Wikidata:Property proposal/oeconym

oeconym (farm name) edit

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Person

   Done: oeconym (P10655) (Talk and documentation)
Descriptionname of a family farm legally used as a personal name
Representsfarm name (Q10512538)
Data typeMonolingual text
Allowed valuesfarm name (Q10512538)
Example 1Busk Margit Jonsson (Q4957345) → Busk (Swedish)
Example 2Stiko Per Larsson (Q5938793) → Stiko (Swedish)
Example 3Hjort Anders Olsson (Q6027054) → Hjort (Swedish)
Example 4Liss Olof Larsson (Q5938123) → Liss (Swedish)
Example 5Gubb Jan Stigson (Q6190452) → Gubb (Swedish)
Example 6Hållbus Totte Mattsson (Q5963549) → Hållbus (Swedish)
Example 7Niss Oskar Jonsson (Q5891889) → Niss (Swedish)
Sourcesv:Gårdsnamn, Rostvik (1999:9–10), Isof (in Swedish) (in more detail in Swedish here, p. 201ff)
Expected completenessalways incomplete (Q21873886)

Motivation edit

Briefly discussed before here. Some Scandinavian names legally (Swedish law 2016:1013 § 29) contain an inherited name, in Sweden typically placed before the given name (Q202444). Such a name is Swedish traditionally called gårdsnamn, literally ’farm name’. In contemporary onomastic research I have also encountered the term ekonym, in English oeconym.

These names are traditionally referred to as ’farm names’ because they often share the name with the family farm (the inherited property).) Some researchers (like Inger Larsson) have argued against the name ’farm name’ as they are inherited personal names, and not place names per se (i.e. the name of a farm), but they are often both (see Rostvik (1999:9–10)). In Sweden, these are especially characteristic of traditional names from Dalarna (Q205218). I refer to Rostvik (1999) above for more background.

It seems to me like there is no way of treating these names in Wikidata. They could be considered an instance of family name (family name (P734)), as they are inherited and shows relationship to other people with the same name, but on the other hand many families adopted proper family names and therefore there needs to be a way of distinguishing them. Defining these names as a property would allow users to generate lists of all persons on Wikipedia with such a name, and one would be able to plot them geographically in Scandinavia, which would be very interesting, I believe even for onomastic research.

For example, Hjort Anders Olsson (Q6027054) has three names, the farm name (Q10512538) Hjort, which he adopted after marrying a woman from the farm called Hjort, the given name Anders, and a patronymic family name (Q11455398) Olsson which shows that his father’s name was Olof.

In the 20th century, people with farm names adopted family names (using different strategies, which I’ll leave out). This means that for instance Busk Margit Jonsson (Q4957345) has three names: the farm name (Q10512538) Busk, the given name (Q202444) Margit and the family name (Q101352) Jonsson. Jonsson in this case is not a patronymic, as her father’s name was Busk Johan Jonsson. See sv:Gårdsnamn#Personer med gårdsnamn for more examples of bearers.

It seems to me from the article oeconym that this term is used in a quite broad sense in English, referring to any ”name of a house or any other residential building, and in the broader sense, […] any inhabited settlement, like village, town or city”. Thus, for the specific oeconyms that in Scandinavian culture (and possibly other cultures) are used as family names, it might be an idea to use a term like farm name to distinguish them. Some Swedish articles distinguish gårdsnamn (farm name used as family name) and gårdnamn (proper name of a farm) for this reason. I’ll leave this for the discussion. –Lundgren8 (talk) 08:31, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion edit

@ArthurPSmith: Thanks! I see that Ainali has fixed the examples now. Lundgren8 (talk) 20:28, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]