RE: Norway - go to jail for naming baby illegal [CNN]

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

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Icelandic last names, and old Norse last names in general, change,
algorithimically, every generation.

Your "last" name, if male, is your father's first name with "son" after it.

If you're female it's your mother's first name, with, I believe "dottir"
(daughter) after it.

So, if your parents are Eric (say :-)), and, um, Helga, and you're male and
your name is Lief, your name would be (oddly enough) Lief Ericsson.

If you're female, and your name is, oh, Greta, (I don't know many female Norse
names, and that's probably not one, Miss Garbo to the contrary) then your name
would be Greta Helgasdottir, or something like that.

Icelanders on the list will correct the specifics, of course. The price of
error is bandwidth, and all that, but you get the idea.

So, no matter who your are, if you're to become an Icelandic citizen, your
last name changes.

Mine, since my family's Fresian, would change from "Hettinga" ("guy who lives
on a hill", which almost everyone did, or they lived in a swamp :-)), to
"Ralphson", which, fortunately, is almost passable Icelandic. Actually,
Frisians, the bad guys in Beowulf, could almost pass for Norse in general, as
anyone who's met me might testify.

Think of it as an anonymous renamer?

:-).


Cheers,
Robert Hettinga

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Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'