> I'm not sure whether Srp is similar. The Serbian-language word for the Serbian language itself is Srpski (српски), but srp is also Slavic for “sickle”...
Native speaker here, these are in fact two different words, since the change that happens in the root of the word 'Srb' that converts it to 'Srp' when the suffix 'ski' is added is called Consonant voicing or originally 'Jednacenje suglasnika po zvucnosti'.
Oh well, if you take a closer look, you will find why: most if not all of those with surnames look weird in English are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from a non-English speaking background. When they/their ancestors arrived, they most likely do not speak English at all or might be a couple of words, some of them might not even have a surname. When they arrived at the customs, they for sure needed something English on their papers. It would make sense to take what ever came to their mind at that moment as their surname.
Such things can be observed in every English speaking countries I would say. As those surnames were actually picked randomly, and when they/their descendants moved again, they most likely carried that randomly chosen surname with them. And now it becomes quirks that lots of surnames of different spellings are actually exactly the same in their origin. Lots of descendants of immigrants no longer neither can read or write in their own language but English, some might be either able to read or write but hardly anyone can do both.
There are plenty native English surnames that came about before spellings standardized leading to (in the case of my own) Metcalf, Metcalfe, Medcalfe, Medcalf, Midcalfe, Midcalf all being the same name.
So even immigrants coming from places that have surnames can have lots of variety before taking into account there isn't always a single best way to write a name in the Latin script.
A famous case of this is the Danish man Victor Cornelins that was born in St. Croix but at the age of seven was brought to Denmark to become part of a human exhibition as a "negro kid" to attract visitors. His birth name was Cornelius which is not unusual in Danish so Cornelins must have been a simple writing mistake. However, this lapse is negligible compared to the racism he was subjected to.
This particular problem, of matching misspelled immigrant surnames was the reason for development of phonetic matching algorithms. See https://stevemorse.org/phonetics/bmpm2.htm
> It would make sense to take what ever came to their mind at that moment as their surname.
Or whatever was the first thing that came to the mind of the clerk that was filling out the papers. I know a guy whose family name became "Bohunk" at Ellis Island.
Some surnames that look weird in English happened because there was a word in one language being written with another language's spelling assumptions. (Mine is one that works like that.)
As of now, the longest vowel-less meaningful sentence in Czech is:
Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn.
The meaning of the sentence is:
Stingy dormouse from Brdy mountains fogs full of manure spots firstly proudly shrank a quarter of handful seeds, a delicacy for mean does, from brakes through bunch of Centaurea flowers into scrub of willows.
It is vowel-less only from the perspective of the languages where "R" and "L" can be only consonants, i.e. they must always belong to syllables where another sound is the vowel (i.e. the peak of sonority).
In Czech and in many other present or past languages, including in the Proto-Indo-European, "R" and "L" can be both consonants and vowels, depending on the neighbour sounds.
While there are many languages where "R" and "L" cannot be vowels, in almost all languages "I" and "U" can be either vowels or consonants, also depending on their environment.
There are languages where even "E" and "O" can be consonants in certain environments, not only vowels. There are also languages where the nasal plosives or even some sibilants may be vowels, not only consonants.
In general, only "A" is always a vowel and only the non-nasal plosives are always only consonants.
For the other sounds of intermediate sonority, it varies from language to language whether they are used only as consonants or only as vowels, or they may be used as either consonants or vowels, depending on the environment.
The doctor who is mentioned does likely belong to the Parsi community of India.
The Parsis came from Iran to India to flee Islamic persecution. And they are among the "model minorities" in India.
There are many famous people with occupational last names. But I don’t know why. Did they not have last names originally?
Last name convention in India varies wildly. Bengalis, Marathis, Hindustanis go with the family last name. Many Muslims do not. They can choose among Ali, Sheikh, Mian, etc. South Indians often put their father's name as last name.
Did Parsis have none? I wonder.
Farokh Engineer [0] was a famous Indian cricketer.
I have even heard of names like Daruwala (seller of alcohol), Screwwala (screws), etc. IRL.
The wildest one that I have heard is SodaBottleOpenerWala [1]. Wala just means "having". So a seller of X would be X-wala [1a].
The Parsis are a influential minority who enjoy a good perception from the population. Homi Bhaba, FRS [2] was the father of Indian Nuclear Science. Sam Maneckshaw [3] was a legendary Field Marshal who helped liberate Bangladesh from Pakistan. Ratan Tata is the leader of Tata Group in India. They own Jaguar Land Rover brand.
Parsis were, and still somewhat are in prominent positions of Bollywood, science, military, and definitely industry.
Nitpick: These are names with no _vowel letters_; many (if not all, depending on how you define what a vowel is) of these letters are pronounced with a vowel.
The letters R, L, M can create a syllable in the czech language, similar to vowels. All words in the article are single-syllable words.
The word "srp" in Czech is a "sickle" - a tool for harvesting wheat: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srp From that, you get "Srpen" - "August", which is a "month of harvesting crops" (same in Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, etc).
Or "Huáng" (黄) or "Ruǎn" (阮) or maybe something else, depending on what the actual surname is and where they're from. (阮 is also the Chinese character for the Vietnamese surname Nguyễn.)
Another strange transliteration is the most common Vietnamese-descent surname Nguyễn, pronounced roughly as Win, n-Win or n-Yen (with the n being very quiet). I do wonder why these difficult transliterations were chosen over more obvious ones.
As a European, when I think of stereotypical 'American' surnames, it's often the European ones that are not common near me that I think of, particularly Polish names ending in -ski and Italian names ending in -i.
I wonder if other areas in Europe do the same in reverse. (Though typing this out I realise that I grew up knowing a few people with a Polish and Italian surname that fits these patterns, so possibly that's why they stick out for me personally).
I think it's confusing to non-speakers of Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croat and Slovene because they may just not be 100% on how it should be pronounced. Quite a few names get mangled when used in US English even when the letters don't have háčky, čárky etc. Brett Favre becomes "Brett Farve", Weird Al Yankovic's surname is pronounced "Yankovik" (not "Yankovitch"), anything ending in "-owski" is pronounced "OW-skee" (instead of ov-skee).
I read that with an almost sarcastic tone. I don't think the author thinks it's confusing, they're probably mocking the immigration officers who found them confusing and chose to simply erase them.
Nowadays, it would be considered disrespectful to call a language feature "confusing" (also it would sound dumb) so I don't think that's what the author is doing.
There's not many accents or variations from basic ascii in english, so anything squiggly is usually confusing. In my language we use a few accents and character variations and I often meet Americans who have never seen such character variations like ç and get confused. Perhaps the author had similar experiences.
Unless you are exposed to the languages, no one realistically knows how to pronounce them.
I'm going to guess, however, that the real reason for dropping them was due to typewriters (and later computers) that simply don't have them as an option. You can't print punctuation and letters that you simply don't have access to. ö, ø, å, æ and the like get dropped as well.
I don't think truly vowel-less words can exist, unless the consonants can all be "held" like {rr, sh, th, zh, l}. If a consonant cannot be held, like {b, k, t, d}, then there has to be a vowel somewhere.
When I say "ng", I say it almost like "oong", so there's a starting vowel. I can say it with an ending vowel like "nga". I suppose the consonant "ng" can be held, but it's hard to say it without pronouncing a vowel somewhere.
> I suppose the consonant "ng" can be held, but it's hard to say it without pronouncing a vowel somewhere.
It just takes a bit of practice. The surname Ng is pronounced without a vowel in Cantonese.
It's true that you can't really have a stop-only word in isolation, but they can still exist with other words depending on how you define what a word is.
You could consider "'d", the contracted form of "would", "had", or "did", to be a word in English. If you didn't, it would imply that "you'd", "I'd", "Mary'd" etc. must be words in their own right which is a bit ridiculous.
A good example in another language would be 't and 'k in Dutch, since they're also written with spaces separating them.
The author appears to mostly randomly choose from a menu of Slavic options, both wrt etymology and geography. For example “smrt” means “death” across Slavic languages, yet Czech is randomly chosen to be mentioned in the article.
Similar problems with Croatia vs Serbia vs Yugoslavia are discussed in others’ comments.
It says it's Cantonese, not Mandarin. There are many ethnic Chinese in Vietnam (Hoa), and many of them speak Cantonese or are descended from Cantonese speakers.
[+] [-] forehanddev|4 years ago|reply
Native speaker here, these are in fact two different words, since the change that happens in the root of the word 'Srb' that converts it to 'Srp' when the suffix 'ski' is added is called Consonant voicing or originally 'Jednacenje suglasnika po zvucnosti'.
[+] [-] acadapter|4 years ago|reply
"equalizaton of consonants on [the basis of] voicedness"
[+] [-] mrjin|4 years ago|reply
Such things can be observed in every English speaking countries I would say. As those surnames were actually picked randomly, and when they/their descendants moved again, they most likely carried that randomly chosen surname with them. And now it becomes quirks that lots of surnames of different spellings are actually exactly the same in their origin. Lots of descendants of immigrants no longer neither can read or write in their own language but English, some might be either able to read or write but hardly anyone can do both.
[+] [-] cwmma|4 years ago|reply
So even immigrants coming from places that have surnames can have lots of variety before taking into account there isn't always a single best way to write a name in the Latin script.
[+] [-] liversage|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Cornelins
[+] [-] forehanddev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hereforonep|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
Or whatever was the first thing that came to the mind of the clerk that was filling out the papers. I know a guy whose family name became "Bohunk" at Ellis Island.
[+] [-] mbg721|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|4 years ago|reply
Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn.
The meaning of the sentence is:
Stingy dormouse from Brdy mountains fogs full of manure spots firstly proudly shrank a quarter of handful seeds, a delicacy for mean does, from brakes through bunch of Centaurea flowers into scrub of willows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C4%8D_prst_skrz_krk
I just walked around Brdy yesterday, but I didn't meet any stingy dormouse. They must be rare.
[+] [-] adrian_b|4 years ago|reply
It is vowel-less only from the perspective of the languages where "R" and "L" can be only consonants, i.e. they must always belong to syllables where another sound is the vowel (i.e. the peak of sonority).
In Czech and in many other present or past languages, including in the Proto-Indo-European, "R" and "L" can be both consonants and vowels, depending on the neighbour sounds.
While there are many languages where "R" and "L" cannot be vowels, in almost all languages "I" and "U" can be either vowels or consonants, also depending on their environment.
There are languages where even "E" and "O" can be consonants in certain environments, not only vowels. There are also languages where the nasal plosives or even some sibilants may be vowels, not only consonants.
In general, only "A" is always a vowel and only the non-nasal plosives are always only consonants.
For the other sounds of intermediate sonority, it varies from language to language whether they are used only as consonants or only as vowels, or they may be used as either consonants or vowels, depending on the environment.
[+] [-] rg111|4 years ago|reply
The Parsis came from Iran to India to flee Islamic persecution. And they are among the "model minorities" in India.
There are many famous people with occupational last names. But I don’t know why. Did they not have last names originally?
Last name convention in India varies wildly. Bengalis, Marathis, Hindustanis go with the family last name. Many Muslims do not. They can choose among Ali, Sheikh, Mian, etc. South Indians often put their father's name as last name.
Did Parsis have none? I wonder.
Farokh Engineer [0] was a famous Indian cricketer.
I have even heard of names like Daruwala (seller of alcohol), Screwwala (screws), etc. IRL.
The wildest one that I have heard is SodaBottleOpenerWala [1]. Wala just means "having". So a seller of X would be X-wala [1a].
The Parsis are a influential minority who enjoy a good perception from the population. Homi Bhaba, FRS [2] was the father of Indian Nuclear Science. Sam Maneckshaw [3] was a legendary Field Marshal who helped liberate Bangladesh from Pakistan. Ratan Tata is the leader of Tata Group in India. They own Jaguar Land Rover brand.
Parsis were, and still somewhat are in prominent positions of Bollywood, science, military, and definitely industry.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farokh_Engineer
[1]: https://www.sodabottleopenerwala.in/food/the-story-behind-wa...
[1a]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallah
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homi_J._Bhabha
[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Manekshaw
[+] [-] uranusjr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timeon|4 years ago|reply
maybe in English but not in Slavic languages (at least not in western Slavic).
"prst skrz krk" [ˈpr̩st] [ˈskr̩s] [ˈkr̩k]
[+] [-] IvanK_net|4 years ago|reply
The word "srp" in Czech is a "sickle" - a tool for harvesting wheat: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srp From that, you get "Srpen" - "August", which is a "month of harvesting crops" (same in Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, etc).
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
Is it a coincidence that this glyph looks like a man, waving his hand?
[+] [-] est|4 years ago|reply
You are 99% close. It actually means a person speaks loudly with palm hand
https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E5%90%B4
[+] [-] McNutty|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yorwba|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
I wonder if other areas in Europe do the same in reverse. (Though typing this out I realise that I grew up knowing a few people with a Polish and Italian surname that fits these patterns, so possibly that's why they stick out for me personally).
[+] [-] iNerdier|4 years ago|reply
What’s so confusing about a háček?
[+] [-] smcl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Biganon|4 years ago|reply
Nowadays, it would be considered disrespectful to call a language feature "confusing" (also it would sound dumb) so I don't think that's what the author is doing.
[+] [-] vasco|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|4 years ago|reply
I'm going to guess, however, that the real reason for dropping them was due to typewriters (and later computers) that simply don't have them as an option. You can't print punctuation and letters that you simply don't have access to. ö, ø, å, æ and the like get dropped as well.
[+] [-] timeon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ogogmad|4 years ago|reply
When I say "ng", I say it almost like "oong", so there's a starting vowel. I can say it with an ending vowel like "nga". I suppose the consonant "ng" can be held, but it's hard to say it without pronouncing a vowel somewhere.
Note: This opinion is not scientific.
[+] [-] Asraelite|4 years ago|reply
It just takes a bit of practice. The surname Ng is pronounced without a vowel in Cantonese.
It's true that you can't really have a stop-only word in isolation, but they can still exist with other words depending on how you define what a word is.
You could consider "'d", the contracted form of "would", "had", or "did", to be a word in English. If you didn't, it would imply that "you'd", "I'd", "Mary'd" etc. must be words in their own right which is a bit ridiculous.
A good example in another language would be 't and 'k in Dutch, since they're also written with spaces separating them.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dvh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] innermatrix|4 years ago|reply
Similar problems with Croatia vs Serbia vs Yugoslavia are discussed in others’ comments.
[+] [-] retrac|4 years ago|reply
Surely "Mr. Death" is a bit unusual in its own right?
[+] [-] tiahura|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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