There have been many systems for naming people over the centuries, but English-speakers tend to be familiar only with their own system. While it is true that modern Western surnames evolved in medieval Europe, there were other even more complex naming systems in use in other parts of the world prior to that.

In this episode we take a look at the naming system used among Arabic speakers in the Islamic Middle East prior to modern times.

CORRECTIONS

1. I messed up the Arabic on the Spongebob slide. I didn't use the right grammatical form for the word "minutes." That's pretty embarrassing, honestly. In my defense, the Arabic rules for number agreement are out of control. (Needless to say, I'm not fluent in Arabic. This is not news to any Arabic speakers watching the video.)

2. The English word "camel" doesn't come from Egyptian Arabic. It comes from Phoenician by way of Greek. Phoenician and Arabic are both Semitic languages. In most Semitic languages the word for "camel" is some variation of "gamal," "gamla," etc.

3. I didn't talk about how kunyas can also be laqabs. Not so much a mistake as an omission. When I made the video I just didn't want to add extra explanation when it was already pretty long. But in retrospect, after seeing some of the comments, I see that I was leaving out an important and interesting part of Arabic naming.

"The conventional notion that Africans failed to employ the wheel because of lack of initiative or intelligence is intellectually unsatisfactory, not so much because it is racialist as because it is circular: Africans are supposed to have ignored the wheel because they were unenterprising, and the evidence that they were unenterprising is that they failed to adopt the wheel."

---Robin Law, “Wheeled Transport in Pre-Colonial West Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 50, no. 3 (1980), p. 257

The first U.S. presidential election in 1789 had none of the features Americans associate with elections today: no campaigning for the office, no political parties or conventions, no primary elections. Election Day was in January rather than November. The Electoral College was taken seriously rather than being treated as a formality. This was the only election in which a state was disqualified from participating. And there was only one issue at stake: whether the Constitution itself should be scrapped.

The final results of the election were that George Washington received 69 electoral votes and John Adams 34, making them president and vice president, respectively. John Adams should have received at least 49 votes, but many of the electors who wanted to vote for him voted for other people instead because of a scheme that Alexander Hamilton helped create. So instead of Adams receiving 71% of the electoral vote as he would have, he only received 49%.