Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Jorengarenar | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

Jorengarenar

Absolutely off-topic, but I need to get it out of myself:

I just noticed Joel Spolsky's surname means "from Poland" ("z Polski")

View on HN

A common assumption, but it is actually from Шпола, a city in the Ukraine.

Really? I assumed it's the same genesis as the word "spruce" ("z Prus")

In case you missed it, that is Spolsky himself replying to you

Indeed I did miss that, but fortunately my reply wouldn't have changed.

Now I kinda hope for further details. Is the surname from adjective "Шполянський"?

seems reasonable to hypothesize that the Ukranian town might have named "from Poland"

Disclaimer: I'm a complete noob about the history of the region and the languages involved.

I just figured out the best way to get an answer on the web is to post a wrong one first, so I went 5 minutes into the subject on Wikipedia and what I've concluded is that maybe it's actually the other way around.

Poland is like "Land of Polans" which were the original tribe of the region.

The Ш letter seems it is a prefix that comes from Hebrew, so maybe, Шпола also refers to Polans in some way.

I must emphasize again that this can be completely wrong.

The name "polans" derives from the word "pole", which simply means "field". There were actually several different groups of Slavs who were known as "polans", all named because of where they settled. One of them did indeed found Poland. But there were also (different) polans in what is now Ukraine - indeed, they were the dominant group, as Kyiv was their city.

In any case, "pol" in the placename can simply refer to a field directly. Or even to something else; in case of Shpola, the local legend is that it was named after the guy who first settled there.

I think the workers on Ellis Island often made up last names when speaking to hurried immigrant families. My last name is pretty close to "Von Der Hook" by pronunciation, which is awful close to "from the hook" (Hoek, a part of Netherlands). My friend is quite close to "From the Sluis", which is another part of Netherlands.

Add to that the various spellings "Vander X, Van Der X, VanderX". I'm sure the conversation went

"Surname?"

"Vas?"

"Where you from?"

"Von Der Hook"

scribbles something on intake card. "Next!"

Not doubting your story, but wanted to add that many European Jewish communities especially wound up with surnames that reference geography. That would have happened centuries before the US existed, representing migrations that happened in Europe.

Don't have a lot of details on this history (which i heard orally) but a Google search for "Jewish surnames geography" seems to back me up.

Yeah this very much might be how surnames actually happened. I wouldn't know. Or, a little of column A and column B.

China still struggles with that. A traditional question is "what is your village?", to get name uniqueness in a system which has too few family names.

France at one time went to the other extreme - names had to be approved by a central registry at birth. Until 1993, there was an official list of allowed first names. Today, there are still some prohibited names. "Nutella" just made the list.

> “Nutella” just made the list

My wife is French. We’re expecting our third child and the other two, Banana and Oatmeal, were devastated.

In #dadjokes on one of the slack channels I'm in...

> On the way home I'd pick up Pizza and Coke. She wasn't happy with me.

> Fur fgvyy unfa'g sbetvira zr sbe anzvat gur xvqf.

https://rot13.com

A clarification: it's not so much that there's a list of prohibited names, it's more like some people had "clever" ideas and the legal naming process has a judge involved to validate that names are not outrageous or could cause harm to a child. Once it's been ruled out, it's unlikely to have a different result on a second occurence.

Examples (from the process above: keep in mind people actually tried)

Titeuf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titeuf

Fraise: (strawberry) because of the expression "ramène ta faise" ("bring you ass over here")

Jihad: for obvious reasons

Joyeux: (happy) from the dwarf name

Patriste: (notsad) an attempt to circumvent the above

Babord / Tribord: (port / starboard) someone tried that for twins

MJ: trying to honour of Mickael Jackson's death

Griezmann Mbappé: you can guess

Mégane: because the family name was Renaud (close to Renault, which has a car named Mégane)

Mohamed: because the family name was Merah (Mohamed Merah being a well-known serial murderer)

Fañch: a traditional Brittany name, initially rejected because the ~ diacritic, which does not exist in the French alphabet. Was later overruled and allowed.

The horrible part, though, is about all those terrible names that are not rejected as the ones above were but are obviously a sort of sad, tasteless joke and very very bad for the child.

My sister's ex-husband's family tacked a "-ski" onto their surname while immigrating to avoid sounding too German. They immigrated during one of the World Wars (I believe it was the second) when anti-German sentiment was high.

If they're from Silesia, it might actually be a mixed German/Polish family that used both family names historically depending on the context; it was not uncommon there.

I'm surprised there aren't more people around with the surname Vas

I don't know anything about refugees immigrating into the US so I can't refute your story in any way, but one thing worthy of note is that Dutch names often include geographical areas with "van de/van der/van" (meaning "of, from") as an insertion ("tussenvoegsel") between first and last name . "van der Sluis" would be a perfectly normal Dutch name. I also wouldn't think twice about "van der Hoek" if I heard someone introduce themselves by that name.

Many people had to pick surnames when the French occupied the Netherlands, often leading to geographical names, references to occupations, or sometimes even jokes ("Naaktgeboren" being relatively common, meaning "born naked"). The forefathers of someone named "van der Sluis" could have lived near a sluice/lock, lived near a place called Sluis, or perhaps operated sluices/locks as part of their job in the barging industry.

English speaking countries where last names consisting of multiple words were incredibly rare often concatenate(d) such names into one or fewer words. To many English speakers the only name with multiple words would imply nobility (if they even considered the concept at all) and I wouldn't expect nobility to arrive amidst refugees either. To this day some American websites refuse to take the space in my last name.

As an added bonus, Dutch names specifically can have "tussenvoegsels" that are part of the name but need to be treated specially to be used correctly (i.e. when sorting a list of names). Depending on if the name belongs to a Belgian or a Dutchman the capitalisation rules also differ (the Flemish capitalising the "Van", the Dutch using lowercase letters). Of course other languages and cultures also have their own naming schemes with grammar rules (take German/Austrian "von" or Danish "af/de/von" for example); it's hardly a unique concept, but the details differ between countries.

It's no wonder those poor American immigration workers couldn't make heads or tails out of the names these people brought into their country. As a Dutchman, the end result is often quite interesting to witness when Americans or Canadians with Dutch names appear on TV, most names containing their own special deviation from "normal" Dutch names.

> Depending on if the name belongs to a Belgian or a Dutchman the capitalisation rules also differ (the Flemish capitalising the "Van", the Dutch using lowercase letters).

Actually, a little-known grammar rule (in the Netherlands) is that lowercase is only used for a tussenvoegsel following a first name. In other cases, the first tussenvoegsel is capitalized.

Example: Piet van der Sluis -> meneer Van der Sluis

https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/hoofdletters-in-aanhef-brief-o...

That's true, but in many cases where official registration is involved one tends to need to write out one's full name (the capitalisation of which then depends on the country of origin).

> I think the workers on Ellis Island often made up last names when speaking to hurried immigrant families

This is a myth.

C'mon, you can't just drop that in with no corroborating data.

I could, with similar authority, state that it being a myth is a myth.

"Someone wanting to book passage to America, Canada, Australia, South America, etc., would have had no difficulty locating an agent. Agents quoted ticket prices to the would-be traveler, accepted payment, and then recorded each traveler’s name and other identifying information (the specific information collected varied over the years). The information taken down by the agents was sent to the home office, where it was transferred by shipping company clerks onto large blank sheets provided by the US government. Those sheets became the passenger lists which later were used by American port officials."

https://journals.ala.org/index.php/dttp/article/view/6655/89...

Don’t take it on my authority. Read any historical source about what happened at Ellis Island, eg. https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/ellis-island-facts-and-...

Even wikipedia has it under the “Name-change myth” section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island

> Records show that immigration officials often actually corrected mistakes in immigrants' names, since inspectors knew three languages on average and each worker was usually assigned to process immigrants who spoke the same languages.

> Many immigrant families Americanized their surnames afterward, either immediately following the immigration process or gradually after assimilating into American culture. Because the average family changed their surname five years after immigration, the Naturalization Act of 1906 required documentation of name changes.

See, that's what you should have posted originally.

I was just following the “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”-principle.

There is just no evidence that Ellis Island officials made up names, and this is a very througly studied area of US history.

I have an incomprehensible last name and it often gets butchered by busy people.

It would not surprise me at all if some overworked government employee doesn't really care what noises the foreigner is trying to make. This was in a time when lots of people couldn't read or write.

The officials at Ellis island did not ask for names and then write them down, they used written manifests from the ships.

Says the guy with the made-up user name.

Where do you place the burden of proof when someone makes up a story with no evidence and which contradict all legitimate histocal sources - and another comment calls bullshit?

The grandparent anecdote is very clearly a work of imagination, while historical sources show that new names were not assigned at Ellis Island, and that Ellis Island officials were multilingual and assigned to immigrant cases based on language.

No doubt this kind of thing happened, but people also just changed their names over time because it's easier. One of my grandfather's brother migrated to Canada in the 50s, and he now goes by "Vanderloo" or "Vanderlo" (not entirely sure how he spells it) instead of "Van der Loo".

Same people Dutch people named Martijn or Maarten, who will often use Martin abroad. Johan Cruijff is typically known as Cruyff abroad, etc.

>I think the workers on Ellis Island often made up last names

no, ship's manifests (prepared at the point of departure) have been a standard in the ocean-voyage game for a long long time, and those were the lists used by immigration, not handwritten lists based on what they heard.

see here https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-isla...

> I think the workers on Ellis Island often made up last names when speaking to hurried immigrant families.

This is not true. The Ellis Island workers recieved the names in written form from the ships passenger lists. But many immigrants changed their names after arriving in the US for convenience or to better integrate in society.

https://forward.com/culture/13721/how-did-jews-choose-their-... describes reasons how and why Jewish people chose names in Europe when Joseph II enforced them. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2017/importa...

I wonder if Yiddish speaking ancestors pronounced that S as SH because P follows it, which would not be in keeping with its Slavic root.

Now that Mr. Spolsky himself cleared up the etymology, I wish i could delete this.

But he cited something with the letter ш, indicating the sh sound. So I think I was onto something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com