"Zildjian" is an Armenian last name, but "Zildji" (zilci) means "cymbalist"/"cymbal-maker", or more generically, "bell-maker" in Turkish. "-ian" is the Armenian patronymic suffix. The whole word means something like "Cymbalistson" which makes it the most fitting company name to produce cymbals.
From the article, the cymbal-making came first, and then the name followed:
The company’s proprietary alloy was alchemized 13 generations ago in Constantinople (now Istanbul) by Debbie Zildjian’s ancestor, Avedis I. He was trying to make gold, she said, but he ended up concocting a combination of copper and tin. “The mixing of those metals produced a very loud, resonant, beautiful sound,” she said.
Debbie explained that in 1618 the Ottoman sultan summoned Avedis to the Topkapi Palace to make cymbals for elite military bands. The metalsmith’s work pleased the ruler, who gave him permission to found his own business in 1623. The sultan also bestowed Avedis the family name "Zildjian" which actually means cymbal maker. He went on to craft cymbals that were widely used, including in churches and by belly dancers.
The catch, though, is that ambiguity between 'cymbal-maker' and 'bell-maker'. 'Zil's certainly existed before the surname existed, but what was a zil/zill? In English 'zill' still usually refers to something like a 'finger cymbal' or crotal, something with thicker bell-like walls and a bell-like sound and vibration. Unfortunately everything I've read about this is suggestive but maddeningly vague, for example p. 8 https://books.google.ie/books?redir_esc=y&id=Fl6Ie0_Rt8cC&q=... of the official history, Zildjian: A History of the Legendary Cymbal Makers by Jon Cohan (ISBN 9780793591558 ):
> Cymbals and bells had been made of bronze for centuries; the formula of eight parts of copper to two parts of tin was well known, but at some point Avedis stumbled upon a process of making a bronze alloy which held its strength and temper even when hammered and worked to a previously unimaginable thinness. The technique he discovered allowed cymbals to be made which had a distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved. The bronze alloy itself was no mystery, but the mixing process, the method of combining the metals in molten form to create the castings from which the cymbals was made, was a secret held only by Avedis. The resulting cymbals, said to contain traces of gold or silver, must have pleased the Sultan enough to commission Avedis to make cymbals for the Janissaries, the superior fighting forces of the Ottomans. The music of the Janissary bands relied profoundly on the striking of the cymbals, and Avedis became the official supplier to the Sultan.
Bells ring when you hit them, but cymbals have a thin bow which vibrates wildly and crashes when hit. It's a radically different sound, and apparently a radically different physical behaviour, though I don't understand the physics. So what I suspect happened was this: thick-walled, bell-like zils had long been manufactured in Constantinople, in various different sizes. But Avedis I's alloy turned out to be (again, I assume) the first (at least in the Middle East or Europe) to allow zils to be made thin enough to crash like a cymbal, not just ring like a bell. This is presumably what the talk about "distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved" actually refers to. Since making thin-bowed cymbals is apparently a very tricky procedure which involves subjecting the blank to high pressure and high temperature at the same time, it seems plausible that Avedis' accidental breakthrough in metallurgy was necessary to make this possible. (OTOH maybe his real breakthrough was in that cymbal-making process; maybe his special recipe for the blanks was in fact less necessary than he realised, even?) A leap from ringing bell-like zills to crashing cymbals would be the kind of thing which could be dramatic enough to get the sultan to notice and to hand out a title, a trade monopoly and a cash prize. If the crash was a new sound, it must have seemed absolutely otherworldly at the time. (However I don't know when China started making crashing cymbals, whether some crashing cymbals from China might have made it to Constantinople by the early 1600s, and so on.)
In his memoir "The Black Dog of Fate" Peter Balakian gives a breakdown like this for a relative branch of the family named Shekerlemejian: "şeker" is Turkish for "sugar" and "şekerleme" is "things made with sugar" so a candy seller got an occupational name and then their child got the patronymic form.
All of this to say: there's an n=1 elsewhere for this happening to Ottoman Armenians.
"Crapper" as slang for a toilet has an attestation from before Thomas Crapper was a plumber, so if that's what you were referring to, then it's also not a case where it was named after the guy.
I'd be shocked if they hadn't. Particularly, cymbal makers who have already mapped out the other parts of the process. In fact they may already be using the same or similar alloys. Consider that violins are all made from approximately the same materials.
It's a day's work in the right spectroscopy lab. A bit more difficult to figure out is how to turn the cast blank into a cymbal.
The "How it's Made" for cymbals is a Zildjian factory. By the time this was made, there were already many competitors, so I doubt anything in the video wasn't already replicated by Sabian, Paiste, etc., but it's still interesting.
Italians also got into cymbal-making during the 20th century, the upshot of which was apparently that some of the post-WWII British cymbals branded as "Zyn" were made by Italian POWs (or maybe ex-POWs?)
Interestingly, Sabian is the same family as Zildjian. I believe the owners at the time of separation were brothers Robert (who separated out the Sabian line in Canada naming it after his children) and Armand who took the Zildjian line in Massachusetts.
There is a rich tradition of secret sauce Armenian-American businesses splitting in half in this way. Zankou Chicken forked, for instance, however much more acrimoniously.
More like people didn't have last names in the Ottoman empire, so they were usually called by their fathers' names, or nicknames. Surnames were officially started to be enforced in 1934, long after the Ottoman empire collapsed and the Rebublic of Turkey was founded.
All surnames derived from occupations started at certain point of time. Ancestors of Tailor, Smith, Miller, Fletcher, Fisher, Cooper, etc. had different last names at certain time in past. If a change didn't occur these "occupational" names would not exist.
A change in surname is not necessary, just a transition from no surname to surname, which happened relatively recently in many places, or from explicit parentage descriptions ("X son of Y", etc.) to inherited family names.
Maybe. Often when families immigrated to America they tried to pick a spelling that would allow English speakers to pronounce their name close enough to what they were used to that they would understand they were being called. Sometimes the this was a different English word that had nothing to do with the meaning in the original language. (I suspect the same happens with immigrants elsewhere, but I know my family name is based on getting close to the original sound and that happens to be a word that has a different meaning in English)
I don't know if the original word was a occupation back in the old world or not. (the dialect my family spoke is no longer spoken so it would be difficult to research)
> Often when families immigrated to America they tried to pick a spelling that would allow English speakers to pronounce their name close enough to what they were used to that they would understand they were being called. Sometimes the this was a different English word that had nothing to do with the meaning in the original language.
This is also the naming process for some places in the new world like Cuernavaca in Mexico
So it's very likely it is just a normal thing humans tend to do. Except I don't know much European history so I can't tell if those places got it from England
right, I'm just putting a date on it for anyone wondering about when it happened in English. I have no idea when people got last names in those countries. Also they didn't have different last names before they got these names, they just didn't have last names at all.
Well, consider what position you are in when someone with absolute power over your life and death grants you a new name as a sign of favor. Do you risk rejecting it and potentially endangering yourself and your entire family?
