How did surnames originate?

There is a school of thought suggesting that the first codified sounds of communication were the calls that hunters used to apprise each other of their location and/or of an approaching prey animal. It had to sound natural enough not to inspire suspicion in the prey, yet distinct enough to be recognized by other members of the tribe and not mistaken for a real animal call.

The clicks and other rather difficult phonemes in some of the African languages lend credence to his hypothesis.

Nonetheless, it's certain that we'll never really know, since they didn't have writing in those days (not until the Bronze Age), much less recording equipment (not until the late 19th century).

In the Stone Age, tribes were relatively small and there was no technology for long-distance travel. So it was not difficult to make sure that every member of the tribe had a unique name, and visitors were so rare that they didn't cause any identification problems.

That has been true in the developed nations for centuries. As I mentioned earlier in the discussion, Iceland is perhaps the only society in which matrilineal naming is somewhat commonly used as an alternative to patrilineal. Both in the common sense of taking one's mother's surname, but also in the more basic sense of being named Helga Ingridsdöttir or even Erik Ingridsson.

In the post-feminist era of the USA, it is now not unknown for parents to give their child his/her mother's surname, especially if the mother is famous or comes from a well-known family. Other parents give the child a hyphenation built out of both surnames.

Anyway, yes, the odds are a million to one that you were indeed given your father's surname just because it's customary in Western society.

 

Middle names serve different purposes in different cultures. In China, the surname comes first, and the middle name is a generation identifier. All people of the same generation within a family have the same second name. Their third name is unique and identifies the individual.

But in the Western countries, the middle name is usually nothing more than an extension of the first name. Several branches of the family might name their son Edgar in honor of the fellow named Edgar who got rich in the wool industry 200 years ago and founded the family. So one of them is Edgar William, one is Edgar Harold, and one is Edgar Jonathan.

It also helps people in conservative communities who restrict themselves to traditional names. If one family has a son named William Robert and another one has a son named William Joseph, then the one will be known to the community as Billy Bob and the other as Billy Joe, so everybody knows who they're talking about. Same for Betty Jane and Betty Sue.

In most Western countries there's no limit on the number of names, so some children are given four or more. Dweezil Zappa's birth name is Ian Donald Calvin Euclid Zappa. The hospital wouldn't let Frank and Gail name him Dweezil so for revenge they gave him a name so long that it didn't fit on their forms. When he was five he became very angry to learn that Dweezil was not his real name, so the parents hired an attorney and a judge changed it back after hearing his impassioned plea.

 

Governments have existed since the first Stone Age civilizations were built ten thousand years ago. They were built in Asia and North Africa; civilization came very late to Europe. Taxes have been levied since long before Europeans took surnames.

The New Testament tells us that Roman tax collectors were making the rounds in Palestine more than 2,000 years ago, when only the aristocrats had surnames. (And this would have taken place in April, not December. The civil servants weren't interested in trudging through the snow.

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You misspelled that. It's Schicklgruber and it has nothing to do with money. In any case, the shekel was a coin in ancient Israel. Considering that antisemitism has been one of the defining characteristics of European Christendom since its founding, it's highly unlikely that any Gentile would have a surname that might cause him to be mistaken for Jewish.

It also has no relation to the English verb "to grub." In German, die Grube means "pit," as in a large seed. The similarity to the English word is a coincidence; ours comes from an old verb meaning "to dig."

Again, you're assuming a relationship between English and German words that is common but by no means universal. The German word for "shit" is die Scheiße--pronounced "shy sa." This is an old word skit going back to Proto-Germanic, which exists in all the modern Germanic languages, for example skid in Danish.

The name Lipschitz arouses giggles in the USA, but not in Germany.

But not so much knowledge of the German language.

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