#reblog replies
qv:
the name tyler sounds like it was first used post-ww2 like maybe 1960 until you find out it literally meant “guy who lays tile” (tile-er) 11th century england to refer to people that built houses. and then you read it as tile -er for the rest of yourlife
does piper mean guy who lays pipe
I know this is a sex joke, but… do people genuinely not know that a lot of surnames stem from professions? Tiler/Tyler became the surname for somebody who laid tile. Piper became a surname for somebody who played the pipes. Archer, Brewer, Butler, Carpenter, Clerk/Clark, Dexter, Farmer, Fisher, Mason, Miller, Potter, Sawyer, Sheppard/Shepherd, Smith, Tanner, Taylor/Tailor, Weaver…
People later started to give old family surnames as first names, and then over time, many of those became popular as first names in their own right. Is… is this not known?a fun fact: germanic jews were forced en masse to adopt last names only a couple centuries ago, for tax reasons. before then it was just ‘dude son of guy’. so mostly the rabbis made everyone’s last names up themselves because they were the logical guy to do the census paperwork.
so that’s why ‘jewish names’ are so like that. goldstein (gold rock), goldfarb(gold colored), goldshmidt (goldsmith). three or four hundred years ago some tired rabbi ran out of ideas. you get tons of jews who are just something-thalbecause-thalmeans valley and that’s where they were when they got named. my favorite traditional jewish surname is just klein, small, because three hundred years ago some rabbi looked at a local guy and wrote down ‘shorty’.
Fun Also Fact: Taxes may have also been the reason the English got lastnames, too! “may have also been” because there’s some debate about if it was THE cause, but their popularity lines up chronologically.
The usual story is that, after William the Conqueror did his Thing, he commissioned a big census of his new Territory(The Domesday Book) and, since everyone was named off a not terribly long list of church names which, in practice, was shorter cuz ppl didn’t like picking the obscure and ill-omened ones(not allot of Barnabuses or Hezikiahs or Judases, if you can believe it :T), the clerks tasked with doing the census found themselves in need of a way to distinguish between ppl with the same names. So, professions were an easy go-to: John the Brewer becomes “John Brewer”, John the fisherman became “John Fisher”, John the Farmer becomes “John Farmer”(or John Fields, or John Tiller, or John Peasant, or John Planter, or John Gardener, or John Rowe: there were allot of farmers so allot of farming-surnames). Before that the English distinguished btwn ppl with the same names conventionally, through nicknames (Short John, Longjohn, John-down-the-way, Angry John, etc etc etc), and some of these ended up becoming surnames too, but they were just that: nicknames. It wasn’t until the Normans gave these names bureaucratic significance through the need to tell who to tax what(and if they paid it) that they became something passed down, one gen to the next, in England.
