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A comment on Catala: A Programming Language for the Law. Parent comment

Re:Catala: A Programming Language for the Law by Y_Y on Thursday May 06, 2021 @05:46AM (#27061003)
The somewhat ironic logic here being that a name referencing a place is very unlikely to come from that place. If Jordi moves from a Catalan area to an Occitan area then he (and his descendants) might be known as "Jordi the Catalan". It wouldn't be very useful to pick that as a name for someone who never left though.

Of course nowadays people's names are mostly just symbolic, and you can move to England and still be called Johnny English.

(In fact, as a sibling comment notes, maybe SQL is named after him.)

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Re:Catala: A Programming Language for the Law by huachimingo on Thursday May 06, 2021 @09:44AM (#27063083)
>Of course nowadays people's names are mostly just symbolic, and you can move to England and still be called Johnny English.

This depends on the language. In Spanish (and by extension every romance language) no one would know the meaning of Alvarado (they would associate it with the name Álvaro, but just that) or González, but it would be awful to have a name like "Marcos Café/Marrón" (Marcus Brown) or "Carlos Panadero" (Carlos Baker).

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Re:Catala: A Programming Language for the Law by Y_Y on Thursday May 06, 2021 @02:12PM (#27067129)
What about Marcos Moreno? Or Carlos Zapatero?

I take your point that the origins of surnames in Spain are typically unlike those in e.g. England, but there are plenty of common apellidos originating in physical descriptions, (far away) place of origin, or livelihood.

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Re:Catala: A Programming Language for the Law by JasonFruit on Thursday May 06, 2021 @08:03AM (#27061968)
Kind of like how, if someone's last name is Ashkenaz/Ashkenazi, you know they're a Sephardic Jew.
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