Thread: Can someone translate my last name

My last name is russian and i am looking to get it tattooed in russian on me somewhere. Antonchik

Actually, your last name is not Russian. The russian last names are mostly -ov -ev, -iy. The suffix -chik means "little', the name Anton came from romans and means something like "of Antonius (family)".

Okie dokie then, well my great grandpa, and grandma came straight off the boat from russia, so i was always told that it was a russian name, anyways what would the russian spelling of it be.

It does sound like a Slavic name, though. Perhaps Slovakian or something in that area?

There are a lot of Russian names that end in -in as well.

It could just be an accident. I've heard plenty of stories of immigrant families turning up in the US not being able to speak a word of English and being assigned an odd surname due to a miss-understanding. Maybe the immigration officer asked their names and they couldn't answer, but he overheard Granny calling Gramps by a diminutive so he wrote that down, and it stuck.

My own surname is the result of a miss-spelling on my paternal grandfather's birth certificate.

What do you mean? Did your grandfather immigrate to England?

The Russian spelling: Антончик

It is not necessary for Russian names to end on -ev/ov or -in. Some of them may be just words like "Коромысло", "Земляника", this very "Антончик" ("Tony" ) or even word combinations like that famous "Доезжай-не-доедешь". Some of them are of Ukranian ("Степаненко", "Стасюк") or other Slavonic origin ("Ковальский"), but it doesn't mean that their owners are not Russian.

Thank you for all your help

Originally Posted by Евгения Белякова

What do you mean? Did your grandfather immigrate to England?

No, just that the clerk or doctor who registered my grandfather's birth somehow made a mistake when he filled in the birth certificate (swapped two letters around, and missed one out completely). Remember that English is barely phonetic, so it's really easy to make mistakes like that, especially since most Scottish names were Gaelic (a language that is difficult to represent with Latin script) and have been around longer than wide-spread literacy anyway, so there are usually several different spellings of each surname. It doesn't actually matter much in the end, it just happens that my immediate family have an even more unusual spelling. I just used it as a throw-away illustrative example

Interesting