From: William F. Hoffman To: Subject: [PBS] -ski vs. -sky (sorry, it's a long one) Date: Thursday, August 26, 1999 9:56 AM Hi, all! As Tina said in a previous note, I'm still trying to unpack after moving from the Houston area to near Chicago. Most of my books are still in boxes, so please don't write asking about specific names -- it will be a while before I can answer, especially since I have a backlog of over 100 notes, dating from more than a month ago, to answer. But I have read the comments on the whole -ski/-sky question, and find it pleasant that people are so interested in issues concerning Polish surnames. I don't need my books for this -- I have written notes on the subject before, so I don't have to write much new; I'll just dig out past notes, dust them off, and insert a few words here and there. I hope you'll forgive the length, but this is not a subject you can discuss adequately in a few sentences. One thing I'd suggest: don't be dogmatic. If you lay down any rule regarding surnames, I guarantee you'll hear from a dozen different people with unimpeachable exceptions to that rule. Recognize that the establishment of surnames was not a methodical process administered by a government-appointed commission of three linguists who made sure every surname was appropriate and properly spelled and thoroughly in order. Surnames developed a dozen different ways, and changed according to circumstance, or even whim. While we can recognize basic patterns that usually hold true, there is no such thing as a binding "rule" regarding names. Now, on to the subject. ORIGINS OF -SKI NAMES I get a little tired of hearing that -ski surnames once indicated nobility. True, at one time surnames ending in -ski indicated nobility; surnames ending in -owicz indicated nobility; hell, a surname ending in -dupa would indicate nobility. Up until about the 16th-17th century, the only people who had surnames were nobles! If you see a surname from before then, it belonged to a noble family. Period (except, of course, for the exceptions). But as time went on and surnames proved useful, they spread throughout society, so that by the 1700's most Poles had relatively stable surnames (except for Jews, most of whom did not take surnames until forced to in the 1800's by the partitioning governments). That doesn't mean the names never changed forms; in the records you may see a name can go from Piekarz to Piekarski to Piekarczyk at the drop of a hat. But as time went on surnames stuck and gradually became less and less variable. Surnames started out as a way to distinguish this noble Jan from that noble Jan from the other noble Jan, to provide clarity in legal matters, military organization, tax-paying, etc. An early, popular way to form a surname was by adding a patronymic suffix, i. e., a suffix meaning "son of" that was added to the father's name. This made good sense, because offspring inherited property based on being recognized as the legitimate son of so-and-so. There are a number of patronymic suffixes used by the Poles and other Slavs, of which -owicz/-ewicz is especially common. So Piotr son of Jan would be called Piotr Janowicz, and Piotr son of Szczepan would be Piotr Szczepanowicz. This suffix is not used only by Poles, in fact they originally borrowed it from the Belarussians; but the spelling -owicz is Polish, most other Slavs spell it -ovich or -ovych or -ovic with a little v over the final c (of course, many Slavs write their names in the Cyrillic alphabet, on which more later). Another popular way of referring to nobles to keep them straight was by alluding to the name of the estate they owned. At first the preposition z (of, from) was used, thus "Jan z Grabowa" was "Jan of Grabów" (or Grabowo). But you can say the same thing in Polish by using an adjectival form of the place name, and for some reason Poles liked that better. That's how -ski names (and -cki and -zki) got started, they were adjectives that described a person in terms of the place he was associated with. One problem with this, however, is that there are a lot of places in Poland with the same names, so that you have no way of knowing, just by looking at the name, which of a dozen Grabowos or Grabóws a given Grabowski family came from. Also, in the old days the formation of these adjectival names was not so well defined by rules, so that Grabowski could refer to one from Grabów or Grabowo or Grabie or Grabowice or Graby, etc. That's one reason some of these names are so common: Grabowski, for instance, meant "one from a place with a name beginning Grab- something," and there were a lot of places with names that qualify... By the way, -ski names don't have to refer only to place-names; they can also refer to occupations, personal traits, and so on. Names ending in -owski or -ewski and -inski or -ynski generally do refer to place names. As I said, at first only nobles used surnames, but gradually the practice spread throughout society. So if you see Grabowski in a document from 1418, it almost certainly refers to a noble who owned an estate called Grabowo, Grabów, etc. But by 1718 the name meant little more than "one from Grabowo (etc.)." It merely indicated that somewhere in the past the family had some connection with a place by one of those names. They might have been nobles who owned it; they might have been peasants who shoveled horse dung on the estate by that name; the breadwinner of the family might have traveled frequently to a place by that name on business; and so on. A surname is like a snapshot: it indicated something about a family that was relevant at one point in the past, when the name first became established. But as time went on the connection to which the name originally referred might become more and more blurred. So -ski names did originally indicate nobility because they referred to the name of an estate the family owned at some point. But by the 1600's and 1700's they indicated nothing more than some past association of the family with the place (or occupation or trait) referred to in the first part of the name. Sometimes the compounding of suffixes would mix the categories: Kowalewski means "one from Kowalew or Kowalewo," and those place names mean "of the smith," so that Kowalewski could be interpreted as "one from the place of the smith." A Grabowski might be the descendant of the nobles who owned Grabowo, etc., or he might descend from peasants who worked and lived there. Only successful genealogical research will determine the facts. A name expert can tell you something specific just by looking at your name only if some aspect of the name makes it unique and distinguishes it from other names -- by my estimate, that is true perhaps 10% of the time, perhaps even less often. -SKI VS. -SKY As I said, any general rule is going to have a jillion exceptions. But as a rule of thumb, names ending in -SKI tend to be Polish. Names ending in -SKY might be misspelled Polish, but they are more likely to be Czech, Slovak, Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarussian. (I'm leaving southern Slavs out of the picture or else we'll be here all day). Why is this true? Polish has always been written in a modified form of the Roman alphabet, the same one English-speakers use. So Poles showed up in English-speaking countries with papers on which their name was spelled in our alphabet. The distinctly Polish characters such as L~ and A~ and E~ caused some problems, but the ending -ski, at least, did not. If the name was spelled -ski, it tended to stay that way. And the name was usually spelled -ski because Polish spelling rules dictate that the letter K can not be followed by the vowel Y. In Polish that Y represents a kind of short i, somewhat like the sound in English "sit"; the vowel I represents a longer sound, much like the i in English "machine." A trait of standard Polish pronunciation is that the consonant K is never followed by that short Y sound, so in theory -sky should never happen... Now if you look at records, you will often see Polish names spelled -sky, but that's usually because of foreign influences, or unfamiliarity with Polish spelling rules. So a name ending in -ski is either Polish, or else comes from another Slavic ethnic group that has been spelled that way due to Polish influence. Czech and Slovak names are also written in the Roman alphabet, and in those languages the correct spelling of this suffix is -sky with an accent over the Y. So Czech and Slovak names also tended to retain their spelling (minus the accent), and that spelling should be -sky. The Eastern Slavs -- Russians, Belarussians, and Ukrainians -- are a different matter. Back home their names were generally written in the Cyrillic alphabet. When they emigrated to countries that used the Roman alphabet, their names had to be transliterated from Cyrillic into a form using our alphabet. The exact form that spelling took depended on many factors. If, for instance, a Ukrainian whose name transliterated as Khmelnytskyj or Khmelnytskyi first ran into a Polish official on the way, the Pole might spell it the way it sounded to him, Chmielnicki. A Chaikovsky might become Czajkowski if Poles had anything to say about it, or Tschaikovsky if Germans were filling out the papers. A well-educated person familiar with Cyrillic might try to render the name "correctly" according to Eastern Slavic phonetics, so that the ending might be spelled -skij or -skiy for a Russian, or -skyj or -skyi for a Ukrainian. (That final -j or -y refers to a slight consonantal y sound at the end of these names; English-speakers spell that sound with a -y, but Germans, for instance, spell it as a -j. In Cyrillic it's a backwards N with a little curved stroke over it). More often than not, however, Eastern Slavs ended up with -sky. The more correct spellings -skiy and -skyi were too bizarre looking for English-speakers, but -sky was an acceptable compromise between Eastern Slavic phonetics and English orthography. That's why -ski tends to be Polish and -sky can be Czech, Slovak, Belarussian, Russian, Ukrainian, etc. It's usually a matter of English- or German-speakers trying to represent the way the name sounded in an alphabet ill suited to reproduce the phonetics of the Slavic language involved. There are no hard and fast rules, and most English-speakers couldn't tell a Pole from a Ukrainian from a Belarussian even if they were drowning in borscht (English spelling) or barszcz (Polish spelling) or borshch (Russian spelling). So there's a lot of confusion and jillions of exceptions. JEWISH NAMES Finally, the Jews. They did quite well without surnames for centuries. They simply used patronymics modeled on the usage in Hebrew, e. g., Shlomo ben Mendel, "Shlomo, son of Mendel," and obviously the patronymic changed from generation to generation. If they were surrounded by Slavs, when dealing with Gentiles they'd use a Slavic patronymic form, such as Shlomo Mendelevich (Polish spelling Szlomo Mendelewicz). If surrounded by Germanic types, they'd use a German form, Schlomo Mendelssohn. After the partitions the governments of Germany, Russia, and Austria said "Hey, here are all these Jews not using surnames. That makes it harder to keep track of them, to make them pay taxes and serve in the military." So they passed laws forcing the Jews to take surnames. To many of the Jews these laws were just one more pile of unnecessary crud the goyim were forcing on them, and they often didn't much care what name they ended up with: "Yeah, sure, call me Bialy (Polish, "white") or Weiss (German, "white") or Jung (German, "young"), what do I care? The people who really matter to me know my name is Jankiel Moskowicz, but I'll let you call me Weiss if the alternative is prison." So the Jews ended up with surnames; because of a traditional predilection for patronymics, they very often ended up with names in -owicz or -ewicz, but that is by no means universal. The Jews with -ski names generally went along with whatever the standard form was in their particular area. A Polish Jew would tend to spell his name -ski, a Russian Jew would spell his name -skiy (obviously using the Cyrillic equivalent), a Czech Jew would spell his name -sky. Due to various religious and cultural circumstances, there are certain types of names that are associated mainly with Jews; but as far as -ski/-sky and -owicz/-ewicz are concerned, I don't think you'll find any useful pattern. OK, class is dismissed for the day. Study your notes, there will be a test. (And I'm sorry for the length of this note -- but some of you made the mistake of asking!). Fred (officially "William F.") Hoffman Author, "Polish Surnames: Origins & Meanings" (or was it "Published Surname Articles Unceasing"?) I can never remember) ______________________________