I'm trying to decide how I might behave if I met a stranger on the street who was wearing a "Kiss me, I'm Slovenian" t-shirt. Would I accost him/her and ask about name and family history? I might.
I suspect that the people you are talking about believe (incorrectly) that you are wearing the equivalent of an ethnically-identifying t-shirt. I'm not making any excuses for their rudeness or bogus assumptions -- the social distinction between one's genes and one's jeans is enormous. I'm just trying to understand the mechanism of it.
As for 'Nepveu', the (intriguing to me, as are most etymologies) question is whether nobody added a silent p, but rather failed to lose the p when it became silent. Modern French neveu is from Latin nepote, ablative of nepos, meaning "sister's son" or "grandson" or generally "male descendant". The transitional forms retained the p from the Latin, or in some cases used a b. (Nièce had a p in Latin also -- neptia became niepce became nièce. Some of the cognates retain the p to this day, e.g. Lithuanian nepta.)
So maybe some regional variant was still using both the p and the v at the time the word became a family name. A quick check didn't find any obvious candidates for when and where, but that kind of question does fascinate me.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-08-09 06:58 pm (UTC)I'm trying to decide how I might behave if I met a stranger on the street who was wearing a "Kiss me, I'm Slovenian" t-shirt. Would I accost him/her and ask about name and family history? I might.
I suspect that the people you are talking about believe (incorrectly) that you are wearing the equivalent of an ethnically-identifying t-shirt. I'm not making any excuses for their rudeness or bogus assumptions -- the social distinction between one's genes and one's jeans is enormous. I'm just trying to understand the mechanism of it.
As for 'Nepveu', the (intriguing to me, as are most etymologies) question is whether nobody added a silent p, but rather failed to lose the p when it became silent. Modern French neveu is from Latin nepote, ablative of nepos, meaning "sister's son" or "grandson" or generally "male descendant". The transitional forms retained the p from the Latin, or in some cases used a b. (Nièce had a p in Latin also -- neptia became niepce became nièce. Some of the cognates retain the p to this day, e.g. Lithuanian nepta.)
So maybe some regional variant was still using both the p and the v at the time the word became a family name. A quick check didn't find any obvious candidates for when and where, but that kind of question does fascinate me.