Tim wrote:

At 11:21 AM -0700 6/3/97, Asgaard wrote:

...

*Why is it that people of finer (?) English heritage often has a double second name? Someone once suggested to me that it originates from having (or an ancestor having) adopted the name of both one's 'marital' father and one's biological father, for reasons of property inheritance, but I never believed that one. Just curious.

That's the impression I got while I lived there. Many people regard it as rather pretentious (pace, Phil). At my school, there was a student who rejoiced in the moniker (I am not making this up): "The Honorable Jamie Darymple-Hamilton, Esq."

Yuppies in the U.S. have often gone to the "feminist-friendly" hyphenization of their names, claiming it gives their children both names.

(Oh yeah? It just pushes the problem one level deeper in the stack, as _their_ children than have to contend with being "Suzie Smith-Yates-Hallam-Baker." I like the Icelandic solution where girl children are "Suziesdottir" and boy children are "Winstonsson.")

With the old Norse system, still used in Iceland, there is a tremendous namespace-collision problem. There is a fairly short list of acceptable first names (yes, there is a list, and you have to name your child from it - this is fairly common outside the US), and by the second generation these names, and only these names, get pushed into the surname namespace. Immigrants change their names to Icelandic ones as a requirement of citizenship. The one exception is that if you are still living in the place you were born, you can adopt the placename as your surname. Thus, Iceland, with only 265,000 people, has phonebooks which index by location and profession as well as by name to reach a reasonable level of dis-ambiguation. [Doubtless some Magnus Magnusson (the most common male Icelandic name) will correct some of the details here.] Peter Trei (that's Estonian, if you were wondering). trei@process.com