A large portion of modern English last names are derived from medieval guilds - the candlemaker's guild for 'chandler,' or the saddlemaker's guild for 'Saddler.' Does this also hold true for last names in other cultures? Was last-naming by guild/occupation a thing in France, China, Russia, etc?

by SnowGN
tim_mcdaniel

TL;DR: like people and sex. Some do, some don't.

Those English last names aren't necessarily from guilds per se. Henry le Drovere 1327, Richard le Fischer 1263, William Spileman 1167 (Old English spilemann = jester, juggler), Thomas Spinnere 1356, Robert Plouman 1223: none of those were in guilds, so far as I know, so guilds are not necessarily the source of occupational surnames. (BTW, thanks for the examples: until I checked a source, I didn't know those professions had guilds.)

The second part was correct: these were occupational bynames, and guilds could be examples of occupations.

A devoted onomastician, Kathleen M. O'Brien, requires me to point out that "guilds" eo nomine existed in only some cultures. And she wonders whether you are specifically asking about "guilds" accept no substitutes, or occupations. I'm assuming occupations.

The question is a bit of example-seeking, which can be frowned on here. My focus is western Europe and medieval times, so I can really only address them reliably. (The Society for Creative Anachronism is devoted to the study of pre-17th Century western Europe; I got sources with and via fellow SCAdians; more recent and outside that, I get iffier.)

As an example that wasn't asked for: Irish and Scots Gaelic: historically, vanishingly rare. They overwhelmingly used patronymics, either son/daughter of a man, or descent from a male ancestor (expressed with the words for "grandson" or "granddaughter"). But office names were used: "So while there don't appear to be Gaelic bynames describing that individual as a smith or a tailor, there are bynames identifying Gaels as earls, bishops, abbots, priests, judges, and the like." And a patronymic might identify the parent's occupation: "there are simple patronymic bynames that identify Gaels as the child of a smith or a tailor. The range of occupations used in simple patronymic bynames, however, appears to be somewhat limited."

French: yeah. Plenty of examples from the 1292 Census of Paris:

  • l’aguillier (15) 'needle-maker'. Arthur Guillier is a French soccer player.
  • le chandelier (65) 'candlemaker' [oh, that's the etymology!].
  • le selier (20) 'saddler'.

and many more pages. I can't say about current use, but a random French name site (here, have a grain of salt) suggests that these three examples at least are current if uncommon.

Russian: Apparently patronymics were the overwhelming majority, and inherited surnames tend to be more modern or Ukrainian. Paul Wickenden of Thanet, "Occupational Bynames in Medieval Russia", is a reasonable source. He worked some years on Russian onomastics. "While non-patronymic bynames are rare in period, occupational ones are among the most common of category within this group. Today, they hold a significant place in any study of modern surnames." Note that he has caveats on the sources versus his own focus, authenic medieval Russian names.

Chinese: Dunno. I don't have a source. May I offer a bit of Japanese? I don't have the source to hand myself; it's about a 15-minute drive. There were be, monopoly corporations of skilled artisans ... guilds except they also owned land and had farmers, and they might be agricultural be. "Guild names were sometimes adopted as surnames by kuge and buke families" (In the Kamakura period, kuge were court nobles, buke were military clans.) But these were clan names, and there were few clan names. And the -be name would often be a geographical name suffixed with -be or a clan name suffixed with -be, rather than include a word that's an occupation.

Sources:

P. H. Reaney and R. M. Wilson, A Dictionary of English Surnames, 3d. ed.

Sharon L. Krossa, "Quick and Easy Gaelic Names", 3d ed., 2007.

Sara L. Uckelman, "Names in the 1292 census of Paris", draft, 2013, p. 104 / PDF page 108 et seq.

A random modern French name site. I just wanted an indication as to whether the French names might be current -- here, have a grain of salt.

The larger name list that Paul Wickenden of Thanet's article refers to is his own A Dictionary of Period Russian Names: Grammar.

Solveig Throndardottir, Name Construction in Mediaeval Japan, 2004 edition, p. 38.

no-tea

This is a not-uncommon practice in Spanish, though it's far less prevalent than in English. All ten of the most common surnames in Spain, as of 2016, are patronymics or are men's first names. (Those names, in order, are García, González, Rodríguez, Fernández, López, Martínez, Sánchez, Pérez, Gómez and Martín.) The -ez suffix in Spanish is roughly equivalent to -son in English; thus, the English equivalent of Martínez would be "Martinson."

You have to get to #15 to get to a non-patronymic, "Moreno," meaning "brown." But also in the top 100 are names based on occupation like Guerrero ("warrior"), Caballero ("knight"), Herrero ("blacksmith"), and Pastor ("shepherd").

By comparison, the 2010 US census includes two occupational surnames among the top 15 most common surnames in the United States: Smith (#1) and Miller (#7).

koredozo

Many of the most common Japanese surnames, and 89.5% of all Japanese surnames on record, are topological. Examples include Suzuki (bell tree), Takahashi (high bridge) and Tanaka (in the field.) This stems from the Kamakura shogunate registering samurai under a name derived from their holdings. For much of Japanese history, commoners did not have (or were not allowed to have) surnames; when required to adopt surnames of their own, they often selected surnames in an imitative fashion, based on where they themselves lived.

A second category of extremely common surnames are those containing the kanji character 藤 (pronounced 'tō',) including Satō, Itō, Katō and Saitō. With a different pronunciation, this same character is the "Fuji" of "Fujiwara," a powerful clan who dominated Japanese politics during the Heian period (794–1185). There are multiple competing theories of precisely how these surnames arose, and in some cases the same surname may have been adopted by multiple independent bearers for different reasons, but they all involve fusions of a place name (in the case of "Satō", Sado Island, or the town of Sano in Tochigi) or title of office with the name "Fujiwara".

One possible exception to Japan's dearth of occupational names is the common surname Watanabe (historically spelled 'Wataribe'), which loosely translates to "guild of ferrymen." Of course, this surname was also adopted by the famous Heian-period samurai Watanabe no Tsuna after his estate, so it's ambiguous whether all or even most Watanabe/Wataribe throughout history were actually ferrymen.

My main source is "Japan's Name Culture" by Herbert Plutschow.