Two first names. Unlike Americans we don’t have a First Name and a Middle Name. Many of us (but by no means all of us) have two names. Mine are Francisco Javier (Properly speaking, this is just one name with two words. José Javier would be two names, Francisco José too, but Francisco Javier is just one. You have to go to the annals of saints in the Catholic Church to understand why). Americanwise, I’m more Francisco J. Most colleagues and friends in Spain call me Javier but some call me Francisco, which sort of like. By the way, Francisco is one of the names that admit more nicknames in Spanish: there is Paco, Curro, Pancho, Quico (Kiko if you like the K thing) and many variants of them. I like Pancho, but don’t tell anyone. I enjoy messing around, so when introduced I use indistinctly Francisco or Javier. For my mathematical papers I put a hyphen in between, in the French style (it is also common in German), so there I’m Francisco-Javier Sayas, the rationale being not to convert my false middle name into an initial. So, you want my full name? Here it is: Francisco Javier Sayas González. Cool, isn’t it?
More names. It’s also been a long tradition that we used to learn as children, to keep a record of more than two family names. The process is very simple: you intertwine the lists of your father’s and mother’s names. With their two names, you get four. With their four, you get eight. Here are my eight first names, the only ones I know: you have to read in rows; the first column gives you my dad’s four and the second one, my mum’s
|
Sayas |
González |
|
Litago |
Caparroso |
|
Lasheras |
Miedes |
|
Chueca |
Martínez |
I’m afraid this tradition will be lost shortly because of political correction. Since most immigrants (immigration is a very recent phenomenon in Spain) don’t have the record, it’ll be considered offensive to mention it, so we’ll forget about it as about so many of our nice and non-problematic traditions. (On the other hand, we Spaniards fight very hard to keep useless, expensive and annoying traditions, especially those that make us feel very different from one another, but that’s another story).
(My) Spanish names. Going back to the list, you’ll see two names finished in -ez, which are essentially patronymics, names derived from a name. It is the equivalent to the English ending -son or the German/Nordic -sohn, -sen, -son, … González derives from Gonzalo and Martínez from Martín. They usually appear from men’s names of Germanic origin, some of them in very little use today. There are many López in Spain but no-one I know is called Lope. Sánchez is common as a family name but its origin, Sancho, is rarely heard out of history books (many kings of Navarre) and there’s Sancho Panza too. Fernández and Fernando are very common though. Not all Germanic names produce family names and you find many people whose family name is just a first name, sometimes preceded by the preposition de.
You can track many other names to place names. For instance, in my list there is Litago (a small village in Aragón), Caparroso (a small town in Navarre), Miedes (another one in Aragón; in fact there are other places called Miedes in Spain) and Chueca (in Castilla). So there are two missing. Lasheras is an alternative writing for Las Heras. I think, but I don’t know for sure, that Heras could be an old spelling for Eras, which are the places where threshing was done before agriculture was fully mechanised (thresh: in Spanish, trillar). Las Heras would then be “the threshing places”. I don’t know. There’s a place in Argentina called Las Heras, but the name comes from that of a person (a general in the Argentine war of independence) and not the other way round. Sayas is plural for an old-fashioned word for skirts that is only used (mainly in plural) when referring to some folk-regional dresses and to the good old times. There’s an alternative spelling that is a bit more common (Zayas). We’ve tracked the name (not the family lineage though) to the times of the Crown of Aragón, with the S spelling.
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