Family names

[FartinMowler]

I've been wanting to have this question answered for a very long time now. Ok How come there is so many different family names? It just doesn't make any sence to me that there are so many different variations of family names.

[AChimp]

A) Certain terms get combined over time, or people's speech slurs syllables together. (i.e. Goodbye = God be with you). Different cultures would end up combining syllables in different ways.

B) Different languages. Plain language terms like "short" would get translated into the local dialect.

C) Different spellings. When immigrants came to North America at the beginning of the 20th century, most of them couldn't read or write, so when they were asked their names, the dude filling out the form just wrote down how he thought it was spelled. Different dudes meant different spellings.

[FS]

Also, family names haven't always existed. I don't know much about the subject even in my own country, just that during my country's French occupation, it was decreed that everyone had to choose a last name to be more easily identified, or something. Up till that time, people had been using their last name as a reference to their father: "Peter's Son", "John's Daughter". Anyway, a whole lot of new, made-up names suddenly appeared this way (some people even made up joke names because they thought the concept was stupid and wouldn't last - "Bornnude" is still a rather common name over here). Some people probably combined their existing last name into a single word, which would be where names like Johnson and Peterson come from.

[pjalne]

A lot of family names are the name of the job one ancestor or another had. This is very common in Germany, as well as many other places.

Here in Norway, people's names are usually the name of the place their family comes from.

In some countries like Sri Lanka, the wife and children of a man take his first name as their last.

[FartinMowler]

thankyou very much for replies. It was one of those wierd little questions that I had in the back of my head for a while and your answers where fun and interesting.