Sir Frederick Grant Banting 1891–1941 The Origin of A Famous Canadian Surname The surgeon and researcher was a co-discoverer of insulin. To learn more about the great Canadian discovery, visit http://www.diabetes.ca/ and click on the left panel the words “About Diabetes” and then click on “Banting House.” Banting is a type of the common patronymic surname, that is, a last name arising from the name of the father. In Anglo-Saxon, now called Old English, patronymics were often formed by adding -ing to the stem of the father’s name. Thus English has surnames like Carling ‘son of an Anglo-Saxon named Carl’ and Keeping ‘son of The Keep,’ that is, of a person who looked after the keep of a castle, and was probably the jailor who by metonymy would have a nickname like Keep or The Keep or later John the Keep (for John the Jailer). Metonymy labels a figure of speech in which the name of an attribute or adjunct of a thing is substituted for the name of the thing itself; for example, referring to the turf for horse racing, to the crown for king, to the stage or the boards for theatrical profession, to the bench for judiciary. Metonymy adds variety and colour to speech and writing, and is a frequently used ploy in the metaphorical bag-of-tricks of most languages. In the making of English last names, metonymy was a frequent source of nicknames and then later of surnames. Banting is a patronymic that means ‘son of an Anglo-Saxon named Bando or Banto.’ The Germanic first name Bando is related to our modern English word band ‘strip of material’ and Bant in Old High German which meant ‘tie, bond, connection.’ Banto was a common and widespread Germanic first name. Variants of it show up in Italy, Corsica, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Russia. One remote possibility is the origin of Banting as an Englishing of a Norman-French surname, Bantegny, itself taken from the French place name Bantigny, a district in the city of Cambrai in northern France. The district took its name from a Gallo-Roman first name, Bantinius, which is merely a Latinizing of the Germanic name Banto. The swirling mutability of European political boundaries throughout medieval history is mirrored in the transborder ebb and flow of the words used for names. Down through the centuries names hop back and forth over customs barriers like Olympic crickets.
© 2006 William Gordon Casselman
Hundreds of links to more of my word entries are available below.
|
