Talk:Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson
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_ _ Sterio (talk · contribs) has summarized
- Sigurðsson is not a surname, it simply tells us that his father's name is Sigurður. It's most definately wrong to call him by that name...
Without irony (or more precisely, with only the irony that is built into the situation), this can be described as "highly accurate nonsense". By that i mean that i do not doubt the summary is a correct statement of how Icelanders think of their names, yet i have full confidence that it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether he should be referred to, at subsequent references, as "Hreiðar" (given name) or "Sigurðsson" (quasi-surname). In English discourse, the fact that these quasi-surnames are not passed on to the next generation (and that one's daughters' quasi-surnames differ from one's sons') is so little understood that only the most stubborn Icelander would consider asking, more than once, not to be called, e.g., "Mr. Sigurðsson". It would actually be the height of rudeness for us to follow Sterio's plan, and urge that Icelanders be given the burden of the silliness and confusion of our pretending that there is something wrong with letting the ignorant foreigners (Yanks, Brits, etc.) remain in ignorance until they have occasion to say "So tell me about your country."
_ _ WP offers a fine example of the principle underlying this, reflecting a contrast with virtually everyone knowing that Chinese living where the Chinese language predominates put their surnames first, and many of us having the sense to wonder which other East Asian and Southeast Asian cultures do the same: It is a practically unknown fact that Hungarian surnames also belong first. (Note the handwriting on Béla Bartók's photo.) The consequence is that Háry János is an opera based on the writing of János Garay; notice that the opera's title has the given name János after the surname Háry (and it is always so named in English), but WP refers to the author by putting the given name János before the surname Garay, and ignoring Garay János and Garay Janos for going-on 14 months. (So does the rest of the English speaking world, with the probable exception of the late, flamboyantly pedantic, Robert J. Lurtsema, who called the opera's composer "Kodály Zoltán", a 15-month-old Rdr (as is Kodaly Zoltan) to the 44-month-old bio article.) You may be able to Google up some Hungarian-language pages on "Garay János", but don't expect English ones for anything closer than "Garay, János". (Another WP example with the same given name is János Kádár. Note these rdlks: Kádár János and Kadar Janos -- while i support them becoming rdrs, the 32 months that we've gotten by without them make their creation a low priority in my mind.)
--Jerzy•t 07:06, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
