Comrie, Bernard; Stephen Matthews; Maria Polinsky;
The Atlas of Languages
Facts on File / Quarto 1996
ISBN 0816033889
topics: | language | atlas | reference
Relation between names and language typology: SOV lgs: Surname comes first: KIM Il-Sung MATSUMOTO Tada YAMATA Sensei WATANABE Ishi VSO lgs: son/daughter-of - comes earlier Mac- as in MacAllister : Son of Alistair (Scots) O- as in O'Hara : Son of Hara (Irish) Ben- as in Ben-Gurion : "Son of Gurion" (Hebrew) In SOV lgs from Caucasus, "son of X" -ian as in Khachaturian (Armenian) -shvili as in Basilashvili (Georgian) Many Indo-European lgs show a similar order, which may be a relic of earlier SOV order: -ova' as in Gruberova' : Gruber's daughter (Czech) -dottir, Sigurdstottir : Sigurd's dtr (Icelandic) -son, Anderson : Anders' son (Norwegian) English names like Johnson are of Norse origin