User:Thayrathyn/sandbox

Erklavec (/ɛr'klɑ:vɛts/ - IPA Phonetic Transcription ) is a surname, originating in Slovenia. Most people with the surname Erklavec still live in Slovenia, however, there are records of people with this surname living in the USA as well, most likely as a consequence of branch of family moving there in the early 20th century (earliest noted records of the surname on USA's ground are from this period).

There are approximately 76 people that bear this surname still alive 68 in Slovenia and 8 in the States; which makes the surname 1,415,402nd most common surname in the world, 5,607th most common in Slovenia and 901,054th most common in the USA. The earliest recorded bearers of the surname in the USA are Valentine (born 1862 in Yugoslavia) and Mary Erklavec (born 1872 in Italy) that immigrated to the US in 1910 and settled on Manhattan in 1930. There is no such record for the Slovene branch of the family.

As of now, there are no documents that would explain the origin of the surname. There is a speculation that the surname Erklavec could derive from the German verb erklären, meaning to explain/ declare/ state or from the derived noun erklärer, meaning annotator/ interpreter. The surname ends with the suffix -ec, which in Slovene commonly carries the meaning of doer of something, like, for example, in the words delavec (a person who is working) or učenec (a person who is learning). The surname could therefore be one of many instances in Slovene language where a German word was derived in a Slovene manner to produce the desired meaning. If this is the case, the surname Erklavec could come from a certain locally or one-time used noun, which was derived from German to name a certain person as a doer of something, in this case a person who is explaining or declaring something, an interpreter. Perhaps it was an expression used to name a person who was a translator from another language, a person who was explaining legal documents to people, perhaps one of few people in some village who could read and people brought documents and letters to him/her to interpret.