I’m away selling stuff at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire for the next several weeks, so these are going to be shorter and less well-thought-out than normal for awhile. If they happen at all.

This one is about something that everyone has already noticed, but I feel the need to talk about it for some reason.

Family names are a relatively recent invention, historically. In Europe family names came into use in the 13^th century or so, but didn’t filter down to the peasantry until around the 17^th century. Like many things, the Oriental regions adopted the idea long before that, probably due to larger populations in this case.

Names in general are just used to identify individuals. As long as there’s only one Morag around, there’s no need to add anything. But if there are more than one Morag, you need to add qualifiers. Such as location: Morag from the Dell, or Morag o’ Dell. Career: Morag the Smith, or Morag Smith. And of course, who their parent is: Morag daughter of Fergus, or Morag Ni Fergus. If an ancestor is famous, craft secrets are passed down, or being 'from' a place is important, then the qualifier may be passed down as well, and eventually becomes the family name.

But really, the idea of family names comes into play when an individual is trying to either gain something from being associated to a family group, or the society is wanting to hold the family group responsible for things the individual does. Which only really occurs when the society has a large enough population that individuals don't automatically know each other.

Every culture deals with family names, and given names, differently. Some have a relatively simple descriptor that gets passed down, some actually assemble their family name from parts of their ancestor's names, ancestral hometowns, and other bits and pieces. Which is how you end up with the German surname of: Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffvoralternwarengewissenhaftschaferswesenchafewarenwholgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeitbeschutzenvonangereifenduchihrraubgiriigfeindewelchevorralternzwolftausendjahresvorandieerscheinenbanderersteerdeemmeshedrraumschiffgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvonkraftgestartseinlangefahrthinzwischensternartigraumaufdersuchenachdiesternwelshegehabtbewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundwohinderneurassevanverstandigmenshlichkeittkonntevortpflanzenundsicherfreunanlebenslamdlichfreudeundruhemitnichteinfurchtvorangreifenvonandererintlligentgeschopfsvonhinzwischensternartigraum

I'm not kidding, that's supposedly an actual German surname. As far as I can tell only one person in modern history wrote it all out on their passport, everyone after that shortened it down to the much more manageable Wolfe.

In any case, Equestrian ponies have an interesting relationship with family names, in that it’s not necessarily a ‘name’ that is common amongst all members of the family, but they seem to follow Themes instead.

Take the Apples: Applejack, Apple Bloom, Big Macintosh, and Granny Smith. We can even add more in, if necessary: Braeburn, Apple Fritter. Red Gala, Apple Tart, Golden Delicious, so on and so forth. All the names have something to do with the Apple theme, but actual word Apple doesn’t necessarily show up. Interestingly, their names assume that everyone hearing them will know that these are Apples, even with the apple variety names that many may not be familiar with.

Now let’s look at Twilight Sparkle and Shining Armor. We don’t have the names of anyone else in Twilight’s family stated explicitly in the show, although a blind bag toy called Twilight Velvet that has the same color scheme as Twilight Sparkle’s mother, so we can assume that’s correct. Her father resembles a G1 pony called Night Light, but that’s even more speculative. The theme here seems to be Light, and Twilight herself has that doubled up with both Twilight and Sparkle, both of which would count.

Rarity and Sweetie Bell have even less to do with each other, name-wise. And we have to reach really far into non-show materials to try to find names for their parents. Their mother resembles several ponies in G1 to G3 but none of them are a true match, and their father is named ‘Magnum’ in the Gameloft game. None of this really helps, unfortunately. We’ll just have to assume that a theme is present, and we just don’t have enough of a sample to pick out the pattern.

And the final family group that we have names for are the Cakes: Carrot Cake, Cup Cake, Pound Cake and Pumpkin Cake. It’s pretty obvious there that they’ve taken the Theme to the next level and turned it into an actual family name as we would understand it.