Black Raven Dragoons

[Zancarius]

Some of you who have an interest in history might find this interesting (particularly Lith)

http://www.slate.com/id/2225718/

[Grimblast]

Interesting. I never knew that. I did know about the other title business such as announcing what town or city your are from or your profession.

[Zancarius]

Same here. What I didn't realize either was that the locational titles and such lived on in Italy much longer than they did elsewhere in Europe.

It's kind of a shame that we've lost this particular aspect of our history. There's no going back, either. With as mobile as society is these days, those types of titles probably wouldn't work! Then there's the issue of many more people in various locations...

[Grimblast]

My enemies now of me as Josh of La Luz, annihilator of gnome ninjas, slayer of annoying customers, feared by denizens of the 5th dimension! Friends just call me Josh.

[Zancarius]

What about Mistress of Magma?

[Lithium]

That's very awesome, I had known that many Italian families were named after their provinces and cities of their origin, so you didn't have 100 guys named Vincenzo being indistinguishable. But I never knew how it came to change and how problematic it was, chiefly with debt and tax collection.

Pretty interesting read! Good find!

[Zancarius]

Yeah, I thought this was really cool!

It really surprised me about Galileo and more so about there being little consistency between naming (like how he'd go by one name in one location and another elsewhere--even going so far as to picking a particular title as a nod to his fellow scientists). Even more interesting is that the Italians are the only culture who continued the practice for so long, so many of the names had much more meaning than their German counter parts. That is freaking cool.

[Tirian]

Most European cultures had varied rules on what we now think of as surnames. Now almost all have been standardized. In Sweden, some people used a name derived from their father's name (my great-great-great grandfather, Ake Jonson, had a son called Jon Akeson), some had last names derived from the places they lived, and some were standardized names from wherever that got passed down.

Russian last names are standardized, but middle names always come from the father (i.e. Vladimir Putin named his son Vladimir too, hence Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the current Prime Minister).