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 video 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.