Re: Hollan name

[Jan Hollan <jhollan@amper....muni.cz>]

Dear Erno, 

please apologise me for answering so late. 

I read in a book on Czech family names long ago, that ll in our name is
perhaps just an orthographic variant of Holan (holý means bare-skinned in
Czech and Slovak, so Holan could be a name for a man without hair or with
very faint beard).

I don't know much about our family origin and orthography, my mother said
me a couple of days ago, that in Hodonin (a town in southern Moravia, SE
from Brno) a building firm with that name has existed centuries ago
already. However, my cousin Ales Zlamal knows more, so he may say
something more accurate. 

All Hollans I know personally are from this family only and are not many
indeed. Some live in Hodonin, most of them in Brno, one family in
Norway, one in Slovenia/Croatia and one partly in town Martin in Slovakia.

Some twenty years ago I saw ``Hollan'' on a flat in a large house in
Topolcany (Topol\v{c}any) in western Slovakia (I was passing there with my
friend and he visited somebody in that house). Of course I was surprised
and asked a woman living in that flat, where did the family came from. She
replied, that more Hollans are living in Vozokany, a small village west
from Topolcany (on a road to Piestany, Pie\v{s}\v{t}any spas). I am sorry
I could not stop there and ask that time, and I never did later (in fact,
never travelled through Vozokany later).

Now, when I tried to find some another Hollans in Slovakia, I came across
two men (Vojtech and some J. Hollan) with this family. Another are written
a bit differently, however, with a long last syllable, Hollán (Michal and
Richard -- see http://www.fri.utc.sk/~hollan). This may point to another
source of the name, different from the Slovak adjective ``holý''. I know
almost no Hungarian to say if it could came from there (I pronounce my
name just as a joke sometimes with really Hungarian ll). 

Your initiative is a very interesting one, perhaps I could make a
non-commercial mailinglist on this topic on the computer I supervise,
  http://amper.ped.muni.cz
 -- as a first step, I store this mail in a separate folder ``family'' and
make an archive from it by mhonarc, in
  http://amper.ped.muni.cz/jenik/letters.

with best regards,
Jenik Hollan


On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Ernesto Hollan wrote:

> Hi, my name is Erno Hollan and I was wondering if you could spare a moment 
> to write about what you know about the origins of your last name. There are 
> not many Hollans in the world, and I am trying to find out if those who do 
> exist are in any way related. I would appreciate very much your reply. Thank 
> you for your attention and time.
> 
> Yours sincerely,
> 
> Erno Hollan
> Mexico City