I commenced this (still very incomplete) as a putative taxonomy to help me understand more about the subject, through its possible structure.

But from the start I encountered difficulties.

Any taxonomy imposes one particular perspective : a decision has to be made as to which aspects to group together, and which to separate.

These aspects might be termed

For example, Patrick Hank’s taxonomy for family names of the United States rightly regards the type of name as paramount; thus bringing together occupational names of all cultural groups.

For Great Britain, however, the ethnic mix is less, whilst the potential time-scales are longer. For these reasons, the first cut has been arbitrarily made as:-

 

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Assimilated
source language

 

Non-Assimilated
source language

 

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Type

Type

 

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Morphology

Morphology

 

This first division is ambiguous and open to criticism (e.g. are medieval Jewish names to be treated as assimilated, and 20th century arrivals as non-assimilated?).

Nonetheless, most surnames in Britain have origins in widely-differing early source languages –Old English/Continental Germanic/Scandinavian- that a non-specialist is unaware of, whilst discerning the origins of recent arrivals.

In essence, this assimilated/non-assimilated category  is merely just a pragmatic device to separate post-Victorian name arrivals, as most name studies will involve pre-Edwardian source documents. And as you might gather, one that I am not too comfortable with.

Surnames -by their often unknown origins- can be impossible to uniquely classify . They are slippery eels.

 

“A surname like Stevens may mean :-

Percy H. Reaney, A Dictionary of British Surnames, London Routledge and Paul, 1958.

In this particular case, you need to decide whether to assign it to a primary category, or to all possible ones.

Another area of ambiguity is status nicknames. A name like Pope is not likely to be derived from an actual position, but more likely to have been a role in a pageant.

I mentioned different perspectives earlier.

You might wish to look at all types of names that derive from

I have included an alternative classification that groups these.

 

Notation

I have not included any notation, because this taxonomy is experimental and embryonic.
Also, the idea is not for each aspect of a name to be recorded by a relevant notation, and perhaps stored in a database
But here is an example

‘Brewster’

Analysis

The source language, gender (though perhaps not the morphology) could be notated as standard sub-divisions (in the same way that in the Dewey Decimal system .942 is the standard subdivision for England, thus 320-942 = Political History of England, 330.942 =Economic History of England)

Hence the code could be for the language .19107, gender .1922

3a//3b5/.1922/.19107

Then there will also be temporal and spatial sub-divisions (for the hearth tax, census, electoral roll), and the notation becomes totally unwieldy.
Rather, I would envisage a taxonomy with radio buttons that is linked to an Access database

Actually, I have decided no longer to pursue a taxonomy per se. Rather I want to convey an idea of the complexity of the subject, and an indication of which areas are being studies, and a flavour of the writing. There is no name for this - so I am using the term 'aspect map' instead. Pretty naff, and I may change it.

 

Structure