Talk:Basque surnames

Other Basque Surnames Zarraonandia Goitia Zabala Arruza Larrauri Barturen Torontegui Belaunstiguigoitia

Burionagonatotorecagageazcoechea

Googling for Burionagonatotorecagageazcoechea gives a wikipedia talk page and a French page that seems to use it as a joke. However Google offers Burionagonatotorecagazcochea that seems equally plausible to me but with no results. My Basque does not allow me to parse any of the surnames. It would be good to know where Albaigès got his reference. --Error (talk) 01:33, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Good question. The official list of Basque surnames does not list the name in its entirety. It does contain some recongisable elements though:

Burionagona + totoreca + gageazcoechea > Urionagoena + totorika + ?-zkoetxea

Where the B- comes from, pass. Google throws up quite a few for it though. Totorikaguena is the most common surname containing Totorika and I'm just wondering if -gagea is some random Spanish rendition of that. The -zkoetxea is not unexpected in a surname, etxe being house so of the so and so house. It looks to me like two surnames that have been misinterpreted as one. Does that help? Akerbeltz (talk) 02:16, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Is there an official list of Basque surnames!?

It could be a compound surname. I have seen some examples but I do not remember any now.

There could be some degree of corruption, either in the family history (see Javier from Exaberri) or in the recording (as with the Corleone family). I have seen Aritmendiz instead of Haritz-mendi.

--Error (talk) 18:52, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes there is, the Euskaltzaindia also standardised the names and surnames [1] It could be a lot of things, true, I just can't find anything beyond what I said above. Akerbeltz (talk) 20:35, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

patronyms

"The vast majority of all Basque surnames are patronymic (like Johnson in English) denoted by the suffix -ez."

this sentence is highly dubious so I will remove it! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.136.162.210 (talk) 17:33, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

I too agree that this sentence is incorrect. González, Hernández and Rodríguez sound Spanish to me, not Basque.

Most Common Basque Names Around the World

I think the most common basque surname is García. It is not included in the list. However, other names which have been included should not make the list.

Iturri- Prefix

I think Iturri means "fountain", not "source". The trick is that both words can be translated into Spanish as "fuente", hence the confusion.

unclear

In section Conventions:

The founder of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, demanded a certain quantity of Basque non-patronymic surnames from his followers to reject people of mixed lineage. The reason for ignoring the patronymic ones was most probably their commonality and therefore, lack of use when it came to discriminate against the immigrant citizens that came to live in the Basque Country with the industrialisation.

This is rather ungrammatical and unclear, I would guess because it was translated from Spanish, or written, by a non-native speaker of English. (E.g., at the end of the quote above, normal English would be "with industrialization", with no article, but Spanish would be "la industrialización". "Commonality" ≠ "commonness"; it does not mean 'frequency'.)

What is "lack of use when it came to discriminate against the immigrant citizens that came to live in the Basque Country with the industrialisation"? Does that mean that patronymic surnames were unhelpful or useless in keeping non-Basques out of the movement? "Lack of use" doesn't mean "useless"; if anything, it means that those names were not being used. I've fixed some of it, but I still am not sure of the meaning overall. --Thnidu (talk) 20:26, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Thnidu for bringing up the query, actually I am not sure what it attempts to express either, the wording is pretty chaotic and hard to understand. I should support a removal, just leaving "The founder of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, demanded a certain quantity of Basque surnames from his followers in order to reject those of mixed Basque-Spanish ascendancy", which seems to me the most acceptable interpretation. Iñaki LL (talk) 21:05, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

@Iñaki LL: Thanks for your approval! I've made the change, replacing "ascendancy" with "descent"; you may have been conflating "ancestry" and "descent". --Thnidu (talk) 21:19, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, my English needs polishing no doubt:) Thank you too! Iñaki LL (talk) 21:25, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

@Iñaki LL: Also, just now I looked at §Types and composition and noticed a couple of redlinks. I've delinked "Martinikorena", as it doesn't seem likely to ever get an article. But as a linguist, I don't know of such a thing as a relational suffix (in "the relational suffix -ko"). However, Basque grammar has a section on Adjectival -ko. While I don't have a clear sense of how it would work, I think this is what it should be. I'm changing the article here accordingly, but please look at it and see if it makes sense. (In case it's not already clear, I don't know Euskera at all!) --Thnidu (talk) 21:39, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

It looks fine to me. (Basically it is like Johnson's [house, or son]) Best regards! Iñaki LL (talk) 22:16, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

-ez

The article claims that -ez is a native Basque suffix, however wiktionary says otherwise: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ez#Spanish that it's from Latin -ici 77.40.3.177 (talk) 12:04, 9 October 2017 (UTC)