On Wimbledon and Married Women’s Names jayeless.net
@jayeless They don’t exactly follow the times! Every man that have been called “young man” in an attempt to point out that you probably don’t know anything should remember that when taking “Miss” in the vocabulary, as for the rest, they should too. In my country ”Miss“ is called “Frøken“, and we were told to use that when we spoke to female teachers, but male teachers were called “Lærer“, (Teacher). 🙄 I hope this is corrected now. “Mrs”, or “Fru”, as they used to say for married women in Norway, are largely gone I think, can’t remember the last time someone middle aged or younger said that. One thing that is common now in a marriage is to have both persons last names as their and their offspring’s common last name, (but if one have a “-son”/“-sen” name, that person often take another name from his ancestors, (a farm name).
@odd Oh man, I remember that issue at primary school - knocking on the staff room door and asking, "Is Miss Thompson there?" only to be told, "There is no such teacher as Miss Thompson at this school." As if I knew whether every single teacher at the school was married or not 🙄 Unfortunately that's still a problem with Australian schools now. (Well, I've taught at one where teachers went by their first names instead - quite liked it, actually!)
I'm not sure I'd say it's common, but it's not exactly rare either for kids here to be given a hyphenated surname (like "Smith-Jones") based on their parents' names. It's less common for the parents to adopt it (more common for women than for men, of course...). I think it's a fine idea though, certainly more egalitarian.
@odd I've been called "fröken" many time being a martial arts instructor for young kids. I suspect that "fröken" means "anyone who is a teacher/instructor to me" to the kids, not "unmarried woman". FWIW my granddaughters surname is "[mother's first name]dotter" ("daughter")
@jemostrom I know they practice this in Iceland. (Mother’s first name) + -dottir for girls and (father’s first name) + -son for boys.
From 1-3 year at school, we had only an elderly, (to us at least) woman as a teacher, and was told to raise our hand and say “Frøken”, (Miss), or “Frøken Lein”, (her last name) specifically. When we got a 30-something man the fourth year, he told us to just call him “Lærer”, (teacher).
@odd The most (?) common surname here is some form of "[Father's name]son" ... in the "modern times" the surname usually stayed the same between generations but further back I have ancestors which where names "A Bson", "B Ason", "A Bson" alternating between generations. The form "[Mother's name]dotter" is something that started to become more popular in my youth and my granddaughter is actually the first one I know personally.
@jemostrom The alternating type I’ve never heard about, except for the Danish Kings that alternate between being named Christian and Fredrik as first names. The -dotter has become more popular here too.
@odd @jemostrom I heard an interesting interview recently with an Icelandic person who taked about the difficulties with 'dottir' and 'son' in regard to those who don't slot themselves into a strict binary gender. It might have been this episode: Allusionist 147. Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 2 — www.theallusionist.org/allusioni...
@Miraz yeah, I can see that would be a problem. A large part of the surnames in Sweden are based on geography and/or nature, for example my surname could be translated to "pine heath creek" (among other translations). But that doesn't help those with names like Annasdotter or Bertilsson