文档介绍：会计学
1
新标准大学英语三unit9
What’s in a Name?
1 Today it's only the exceedingly famous who are known by just one name, but even Sting, Cher and Madonna started life with a surname. In England alone there are around 45,000 different surnames. But prior to 1000 AD in Britain, everyone was known by the given name only, or perhaps their nickname.
Text
2 Different areas of the world adopted surnames at different periods in time. The Chinese were among the first people to use family names to honour their parents from about 2800 BC. In Europe, the Romans started calling people by their given name and family name in Latin from 300 BC, but it wasn't common practice throughout Europe until the 10th or 11th century, when first, the lords and gentry, then middle-class citizens, and finally everyone used surnames.
Text
The necessity for surnames arose when the population began to grow. Suddenly there was more than one person with the same name in a village, so surnames were used. Generally, these surnames were not handed down to the next generation, but after the fall of the Roman Empire, Ireland was one of the first countries to adopt hereditary surnames, and Irish surnames are found as early as the 10th century.
Text
3 As communities grew, it became necessary to identify residents more specifically with a name which referred to a dominant feature such as a physical attribute, an occupation, or a place of origin. This led to names like John the Butcher, William the Short, Henry from Sutton, Mary of the Wood, and Roger, son of Richard.
Text
4 After the Norman Conquest of England, the new rulers (from Normandy in northern France) of the realm obliged people to adopt fixed surnames for administrative reasons, as a form of registration for the census and for taxation. Gradually, most Saxon and Celtic names vanished (Oslaf, Oswald, Oswin – Os meaning God), and we see names like Carpenter, Thatcher, Cook and Baker, Hill, Forest. Any man who left his ho