Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- To the reader
- Introduction
- Gestures & Signals
- Customs & Behaviours
- Names & Addresses
- What's so good about it? the curious nature of ‘good-’ greetings
- Ahoy, ahoy! Pick up the phone! ‘hello’ and its uses
- The unlucky Mr Szczęściarz: foreign names in foreign places
- Wang is King in China: too many people, not enough names
- Finding Björk: Icelandic names
- Yoo-hoo! Who? You! how Swedes don't address each other
- Mister Doctor: titles of medicos, surgeons and barbers
- I forget my name: loss of first name by marriage
- When your coz is your sis: kinship terms
- You, thou and other politenesses: familiar and polite ‘you’
- Include me out! dual, trial and other grammatical curiosities
- For me to know and you to find out: naming and name taboos
- Bye-bye! how things have changed
- Postscript
- Notes
- Sources
- Index
Finding Björk: Icelandic names
from Names & Addresses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- To the reader
- Introduction
- Gestures & Signals
- Customs & Behaviours
- Names & Addresses
- What's so good about it? the curious nature of ‘good-’ greetings
- Ahoy, ahoy! Pick up the phone! ‘hello’ and its uses
- The unlucky Mr Szczęściarz: foreign names in foreign places
- Wang is King in China: too many people, not enough names
- Finding Björk: Icelandic names
- Yoo-hoo! Who? You! how Swedes don't address each other
- Mister Doctor: titles of medicos, surgeons and barbers
- I forget my name: loss of first name by marriage
- When your coz is your sis: kinship terms
- You, thou and other politenesses: familiar and polite ‘you’
- Include me out! dual, trial and other grammatical curiosities
- For me to know and you to find out: naming and name taboos
- Bye-bye! how things have changed
- Postscript
- Notes
- Sources
- Index
Summary
Iceland is one of few countries where the telephone directory is sorted alphabetically by first name. This is by and large because Icelandic people simply do not have family names.
By far the most common case is that your ‘last name’ is made up of your father's first name and a suffix that signals whether you are a son or a daughter. For instance, ‘Páll (Paul), son of Eiríkur (Eric)’ and ‘Helga, daughter of Eiríkur’.
An example. Björn and Helga are brother and sister. Their parents are Jón and Elsa. Björn's full name will be ‘Björn Jónsson’ (John's son) and his sister will write her name ‘Helga Jónsdóttir’ (John's daughter).
If in turn Björn marries and has a son and a daughter, their second names will be ‘Björnsson’ and ‘Björnsdóttir’ respectively. If his sister Helga marries, her children will make their second names from the first name of her husband.
This means that members of the same family all have different ‘surnames’, and it would be pointless to have a phone book listed by last name, as almost everyone's last name is really the father's first name.
Instead, the Icelandic telephone book is listed according to people's first names, as this is the name callers are most likely to know. If you then also know the first name of the person's father, you have an even better chance of finding them in the directory. Best of all is if you know where the person lives, in which case you go by first name and address.
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- Information
- Tales of Hi and ByeGreeting and Parting Rituals Around the World, pp. 157 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009