Iceland, You So Strange
I like tidbits and trivia, so let’s pretend you do too!
Alcohol
Speaking of food, did you know beer was illegal until about
twenty years ago? Not alcohol, just beer. People would make a substitute by
mixing non-alcoholic beer with vodka. The drinking tradition is still pretty
strange – order a drink with your meal during the week and (at least until
recently, and maybe even now if you’re in the country) everyone will assume
you’re an alcoholic (so says Lonely Planet). But if you’re in Reykjavik* on the
weekends, expect everyone to be getting smashed.
* One of the hardest parts of co-planning trips in Iceland
is I can’t pronounces the names of 90% of the places. Reykjavik’s the capital,
if you didn’t know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Icelandic_Patronyms.svg
Surnames
What really perturbs me, my sense of logic, and no one else I talk to, is Iceland’s naming
system. They use patronyms. That is, everyone in the country has a last name
derived from their father’s first name It’s also illegal to change your last
name, even for marriage.
A last name is meant to distinguish you from the five
million other people with your first name: it’s an organization and filing
system tool. If I live in a town of 500 and say I’m Edwardsdaughter, there
won’t be too much confusion. But if you get the whole country doing things like
this, that defeats the purpose. To make matters worse, Iceland also explicitly
prohibits you from getting a really unique patronym by requiring parents to
choose first names from an approve list.
Because surnames are useless as identifiers, everyone just
refers to each other – their friends, their teachers, the president – by their
first name, and books by Icelandic authors are filed by first name as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment