A city by any other name would smell as sweet

So I wanted to go to Tønder in October to stock up on Danish goodies, since I had found out that the regional German tariff is valid as far as Tønder (the first station on the other side of the border) and so a day return is fairly cheap.

I had inquired whether it’s possible to buy a ticket in advance; group tickets (which, inexplicably, cost only €0.60 more compared to a single day return ticket, at least for that distance: €34.60 compared to €34.00) are only valid after 9 o’clock and I wanted to take a train that leaves at 9:01 and didn’t want to have to hurry to buy a ticket from a machine on that day, and had been told that you could do that four weeks in advance.

That meant this week, so I went to the local train company’s travel office in the station and tried to buy a ticket to “Tondern” (the German name). This apparently got turned into “Tøndern st (TCV)”, and the system refused to sell me a ticket to there. A colleague whom the lady asked for advice suggested selling me a ticket to Süderlügum, the last station on the German side of the border, but I was worried that the conductor wouldn’t accept that, even though the fare was the same.

So I didn’t buy the ticket and walked outside. I decided to try the ticket machine to see what it said. It didn’t offer “Tondern” (when I entered “Ton”, the only option was “Tonndorf”), so I wondered whether it might be “Tönder”. After trying a bit more, I found that the magic word was “Toender (DK)”. That gave me the option to buy a group day return ticket, but only for today.

But armed with that knowledge, I went back inside the travel office and asked the lady to try “Toender”; that gave her the same two options the ticket machine had given me, “Toender (DK)” and “Toender Nord (DK)”. The second one is closer to the shops but the German tickets aren’t valid that far, so I asked her to select the first one.

This time, the machine seemed happy to calculate a ticket and sell me a group day return ticket at the fare I expected.

So, yay!

(And boo for the system for having the same station under two different names. Though I suppose it’s not German Rail’s fault: I imagine that one spelling comes from their system and the other from the local fare cooperation organisation, and those two should get their act together and settle on one spelling.)

Surnames in Greenland

I wonder what the history of surnames in Greenland is.

Inuit in Canada had numerical “surnames” (disc numbers) assigned at one point in the 1940s; then, later (starting in 1969), they were given the opportunity to choose their own surnames. So this was comparatively recent.

The surnames that I come across appear to be Inuktitut words; for example, see Wikipedia’s List of Canadian Inuit. You have the occasional name such as “Curley” but by and large, that list is dominated by names along the lines of “Aglukkaq” and “Okalik”.

In Greenland, though, surnames are a whole ’nother kettle of fish: the PDF on naming available from Statistics Greenland says that the top 5 surnames, accounting for about 1/8 of all Greenlanders, are Petersen, Olsen, Jensen, Nielsen, and Hansen. In fact, all of the top 50 surnames look European/Danish to me; I don’t see a single Greenlandic-language one amongst the lot. And most of them end in -sen.

So I wonder how that came about.

Did the priests give everyone a Christian name (at time 1), and then at one point (time 2), everyone got a patronymic as a surname which was then rendered immutable? For example, if Aputsiaq got called Lars and his son Minik got called Kristian at time 1, then when time 2 came, would Minik officially be called “Kristian Larsen”, with the surname being in origin a patronymic?

And if they’re not patronymics, then where do they come from? Danish government officials giving Kalaallit their own family names? And if they are patronymics, how come “Møller” is #7?

Also, I find it interesting that “Petersen” is the most common surname (accounting for 1 in 26 Greenlanders), yet “Peter” is not the most common given name. (At least, not the most common first given name; if all given names are taken into account, it is the most common one.)

Would be interesting to read the history of that.

(Another fun bit from that document: apparently, popular Danish-origin names get Greenlandic suffixes tacked on to them, so you have not only “Hans” but also “Hanse(e)raq” and “Hansi(n)nguaq”. The second, I believe, being something like “Hänschen” in German: the -nnguaq suffix is not just “fake, toy, make-believe, imitation” as in Canada but also, apparently, “small, cute”.)