Books on Onomastics

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Rikki Maviti. I’m calling from San Diego.

I’m an attorney in downtown with Veldas Hayquist and Eck.

And I have a question about occupational surnames.

Okay.

They’re very common in English, and I’ve always kind of had a bit of a hobby sort of collecting them.

And a lot of them are very obvious, such as Butcher and Miller and Baker.

When I came to shoemaker, it was a bit of a question for me because normally in English, the word for the profession is cobbler.

And here I was not finding many people who had the last name of cobbler, a lot of people with the last name of shoemaker, which is more of a descriptive.

And when I compared it, for example, to the German, the word in German for cobbler is Schuster.

Well, that’s used as a last name, and so is Schumacher.

And Schumacher.

And when you look at a last name such as Chandler, which is Candlemaker, you don’t see people called Candlemaker.

You do see them called Chandler.

So I was looking at Shoemaker and saying, why?

Why not Cobbler?

Well, that’s an interesting question.

And there are a couple of things to say about that.

First of all, shoemakers and cobblers technically do slightly different things.

Aha.

A shoemaker traditionally has been somebody who makes shoes and might also repair them.

But a cobbler specifically repairs shoes.

So they’re two different professions for one thing.

Interesting.

I mean, just looking at English last names is, I enjoy it too, because they’re really echoes of conversation, everyday conversation in the Middle Ages, right? I mean, as you suggested,

Every town is going to have a miller, right? Somebody to mill the grain. And every town’s going to have a smith, of course, to work with metal. And it’s interesting because back then,

The word tailor meant something a little bit different from what we think of it to be today.

Today, it’s sort of a luxury to be able to go to a tailor. But back then, tailors had a much larger function. They were involved in actually the creation of clothing, cutting whole cloth and that kind of thing.

Tailors, for a long time, took over the task of making shoes or what passed as footwear in those days. So, tailor’s a little bit older than the term shoemaker. You’re getting at the heart of something really important here, which is the tradition of creating surnames in the first place kind of happened before some of the new language came along. So, we are kind of stuck with these words for, these old words for professions.

Exactly.

So you might have, we don’t have modern surnames like Webcoder, you know, Joe Webcoder or Jane Barista.

We don’t do that anymore.

And I know that they arose out of the Middle Ages because you really normally didn’t have surnames at that time.

You were either a landholder or you were a serf, in which case you just had your first name.

And that as the trades were established, as the middle class started to arise, sort of, in the Middle Ages, they were identified by their trade.

And those became their surnames.

Right, but there were multiple naming traditions happening at once.

So some people were named according to their nickname, the color of their hair or their gait.

Some people were nicknamed according to by names because they lived near a body of water or they were in a particular dell, that sort of thing.

Yeah, or they were somebody’s son.

Somebody’s son or somebody’s daughter in rarer cases, but it does happen.

Do you know the book The Surname Detective?

No.

I would highly recommend this.

The Surname Detective, it’s called Investigating Surname Distribution in England.

I highly recommend it.

And there’s one more I would recommend to you.

Do you know the Dictionary of English Surnames?

It’s not just a list of names.

It’s got a full history of the Middle Ages, and they’ve gone back to the old census records and taxpayer records,

And they’ve really done a great job in figuring out why these names survived, where they come from, and how we still hang on to them.

What about your last name?

My last name is Maviti, which is M-A-V-E-E-T-Y, and that is Scots-Irish.

We’re related to the McVitties.

Okay.

Okay, very good.

So it’s a clan name.

Okay.

But Irishized and kind of modified over time.

But that’s the same family, and it’s spelled 92 different ways.

Well, that takes me back to your original question about shoemaker versus cobbler.

We could have had a lot of Chaucers because the name Chaucer actually means shoemaker.

Right.

It’s just an accident of history that we ended up with more shoemakers than we did Chaucers.

Well, I’m wondering if Chaucer might be the old English then for cobbler, in which case that’s why I can’t find cobbler.

I highly recommend these books.

They’re going to give you a lot of answers for these questions.

It sounds like you’re well on the way to understanding this more than the average Joe, or the average Ricky.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for calling.

Take care now.

You’re welcome.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

This is great stuff.

It is really good.

And I want to mention those book names again just so people have a place to go.

A Dictionary of English Surnames by P.H. Reney and R.M. Wilson,

And The Surname Detective by Colin Rogers.

Both of these books will give you a really good, very comprehensible background on why we’re named the things we’re named.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.