Hint for Polish surname seekers

In many cases you can deciphre the meaning of your Polish surname even if you know no Polish. Here are a few hints:
-- Sundry names such as Motyka, Wilk, Serwatka, Koza, Sowa, Kwiatek, Wróbel, Gruszka, £opata, Pasternak, Gwoździk, etc. can be looked up in a hard-copy English-Polish dictionary or online. Usually the names of common objects, animals, foods, etc. originated as peasant nicknames.

-- names ending in -ski, -cki or -dzki are usually of toponymic origin, so try to figure out the basic root by looking through the place-names listed in a Polish atlas. Such names (also indicating estates or noble-owned villages) were the most common surnames used by Poland's szlachta.

-- patronymics usually end in -ak, -czak or -wicz, so it remains to determine what the first part of the name means; eg Stasiak (son of Staś), Antczak (Tony's boy), Kowalewicz (the blacksmith's kid).

POWODZENIA - GOOD LUCK!

BERNING: ethnicity obscure and meaning uncertain; possibly from German Bär (bear, the animal) or Yiddish name Berko?

PARMONIK: looks like a patroynmic nick from Paramon, a name used in the Eastern Orthodox Church (originally from the Greek paramonos meaning faithful).

All about "Berning".

wiki-de.genealogy.net/Berning_(Familienname)


Low German form of "Bern" short for Bernhard.


Bernhard stems from the old high German and means bear, hard, strong, robust...

Vielen Dank, Bratwurst Boy. That is highly plausible explanation. Old High German for bear (modern German: Bär) was bero and hart, as you noted, meant strong, so taken together the first name Bernhard would have originally suggested someone 'strong as a bear'.