Ahcuah?

“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.

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