Jewish jokes and anti-Semitic canards about this sort of thing, but the alleged names themselves are almost impossible to find, and most proffered examples turn out to be non-derogatory, equally or more common among Gentiles, or pure fiction. This tiny footnote in the subject of Jewish names gets far, far more press than it should.

° Meyer to blend in: Meir is a Hebrew given name; many Jews took "Meyer" as their "public" given name as well.

° Loewe to blend in: Loewe was chosen directly from the given name Judah. At the end of Genesis, the dying Jacob blessed his sons, comparing 4 of them to animals. Judah was compared to a lion (Aryeh in Hebrew, hence that given name). The "public" given name for many Jews named Aryeh or Yehuda or similar was Loeb or Loebel, and the surname was derived from that. See http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/namfaq0.htm#07 for more on the kinnui (nickname) issue.

° Loewe for Levi: that would cause confusion, because anyone from the tribe of Judah was by definition not a Levite. This transformation may have happened on occasion, but given the popularity of names like Levin and Levi, not to mention other names such as Siegel that could connote Levitic descent, it's unlikely that this would explain more than a few cases.

To Trish: in German, the -mann suffix always has the double-n, just like the word "Mann", meaning "man." In Poland and Russia, where German was not spoken, Yiddish was written in Hebrew characters and Russian in Cyrillic, transliterations of names usually used "-man." The second "n" was also generally dropped by immigrants to English-speaking countries, not least because of how we spell the word "man."

To Redluca: colors were also physical attributes, often hair--hence black, white, red, brown, gold, yellow. The surname "Goldgar" is a transliteration of "Goldhaar" (golden hair) from the Cyrillic, where g and h are assigned to the same character. (You haven't really experienced Gamlet until you've seen it done in the original Russian. ;) ) RogerLustig 23:29, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

PS: "Marquard" pronounced "Markwart" is perhaps not the most fortunate example of Huguenot names being re-pronounced after emigration to Prussia. After all, Marquard is a Frenchification of Markwart, "keeper of the borders". See [[1]] for more.