[Coco] family names

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Le 2013-12-23 à 08:45:00, Glen VanDenBiggelaar a écrit :

> As far as I have been told, "VanDen" and VanDer" both mean "Of the 
> Dutch" or "Of the" family name.

I don't know Dutch, but I'm pretty sure it never means "Of the Dutch". 
That might have been a punctuation error in the text you took it from ? 
"van de" means "of the", and the "den"/"der" variations come from older 
versions of the language.


> In my case it would roughly translate to "Of the Biggelaars". I also 
> have been told that "VanDen" means of Dutch Royalty...(which is kind of 
> ironic and makes me laugh), as opposed to the more common Van Der.

It seems that not only the uppercase doesn't mean nobility, the "van" 
don't mean nobility either. I don't know how precise the following article 
is, though. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_%28Dutch%29#Collation_and_capitalisation

If you look into how den/der represented "the", it depended on whether you 
were saying "the thing gets", "get the thing", "get to the thing", "get at 
the thing" or "get from/of the thing", and whether that thing was a noun 
of the 1st group ("masculine"), 2nd group ("feminine") or 3rd group 
("neuter"), and whether it was singular or plural. Hard to see how that 
links to nobility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Dutch#Grammar

It should be noted that some things that nowadays look like family names 
were noble titles, and were not family names back then. "Antoine Laumet de 
La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac" is a guy with one given name, two family 
names (or a compound one ?) and then a noble title, but somehow these days 
we know him as Mr. Cadillac, since a long time.


> In the next decade or so it won't really mater as most of my relatives 
> of my generation, including my own brother, have legally changed it to 
> just "Biggelaar", dropping the VanDen all together. In fact, of all my 
> generation, only one cousin and myself have not changed it.

Interesting... Why do you drop it ?

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| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC