"Be true to who you are and the family name you bare." - Gordon B. Hinckley

 The Etymology of a Name and Debunking Myths

In the English language, we take the name of a city and turn it into an adjective by adding a suffix to the name. This is also known as a "Demonym," which is a word used to denote a person who inhabits or is native to a particular place.

For example: Las Vegas. I live in Las Vegas, therefore I am a Las Vegan. By adding the suffix "an" to the end of the name of Las Vegas, it is now an adjective I can use to describe myself which explains where I live...or where I come from. We also have other suffixes that do the same thing. Some cities we add an "er" to the end of the city's name, such as Portland, and the people who live in or come from Portland are Portlanders. Or we can add the suffix "ite," such as Seattleite, to refer to someone who lives in or is from Seattle.

In the Czech language the exact same suffix structure exists, except instead of using "an" or "er" or "ite," they use "ský" with an accent over the "ý." The root of the word is the name of a city, just like in English. So, for example, if the name of a city in Czech Republic is Lutova, then a person who comes from Lutova would be a ...

Almost! It's odd how much the two languages are alike when it comes to adding suffixes to root words which are the names of cities, towns or villages. Just like in English, and I'll use Las Vegas again as an example...we drop the last letter of the city's name, so in this case we drop the "s" from Vegas, and then add the "n" to create Las Vegan.

We would do the same thing in the Czech language. We would drop the last letter of the name of the city, so in the example of Lutova, we would drop the "a" and then add the suffix of "ský. 

So this would leave us with the name of a village, with the added suffix of ský to create an adjective to denote that a person is from the village of Lutova, which would look like this....

Of course then to Americanize, or have the name fit into English structure, all we would do is drop the accent from the y. And we would be left with Lutovsky, which denotes that a person is from Lutova.

And if anyone hasn't caught on yet, the reason that I used the village of Lutova for this example is because that is what Lutovsky means....someone who lives in, or comes from, Lutova. And yes, there is an actual village named Lutova, Czech Republic.

The map above shows where Lutová is, and the town is spelled with an accent over the á in the Czech language. It's almost on the Austrian border, which is definitely in South Bohemia. And it is also in the vacinity of all the little villages that Lutovskys' have lived in for the past 300+ years...but more about those villages in an upcoming post.

I haven't yet found anyone who is actually from Lutova, but I have a feeling people will start surfacing. By far, the majority of ancestors are all from the surrounding area of Lutova. And I am in contact with a bunch of Lutovskys who live in Czech Republic and they all still live in the area surrounding Lutova. We don't know yet if we are related, but we are working on that, and I'll write more about that in another blog post.

And just for kicks, here are a few photos of Lutova.