My name is perfectly ordinary, though it took some work to get it
there. That makes it partly a birth name and partly chosen; I adopted
the distinctive (and exotic to an American pre-teen) Icelandic ethnic
form of my first name, and found myself compelled by aesthetics to
restore the "s" in my surname that had been dropped in
Americanization in my grandfather's generation. Surnames turn over
each generation in Iceland, where your surname is your father's first
name followed by sson or dottir. Historic siblings Leivur (Leif)
Eriksson and Freydis Eriksdottir are a good example of how it works.
My name "should" be Eirikur Jonasson by the old ways. My
greatgrandfather changed his surname to agree with his first name to
make Americanization easier! Hallgrimur Jonasson became Hallgrimur
Hallgrimsson. Easier, yeah, right. So it seemed to me, even at a
fairly early age, that I had right of choice. My father was very
much against it though.
Linguistically, the Old Norse Eirikur becomes Erik and then Eric as
the inflected endings were eventually dropped except in Iceland
itself. The "ur" is actually the same inflection (a tag meaning
masculine singular noun) as the "us" in classical Latin names like
Julius, Marcus, etc. It's interesting how Indoeuropean languages
have actually lost a lot of formal structure. It makes me wonder how
that complexity came to be in the first place, if we came to do
pretty well without it.
Eirikur
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