On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 12:52 PM, Divya Sampath wrote: > > In most of the Spanish speaking world, everyone has > double-barrelled last names: for example, Maria Gomez > Felix. In the US, they tend to hyphenate to aoid > giving the impression that the first surname is a > 'middle name'. By convention, we may infer that > Maria's paternal surname is Gomez and maternal surname > is Felix. There are exceptions, some people use the > reverse order. In cases where the paternal surname is > very common, the person may go by the maternal > surnmae, i.e., the painter Picasso or the politician > Zapatero. >
Interesting... this sounds in some way similar to how some tribal groups in Kenya (the gikuyu, the mijikenda...) name their children... the first son is named after the paternal grandfather and the second after the maternal grandfather, girls are named similarly according to paternal and maternal grandmothers. Child number 3 and beyond are named after their paternal/maternal uncles and aunts using the same gender based mechanism. So if you know the family history, and you know the "number" of the child, you can automatically calculate the name of the child. This is used as the family name, and the child is also given a christian name and a traditional name (usually the name the mother calls the child by...). (the differentiation of surnames is fairly recent i think....) This makes it quite common for people to have the same first and last names, e.g. "Kabando peter Kabando" or "Tuva adams Tuva"..... (where the name usually gets corrupted to "Tuva Tuva" and then just "Tuva"....)
