Surname Etymology

History

I've known this for a while, but I wanted to write it and put it out there in case anyone else had some questions about the possible origin of our surname. The name Hatting comes from the name of a village in Skåne in Sweden known today as Hättinge. When we took the name, we dropped the 'e' so that it became just "Hätting." This surname is still seen in parts of Sweden. Upon immigrating (especially since we did not come directly from Sweden to America), the umlauts were lost making it only Hatting.

In addition, there is some history with South Africa associated with our surname, but they've added the "-gh" making it Hattingh. This is simply because in Afrikaans, the 'g' is more gutteral and the 'gh' is the equivalent to the English and Swedish phoneme 'g'.

Etymology

As for the meaning of the surname, there are a few possible translations into English, it can mean.

The first roughly translates as, "of the hatter." "Hätt" is hat and "-ing" is an Old Germanic patronymic suffix like "-ovich," "-ov," or "-enko" in the Slavic languages.

The second possibility (and far more likely based on the history), is a specially designated place to the Scandinavian god, Freyr. Roughly translated into English, it is, "Place of the god, Freyr." I'll try to explain to the best of my abilities. Hätt is the Old Germanic for "have." "-Ing" is the Old Germanic name for the god, Freyr. Thus, it can mean "have the god, Freyr," or, as I believe is more appropriate, "the god, Freyr, was/is there" since it became the name of a place.

Both of these are merely hypotheses, though, and they may change as further linguistic information and information come to light.