>According to the dictionary, the word 淳 can be read as jun, shun, atsui, atsu, atsushi, kiyo, kiyoshi, makoto, or sunao. And evidently this is not fully complete, since Akiko can also use that character.
I think the "ko" suffix comes from the second Kanji character "子" which means child (I think, it has been over a decade since i studied Japanese but that particular Kanji character looks familiar to me). So I believe it is similar to how a lot of English surnames end in "son" (Johnson, Anderson, Harrison) etc.
Oh yeah definitely! I never noticed the similarity with -son, that's really interesting. I was actually specifically referring to the "Aki" part of Akiko which isn't listed in the dictionary I'm using.
Now that I think about it though, I've never seen that read as Akiko before (or Akiko written that way). I don't see it on any websites and Microsoft IME doesn't list that as a version of Akiko at all (~10 pages of suggestions). Makes me curious about where the author got that reading from...
It doesn't mean much for a particular kanji/reading to not appear in your IME - there are just too many combinations, and sometimes a given reading will only be common in certain areas or even families. Plus people sometimes just make up new ones :)
But there is no similarity to English (or any language) patronymics. 子 was used as an element of girls' names because it's good for a girl to be youthful. "Johnson" lets you know that the person is the son of John, not that the person is himself named John.
Ahh that makes sense thanks for confirming. I studied Japanese in Primary school until grade 10. We had only just started on Kanji when I stopped taking the classes. I was surprised I could still read all the hiragana and katakana in the source article I guess I retained more of it than I thought.
I think the "ko" suffix comes from the second Kanji character "子" which means child (I think, it has been over a decade since i studied Japanese but that particular Kanji character looks familiar to me). So I believe it is similar to how a lot of English surnames end in "son" (Johnson, Anderson, Harrison) etc.