🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <E9qt56.6u4@iglou.com>, Ken Fischer <kefische@iglou.com> wrote:
>meron@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
>: By overcounting.  You're implicictly assuming that all the ancestors 
>: are different people.
>
>        But there is an obvious problem, not with 
>numbers, but with sir-names.   As the population
>is studied backward, there has to be less last names,
>so where do all the last names come from?

Simple, originally there were no surnames.  At some point, it became
difficult to keep track of people by given name only, so we added on
things like the town they were from, or their father's name, or what
they did for a living, and these developed into the surnames we have
today.

>        And another factor is that with the current/past
>convention of the wife taking the husbands last name,
>and some families having no boy children, the total
>number of last names should be decreasing, and that
>does not seem possible considering the fact that
>there must be more last names now than ever before.

Why must there be more last names than ever before?  Why not just more
people with the same last names.





-- 
======================================================================
Kevin Scaldeferri				University of Maryland

"The trouble is, each of them is plausible without being instinctive"