新标准大学英语综合教程3课文翻译和课后习题答案 unit 9PPT.pptx

; ; What’s in a Name? 1 Today its 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.;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 wasnt 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. ; 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.;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 home and moved to another part of the country would be called by the place where he came from, eg John of York, and other immigrants from Ireland, Highland Scotland and Wales (when it became part of Great Britain in 1536) adopted the English system of surnames. ; 5 Surnames from places were most common. In fact, more than h