• palordrolap@fedia.io
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    6 hours ago

    “Sgrandhomme” was jarring enough to get me to go look up the etymology of Stallman, and it’s apparently nothing to do with men and more to do with the mouth (myn) of a stream (stæl).

    Unfortunately, «(De l’)embouchure du ruisseau» is a bit long for a surname, French or otherwise. I could see abbreviated variants of that mistakenly turning into “Rousseau”, “Lambert” and “Dubois”, if not others, but “Ruisseau” itself could work. There’s apparently a book called “Monsieur Ruisseau”, but I get the impression that it’s not a common surname in French (a bit like how “Stream” isn’t in English), and also, it completely ignores the -man part of the name.

    Going another direction gives “Crique”, but in modern French that means “cove” which isn’t quite the right meaning, and also doesn’t seem to be a surname.

    Yet another direction takes “Stallman” to mean “shopkeeper”, and from that we might get “Marchand” or a variant, which is definitely a French surname.