yeah, but the Japanese familynames like Tanakawa are quite transparent. They’re also fairly recent, I think.
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They are, but it doesn’t make Western names less fun 
I wouldn’t be sure what this would mean, though…
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I’m probably mixing up Tanaka (field-centre) and something with -kawa.
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I always find it interesting from what fields a culture takes its personal names. Indoeuropean has those we know from the legends and the myths: Gunther ‘Battle-Army’, Siegfried ‘Victory-Peace’, Kleonymos ‘Fame-Name’, Khshayarshah ‘Strong-King’. So the Indoeuropeans where somewhat inclined to warfare, and as other names will show, fond of horses and all things powerful. Chinese and Japanese (and probably also Korean and Vietnamese) names reflect a sedentary culture that values scholarship, wisdom and beauty, as far as I can tell.
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Hmm, in any culture a good portion of the names simply refer to where your ancestors lived and what they did for a living, no? That seems pretty universal. Or is that a European bias?
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You can’t invent things completely outside of your experience, so that seems to be the universal part. But you’re talking of names like Miller, Potter or Washington? “Where your ancestors lived” presupposes a sedentary lifestyle and “what they did for a living” a division of labour.
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Exercise! Translate all the colour names in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors_(compact), or else as many as you want to.
| English | Latin |
|---|---|
| absolute zero | zerum absolutum |
| acid green | uiride acidum |
| aero | caelum |
| African violet | uiola Africae |
| air superiority blue | uenetum excellentiae caeli |
| alabaster | alabaster |
| Alice blue | uenetum Aliciae |
| alloy orange | rufum aeneum |
| almond | amygdala |
| amaranth | amarantus |
| Amazon | Amazonia |
| amber | sucinum |
| amethyst | amethystus |
| android green | uiride automati |
| apple green | uride pomi |
| apricot | armeniacum |
| Arctic lime | citrum Thules |
| army green | uride militare |
| artichoke | cinara |
| ash grey | incanum fraxinum |
| asparagus | asparagus |
| atomic tangerine | mandarinum atomicum |
| avocado | persea |
| baby blue | uenetum infantis |
| banana mania | mania bananarum |
| barn red | purpureum horrei |
| battleship grey | incanum nauis |
| beaver | castor |
| black | atrum / nigrum |
| black coral | corallium atrum |
| black olive | oliua atra |
eh, that’s enough of that
Let’s translate the names of some scientific (dinosaur) genera that have been discovered or added to this year.
| Genus | Components | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Adratiklit | adrar, mountain (Berber) | tiklit, lizard (Berber) | |
| Anhuilong | Anhui, Chinese province | long, dragon (Chinese) | |
| Aratasaurus | ara, born (Tupi) | ata, fire (Tupi) | saurus, lizard (Greek) |
| Changmiania | changmian, eternal sleep (Chinese) | ||
| Dineobellator | Dine, Navajo endonym | bellator, warrior (Latin) | |
| Kholumolumo | dinosaur / dragon (Sesotho) | ||
| Lusovenator | Lusitania aka. Portugal (Latin) | uenator, hunter (Latin) | |
| Oksoko | Altaic mythological triple-headed eagle | ||
| Thanatotheristes | thanatos, death (Greek) | theristes, reaper (Greek) | |
| Trierarchuncus | trierarch, captain (of a trireme) (Greek) | uncus, hook (Latin) |
As you can see, non-Grecolatinate words are often used in modern naming to honour the local people or indigenous heritage of the area of discovery. Especially, the Chinese are pretty stubborn in retaining Sinic components.
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I didn’t know this was a thing. That is SO cool and totally a great doom metal band name 
And that was the “compact” list ? O_O
I only know 10+ colours at most.
Ok, since we are in such a topic, were you aware of this speech in “English” by Xenophon Zolotas?
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/greece/2015/10/15/speak-english-using-greek-words/
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I think it was linked earlier in the thread~ It’s an interesting speech.
Of course, the grammatical words like is and for are Germanic. Some of the words he uses are, obviously, proper names: Scylla, Charybdis, Zeus. Many of his words may be obscure to a person with a basic level of education: anathema, numismatic, plethora, oligopoly and monopsony, orthological etc.; I certainly had to look up a couple of these.
Other times you can see him stretching the language. He replaces inflation, of Latin origin, with “numismatic proliferation” and coins the word cryptoplethorist for a person who secretly supports inflationary policies, and for the contrasting plethorophobic (anti-inflationary) measures.
Sometimes he uses an attested word outside its normal sphere: eg. didymous (had to look this guy up ^__^), “twinned”, is only used in English as a biological term.
In English, on a broad scale, there is a “higher” and “lower” register of vocabulary. The lower, or conversational, register is mainly made of Germanic terms descended from Old English. The higher (academic) register is, to a greater extent, taken from French, Latin and, yes, Greek.
Let’s compare the two:
| Lower | Higher |
|---|---|
| dog (OE dogga) | canine (L canis) |
| cat (OE catt) | feline (L felis) |
| mouse (OE mus) | rodent (L rodens) |
| cow (OE cu) | bovine, beef (L bos) |
| sheep (OE sceap) | mutton (L molto) |
| chickens (OE cicen) | poultry (L pullus) |
| bird (OE bird) | avian (L auis), ornithology (G ornis + logos) |
| bug (OE budda) | insect (L insectum) |
| spider (OE spiþra) | arachnid (G arakhne) |
| frog (OE frogga), newt (OE efete) | amphibian (G amphibion) |
| tree (OE treo) | arboreal (L arbor) |
| snake (OE snaca) | serpent (L serpens) |
| tooth (OE toþ) | dental (L dens) |
| book (OE boc), word (OE word) | textual (L textus) |
There some cases in which the Francophone challenger has overthrown the Saxon incumbent in the lower register: toadstool has been largely replaced by mushroom (OF moisseron), and Germanic acquerne has disappeared in the face of Romantic squirrel (L sciurus). However, at times the old roots have fought back, for instance when the intruder roy (L rex) was driven back out by English king, retreating into a lowly role as one part of the compound viceroy.
There’s a conlang called Anglish, which I’m sure has been mentioned in this thread, which removes all non-Germanic words from English. It recently got featured on the ILoveLanguages! channel:
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There’s a nice observation in Ivanhoe that Saxon names are used for farm animals and French ones for the meat (chapter 1):
“Nay, I can tell you more,” said Wamba, in the same tone; there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in he like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment.”
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Which English words don’t have any rhymes?
AFAIK these words don’t rhyme, at least in some accents:
| Word | Rhyme-ending (IPA) |
|---|---|
| bathe(s, d) | -eɪð(z, d) |
| cyborg(s) | -ɔːɡ(z) |
| iceberg(s) | -ɜːɡ(z) |
| warg | -ɑːɡ |
| wolf, wolves | -ʊlf, ʊlvz |
| wraith(s) | -eɪθ(s) |
| wreaths | -iːθs |
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As I pronounce them, at least:
grebe : glebe
gulp: pulp
gulped : scuplt
loaf: oaf
orb: absorb
strength: length
truth: youth, ruth, uncouth
wreath: beneath
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Nice catches! You really chopped that down~
Thanks for teaching me glebe as well.
whisked rhymes with risked, so I had to remove that. And have with satnav. And hoists with joists… teethe with seethe as well. Down to nine lonely non-rhyming words.
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Bathe and wraith seem to rhyme with each other though …
Wreaths rhymes with sheaths, by my guess.
soothe and smooth also sound similar and almost rhyming to me, but maybe all that is the way I pronounce them as a non-English native ?
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You’re right about soothe and smooth.
To be honest, I’m not sure there even is a convention over whether one should use θ (“hard” th) or ð (“soft” th) is a word like wreaths. I think I’ll abandon this attempt ^^
English has turned out to be a more rhymey language than it first appeared~
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Also, note how modern English, but also New High German, has no means to form aesthetically pleasing adjectives of animals that one could use without any irony. On the continent, we would form compounds with prefixes like Hunde-, Rinder-, Spinnen-, Katzen- und so weiter. “Kätzisch” exists, but you can’t use that in a scientific text Those in -isch tend to be pejorative, cf. kindisch ‘childish’ vs. kindlich ‘child-like’. I wonder how natural the neolatin adjectives are whithin Romance languages. They taste somewhat artificial, but I can’t tell for sure.
overwhelmed?
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modern English, but also New High German, has no means to form aesthetically pleasing adjectives of animals that one could use without any irony
Not so: you can suffix -like, and sometimes -ish, onto animals without any humour implied, and without any aritificiality either. See catlike, wolfish.
In fact if you were to use birdlike and fishlike, for instance, in a conversational context you’d find them to be much more natural than avian and piscine.
-y can also be used, eg. spidery.
RIP helmed. I’m not even bothering to update the sorry list any more~
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Ah, nice. I didn’t think of that, and it’s even more productive than the suffixes in German. But isn’t there a certain difference between avian and birdlike? As in, an avian disease is a disease that comes from birds or affects birds, but birdlike is some sort of primitive plane or the sound of an instrument?
Edit: I think -like might correspond to our -artig. A Greek equivalent is probably something like -eides.
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