Re: Off topic: nomen et omen

[PhilA77808@xxxxxxxx]

This is one of my lifetime favorite topics, to which I must do a core dump.
My family name is Adamsak -- of Hungarian derivation. 
I didn't give it much thought until the '50's, when I worked in Iran for some years. There, I learned that Adam means "mankind" in Farsi, the ancient Iranian language. A smattering of ethnographic hints that Adam may have been a name for the ancient Indo-European tribe from which the Persians, and Sanskrit, sprang. Extending that, -sak could become a genitive ending, meaning "of the family of."
This insight became stronger when I flew on an 8-passenger plane with two other Adams on the passenger list -- Adamian, an Armenian, and Adampour, a Persian. Years later, I saw in a work on family names that in Central Europe, Adam--- is one of the most common names, with various genitive endings in Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian and others.
End of dump.
Phil Adamsak