“Ahcuah” comes from the Aztec language (Nahuatl). I use it because of a remarkable coincidence (with an unfortunately long explanation).
My last name, “Neinast”, is a German name. If you break it down, it looks like “nein-ast”. “Nein” is German for “no”, and “ast” means “branch”.
However, that is probably not the original name. The original deed for my great-grandfather’s house, filed with the county clerk in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, has his last name as “Neina∫z”. The “∫” is just an old-fashioned “s”. However, this suggests that the last name, in German, is actually “Neinaß”, where “ß” is the special eszed ligature. A search reveals other people in Pomerania (where my great-grandparents came from) with the last name “Neinaß”, so it is a legitimate name.
If you break down “Neinaß”, you get “nein” for “no” or “not”, and “aß” is the past participle of “eat”, that is, “eaten”.
Now, switch gears and look at Nahuatl.
In Nahuatl, “no” or “not” is “ah”. (In Nahuatl, the “h” stands for something called the “glottal stop”.) “Branch” is “cuahu(i)-tl”. The “tl” is just a noun ending; the root of the word is “cuahui”, with the final “i” often dropped. The “hu” is just how the letter “w” is written, and it is written either “hu” or “uh”, depending on whether it starts or ends a syllable. Thus (liberally), “no-branch” can be rendered “ah-cuauh”.
“Eat” in Nahuatl is “cuā”, and “eaten” is “cuah”. So (again, liberally, and ignoring some issues regarding subject) “not-eaten” is “ah-cuah”. (The macron over the “a” indicates that the vowel is a long vowel. Nahuatl distinguishes vowel lengths.)
Thus we have:
The remarkable thing is that the pun between “no branch” and “not eaten” in German is also a pun in Nahuatl. And I can’t pass that up.
Let me make sure you realize that this punning really makes no linguistic sense. It doesn’t follow the grammar of either German or Nahuatl. It’s just playing around with various roots. But it is still fun, and an interesting coincidence.
Not only that, last names could easily be made up from dialects in which the original meanings are lost or different. For instance, the ancestry.com explanation for “Neinast” is
South German: probably from a topographic name meaning ‘new pasture’, or from a habitational name with dialect Ast(en) ‘pasture’.
Of course, in German, “new” is not “nei” but “neu”, but vowel sounds are often easily interchangeable (just listen to and compare Boston accents with southern accents), so maybe “Neinast” was more like “neu-naß”. In that case, “naß” means “wet”, “humidity”, or I even found an older dictionary in which it was defined as “bog” or “fen”. So that may have been the origin of the name, but I haven’t found anything definitive.
Not show how this says what it is, other then how the word relates ot other words…as that is all your doing here. might want to rethink the article.
It’s his last name in Nahuatl. How did you not get that? 😕
I haven’t heard from you in months and just checking to see if you were still around. I miss your excellent trail guides/accounts.
Nice! Thanks dude! Just found you. Thought I was the only one! Shoeless in Vancouver BC city and surrounding mountains for 5 years now. And I love it! Thanks for the support you gave me by just existing. Stay healthy 👍👍👣👣
In German, we use “nein” as an answer to a question, not as a negation of the following word. “No branch” in German would be “kein Ast”.
I pronounce “Neinast” like “Nei-nast”, and “Neinaß” like “Nei-nass”, or, for American ears approximately: “ny-nass”. The ancestry.com explanation is plausible but – as you say – not definitive.
(I have been a German native speaker for almost 60 years.)
Well, I’d certainly trust what you would say more than anything I might pull off the internet. As I said above, though, it was just playing with various roots.
I try to keep away from many of those pronunciations. Nei-nast sounds like 9-assed (when spoken by an American), and as a kid, I was often called 9-asses. These days, I generally flatten the “a” to “ah”.
Also, any of these explanations are generally called “folk etymologies”, which are often wildly incorrect. (E.g.,fuck supposedly coming from “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.)
Thanks for the comment!
Regarding “folk etymologies”, until the mass arrival of TV ca. 1960 as a unifier for spoken German, Germany had A LOT of dialects that were slightly different even from town to town. “Neinaß” probably is constructed from two normal words from a dialect that I don’t recognize.