Sunday, December 30, 2007

Family names are not the norm

Jens Helgason, is the name of an Icelandic man.

To friends, family and collegues, he will first and foremost be Jens.

The printed Icelandic phonebook is ordered alphabetically by first name.
Look up Jens Helgason in the online version here.

Helgason, is not his family name. There is no such thing in Iceland.
(There are exceptions to this. A few families have taken family names)

Helgason, tells you that he is son of a man called Helgi.
Literally his second name is Son of Helgi.
As Helgi conjugates to Helga in the posessive form, he becomes Helgason.

His sister Anna, is called Anna Helgadóttir, as she is not son of her father. She is daugther of her father Helgi and is therefore Helgadaugther.

Read back and notice that the four of them have four different second names. This can cause quite some explaining on travels abroad.

So when the family of Helgi Beinteinsson, his wife Arnlaug Illugadóttir and their son Jens Helgason and daughter Anna Helgadóttir checked into a hotel in London on a travel in 1978, the lobby cleric kept insisting in vain on getting a family name. The cleric originated from India and could not envision this scenario.
"Please write family name here!" he insisted.
Explanations that this did not exist made him repeat the question:
No family?

When the answer was yes, he went back to square one and demanded:
"Please write family name here!"

Luckily after several minutes, a supervisor stepped in and said "you are an Icelandic family arent you ?"

Damn right he was.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

well and this can get even more confusing when married couple have the same last name like, Jónsson and Jónsdóttir ... but its not the same Jón ... ;) or more like whole family:
Jón Jónsson and his wive Jóna Jónsdóttir and their kids, Jón Helgi Jónsson and Jóna Björk Jónsdóttir .... hehe :p

Cool Iceland said...

You are right.
The same name going again does not make it less confusing.

Conjugation of names can also cause confusion for foreigners about the sex.

Like here are (Hér eru)Ingi og Inga
About (um) Inga og Ingu

Who is the man and who is the woman?

Cool Iceland