User talk:Ramesh

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I'm (snoyes) moving your question on the reference desk here in case you want to keep a copy of it:

Surname question
If a person's surname is "D' Souza", can anything be said about his/her race, country of origin, language or religion? -- Ramesh


 * Language and religion are not strictly heritable, but as for country of origin, I'd say either French or Italian. -Smack 01:53, 9 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * "Souza" sounds Brazilian (or Portuguese). --Menchi 01:57, 9 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * That is Portuguese. Also, I always see "D'Souza" as an Indian name (I guess descended from Portuguese colonies there?), while Souza or Sousa alone is from Portugal. (Of course, I am only speaking from personal experience and memories of people with those names...) Adam Bishop 01:48, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * D'Sousa is a contraction of de and Sousa. de, do, da are particles used in Portuguese like the german von and the dutch van. Muriel 16:40, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * I once knew a De Sousa who was a South African of Indian ethnic origin. He always said is was from a Portuguese community in India in the 1800s. But I also know an African American called McGreggor. Anjouli 19:34, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * D'Souza, De Souza, De Sousa, all of these names have originated from Portugal. When they set up their colonies in India, mainly on the west coast (such as Bombay and Goa) many of them settled there and married natives. Moreover, in those times, the natives were forced to turn towards Christianity and as such many of the converts used these surnames. Being a resident of Bombay, almost the entire Christian sector have their last name as D'Souza. I haven't seen many Europeans have this surname, however many Indian Christians and a vast majority of Catholics have these last names. Again this is all through family ties and personal experience. - Cathy

Wikipedia:Indian wikipedians' notice board
Hi. I would like you to be an active member of Indian wikipedians' notice board. utcursch 07:35, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)

Tamil wikipedia
Ramesh, saw ur comment at Tamil wikipedia. U need Tamil Unicode fonts to read Tamil wikipedia. Now we have provided a link to detail font help from top right corner of every page in Tamil wikipedia. Please do pay a visit. Thanks.--Ravishankar 08:42, August 16, 2005 (UTC)

Your old user talk page
Hi Ramesh,

found your old user talk page while checking out some old deleted edits. I've moved it to User talk:Ramesh/Old. Hope you don't mind. Graham 87 08:47, 20 August 2009 (UTC)