User talk:Cilantrohead

Welcome
Come introduce yourself at the new users page. If you have any questions, you can ask there or contact me personally. Urbane  (Talk)   (Contributions)  09:14, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Hi there. Always great to see new contributors. Can I ask where you're getting those big lists of names? Thanks. If you ever need anything, you can ask on my talk page. Happy editing! – Mike.lifeguard  &#124; talk 17:52, 9 February 2008 (UTC)


 * FYI, you can categorize your own book :) See Help:Category – Mike.lifeguard  &#124; talk 06:14, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Spanish
Yeah, that looks great! If possible, perhaps you could have the words next to the pictures rather than below? But I love the pictures. Did you make them or what? Regards, &mdash;Cel es tianpower háblame 15:20, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Hey Cilantrohead! That Spanish vocab page looks great! Karl Wick (talk) 18:15, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks!
Hi, just a thanks for the message you wrote me back in March, which I didn't see until today. I see also that you haven't edited since October so you might not see this for quite some time either. I've since decided to throw the majority of my support toward the language called Occidental, and am thinking about making a textbook for that (some others exist, but one in my own style) so I might use the images then. Ta! Mithridates (talk) 11:47, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

More comprehensive (or complete) lists of surnames?
Hello. I am very interested in creating fictional characters with genuine-sounding names, and the surnames I am focusing on are especially of English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian origin.

What if I find that the lists of surnames per national origin found here are not enough for me to use? Do you know of any complete lists of surnames for each particular national origin, particularly the ones I mentioned, that are easily accessible online?

From my earlier research, regarding Russian surnames, I was able to come up with this site (this page has a list of surnames beginning with the letter "A", and has obvious links to surnames beginning with other letters found at the top of the page). I'm also curious to find out if that website in particular is reliable for finding Russian surnames.

Any websites you are able to provide that have complete lists of surnames that could be shown in alphabetical order will be very much appreciated. I hope I am not asking too much of you, and I wish you well. Classicalfan626 (discuss • contribs) 19:55, 11 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Welcome to Wikibooks, here are some resources you might want to use:


 * Kate Monk had a site called the Onomastikon. It can be found today here:


 * http://tekeli.li/onomastikon/


 * The website forebears.io covers more than half the people in the world. It has frequency statistics for just about any surname, and you can find the top 200 surnames from any given country. An example would be this page:


 * http://forebears.io/russia


 * The U.S. Census Bureau has put out a list of surnames in the U.S. from the year 2000. It breaks it down by race (White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American/Alaska Native, Hispanic, or multiracial):


 * https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy.html


 * And here's the biggest book I know on first names and surnames from around the world. You can find it at Amazon:


 * People's Names: A Cross-Cultural Reference Guide to the Proper Use of Over 40000 Personal and Familial Names in Over 100 Cultures by Holly Ingraham


 * You can find it on Amazon, but Wikibooks won't let me link to an Amazon page.


 * Hope this helps! Cilantrohead (discuss • contribs) 00:05, 12 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Hello, and thank you for your reply over at my talk page! Your feedback is welcome and very much appreciated. And, just for further reference, your talk page is on my watchlist, so I'll be able to notice once a reply is made here.


 * Anyway, regarding your reply over here, also seen at my talk page, I think you misunderstood the purpose of my initial posting. What I'm looking for are, if possible, complete lists of surnames, particularly of English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian origin. You see, I'm not looking exclusively for the most common surnames, but for all that have ever been recorded.


 * Perhaps it will help if I gave you a couple of examples. For instance, my mom's maiden name is Zanfordino, which is derived from the Italian surname Zanfardino, which is nowhere to be found in the Italian list of character names here at Wikibooks. Likewise, the surname Albinoni, also Italian, as in the fairly famous composer Tomaso, is not listed either. That being said, there are likely more surnames out there in each of the national origins I provided that aren't necessarily the commonplace, or that I haven't even heard of.


 * I want at least some of my characters to be more unique (and realistic), rather than rely on surnames that are the most common, or having to resort to making up surnames which can't possibly exist in the real world!


 * Good luck and best wishes. Classicalfan626 (discuss • contribs) 00:55, 12 December 2016 (UTC)


 * You're welcome.


 * I'm not sure if a complete listing of names by ethnicity exists. The name lists at Wikibooks, however, contain many names that are not very common.


 * If you want every surname, your best bet is probably the forebears.io site. You can look up a name, and see how many people with that name currently exist in each country. An example would be the Russian name Zychik:


 * http://forebears.io/surnames/zychik


 * Forebears.io can help you if you want to find out the national origin of a surname you've already encountered, but I don't know what to do if you want to find every surname that's ever been borne by someone in a national/ethnic group. Cilantrohead (discuss • contribs) 01:46, 12 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Edit: This is my count of the number of surnames in each of Wikibooks' name lists:
 * English: 5,601 surnames
 * German: 5,343 surnames
 * French: 2,383 surnames
 * Spanish: 5,091 surnames
 * Italian: 5,041 surnames
 * Russian: 461 surnames


 * So we definitely go beyond the common surnames. Cilantrohead (discuss • contribs) 02:11, 12 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Wow, I was not quite aware that it was that difficult to find a complete listing of surnames per ethnicity/national origin anywhere. My only remaining concern is this: why is the Wikibooks list of Russian surnames so short compared to its lists of English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German surnames? Classicalfan626 (discuss • contribs) 16:25, 12 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Probably for this reasonː I compiled these lists largely by looking at the U.S. Census Bureau lists and checking the ethnicity of each name. Not many Americans have Russian surnames compared with English, German, French, Spanish or Italian surnames. (I remember reading once that 90% of America's immigrants from Russia were Jews, who generally had Jewish surnames, and the rest were mostly Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Armenian, German-Russian, Carpatho-Rusyn, etc.) I was also helped by a large Hispanic surname list (it may have been the Passel-Word or Word-Passel List?) I found online and an Italian genealogy site with tens of thousands of families. You're free to add names to the Russian list to make it beefier, but I can't think of any good sites for new Russian surnames at the moment. Cilantrohead (discuss • contribs) 02:04, 13 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Oh, OK. I still think this site will be able to help in regards to Russian surnames: http://www.vgd.ru/ENGLISH/a.htm. Classicalfan626 (discuss • contribs) 12:37, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Do you think you would find that All Russia Family Tree site, which I provided a couple of times above, helpful? Classicalfan626 (discuss • contribs) 22:04, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I checked the All Russia Family Tree site out more closely, and it looks as if it could get us some more A and B names on the list (although then we'd have to find other Russian names to compensate for the alphabetical lopsidedness). However, it would be important to check each name for ethnic (as opposed to simply national) origin to make sure that the names are really Russian -- the U.S.S.R. was a big tent. For instance, I notice Aizenshtadt and Akselrod on the list, which are Jewish names, while Akopyan is Armenian and Akimenko sounds Ukrainian. Cilantrohead (discuss • contribs) 03:28, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I am aware that not all the surnames listed on that site sound Russian, but I am really enjoying sifting through those and other surnames through that Forebears site. It's really a lot of fun. Classicalfan626 (discuss • contribs) 21:49, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

user book
Hi. I saw your note at the projects reading room, and had a passing thought. I guess this needs some explanation. A few years back, I had this (naive) idea that Wikibookians might get more of a sense of community if there were an easy-to-use user box for contributors to a book. I tried to set something up, hoping it would catch on... and of course it never did, much. I guess it wasn't easy enough to use, maybe not useful enough &mdash; partly because it wasn't used enough, so it never reached critical mass; or maybe most wikibooks just don't get a lot of contributors at once, so trying to group them like that just doesn't work very well. I've wondered if maybe, once I get context-sensitive help on-line using wikidialog, maybe it'll work better. Anyway there are a few books it's set up to work with; you put on your user page, and it automatically puts you in. The user box is customizable per book, using a peripheral template called. I've got a few of them on my own user page, such as And on a whim I set one up for Writing Adolescent Fiction,  Of course the image isn't terribly inspired; it could easily be customized to something else at Writing Adolescent Fiction/User book.

Of course, in this case I suppose it might be more appropriate to set up some sort of user box specific to the specialized task force. Do you suppose it would be helpful to somehow set up a general userbox facility that would help with things like that? --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:10, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I suppose it might be helpful to! And thanks for the WAF userbox. I'm going to use it! Cilantrohead (discuss • contribs) 21:53, 18 September 2017 (UTC)