Over at Keywords, Kerim posts on Mongolian surnames, or the need for thereof:
Mongolians need surnames. Actually, they had surnames, but they lost them. How do you loose your surname? Well, it seems that the use of Surnames was banned during the communist era in order to “eliminate the clan system, the hereditary aristocracy and the class structure.” But now they need them again, and unfortunately for the government bureaucracy, it seems everyone wants to have the surname “Borjigin” [the clan name of, you guessed it, Uncle Genghis].
Kerim’s post has some good links you’ll want to take a look at. For much of the last 80 years, Mongolians have been using two names — a given name and a patronymic. To cite an example with which I’m somewhat familiar, my wife’s name is Galbadrakhin Solongo, lit. Solongo of Galbadrakh, Galbadrakh being her father’s given name. Occasionally, she will write this in the Western “given name-family name” fashion, i.e., Solongo Galbadrakh, but as you can see above, Galbadrakh is NOT a family name. The wife thinks the use of a patronymic might have been a borrowing from Brother Russia, but she’s not quite sure. Neither is she sure as to her long-lost clan name, although she says her grandmother claims it is, in fact, “Borjigin.”
Nathan of The Argus also posted on this subject, back in June.
(Hat tip to Muninn, which is a fine, fine blog, even if it’s run by a flaming lefty :))
PS: Yes, we’ve seen a restaurant in the COEX that actually had “Mongolian seafood” on the menu.
2 Comments
One way Russian name is constructed are:
Firstborn male’s firstname came from paternal grandfather’s firstname, middle name came from maternal grandfather’s firstname.
Secondborn male’s first name came from paternal grandfather’s middlename, middlename came from maternal grandfather’s middlename.
I don’t know the rule beyond the second male born.
Actually, Russians typically use given name, followed by patronymic, then family name. In Icelandic, one has only given name and patronymic so that the son of Olaf Fridrijkson would be Utmar Olaffson. Actually, the patronymic thing is pretty standard Indo-european at least historically, if not recently