Wednesday, February 1, 2012

The surname Nobel icelandicizes as Nýbýlis

To my utmost surprise I happened to find out that the origin of the surname Nobel is as unscandinavian as the very Völuspá. However foreign the word looks like, it is actually derived from a place-name in Scania, Sweden, Nöbbelöv, which is a corruption of the Scanian Nibbele (the addition-löv, Icelandic -leif, is of a later date), which goes back to the oldest, ine 13th century recorded nyböle (Icelandic Nýbýli). (See: http://www.df.lth.se/~cml/scania/ortnamn.txt ).
and http://www.sloff.se/sob/05-3/ortnamn.html )
Enligt Forslid finns det i Skåne 64 byar med namn på -löv och dessutom tre gårdar. Det är osäkert om det finns fler ”äkta löv-namn” än Svalöv och Håstenslöv inom kommunen. Det är tänkbart att namnet på den gamla försvunna gården Västerslöv i Kågeröds socken är en av de tre gårdarna på -löv. Namnet kan nämligen vara bildat av mansnamnet Westar och löv. Källs Nöbbelöv är däremot ett falskt löv-namn, eftersom det är bildat av det fornskånska namnet Kældor och ordet nybøle (nybygge).

One of Alfred Nobel's ancestors was a peasant farmer by the name of Pederson  (-sen?). When one of his sons moved to Uppsala he couldn’t have such a simple name, so he changed it by Latinising his home parish name Nöbbelöv to Nobelius. Later generations had it again changed to Nobel.
(see http://skaneland.blogspot.com/2005/05/nbbelv-prize.html )

This well-known surname luckily hasn't anything in common with the English noble and its many cognates in various European languages, which all go back to the Latin etymological root nobilis, which opens up interesting neologistic possibilities:

If the surname Nobel can be translated Nýbýlis, the personal name Alfred Nobel then becomes Elfráður Nýbýlis and Nobel Prize becomes nýbýlisverðlaun.
Compounds: Nýbýlisstofnun, nýbýlisskáld, nýbýlishöfundur, nýbýliseðlisfræðingur, nýbýlisfrægð.

The chemical term nobelium can be translated by two completely different compounds: nýbýlisblý and elfráðsefni.

The name of an artificially created radioactive element, a product of the nuclear era, brought into being as late as 1958, can be translated into Icelandic in two different ways, with two completely different words, each consisting of pure, medieval Scandinavian lexical building blocks, amazing!

And last but not least, the term dynamite can translate as elfráðstundur: Nýbýlisverðlaunin voru sett á fót sem hinsta ósk hins sænska Elfráðs Nýbýlis (1833-1896), sem fann upp elfráðstundrið.

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