"Hendrik van Rooyen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
>> In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Hendrik van
>> Rooyen wrote:
>>
>> > "Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> >
>> > 8<--------------------------------------------------------
>> >
>> >> I wonder if we need another "middle" field for holding the "bin/binte"
>> >> part (could also hold, e.g. "Van" for those names that use this).
>> >
>> > NOOOOO! - I think of my surname as "van Rooyen" - its only a string with a
>> > space in it - and its peculiar in that the first letter is not
>> > capitalised....
>> >
>> > And I am sure that the people called "von Kardorff" would not agree
>> > either...
>>
>> So do the Dutch phone books have a lot of entries under V, then?
>>
>> It just seems less efficient to me, that's all.
>
> Don't know about what happens in Holland - my ancestors came over here to
> South
> Africa a long time ago -
> a mixed up kid I am - Dutch and French from the time of the revocation of the
> edict of Nantes...
> And yes, here the phone books are sorted that way - the "van Rensburg"s
> precede
> the "van Rooyen"s. And what is worse, there are a lot of "van der"s too - two
> spaces in the string like "van der Merwe" who are preceded by "van der Bank"
> -
> "van" basically means "from" - like the German "von" - but in Germany its an
> appellation applied to the nobility -
In Germany "von" is just a part of the name since 1919 when the nobility
was abolished by law. In the local phonebook it seems it's up tgo the
people how they want to be sorted. I see e.g. both "von Fürstenberg,
Ulrich" and "Fürstenberg, Constantin von".
> and in my name it makes no sense as "Rooyen" is not a place - its a
> strange archaic derivative of the colour red - "rooij' in Dutch, spelt
In Germany names like that were created when a commoner was
ennobled. There is a "von Roth" in the lokal phonebook ("roth" is an
archaic spelling of "rot" which means "red")
Florian
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