I am married to one of Hans Jónatan’s descendants and my mother-in-law is currently the oldest living descendant.

If you would like to interview descendants, I can put you in touch with lots of them, including the one who still owns and plays Hans Jónatan’s violin!

There also is now a monument to Hans Jónatan in Djúpivogur that was erected in 2018 and dedicated by then Prime Minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir.

Thank you again for furthering the telling of Hans Jónatan’s story.

Like, the Public Universal Friend existed and didn’t identify as either male or female, but we can’t really call them ‘nonbinary’ when that label and the amount of public awareness behind it are from a very different cultural milieu. All conceptions of gender identity are products of time and place and culture.

And all conceptions of racial groups are that way too, right? Yes – but in this case, the group of people being referred to is (very nearly) the same as before, with (very nearly) the same label and (very nearly) the same power differential. Capitalising the B in Black does look noticeable, but the only reason why it doesn’t come across as a generic/’neutral’ term at the moment is that it’s new. Or, rather, that the consensus to use it is new. Calls (from the in-group) for the American press to capitalise the B go back at least as far as the 1920s, but only in 2020 did a bunch of American press style-guides adopt the convention. So the decision to change the standards of usage is certainly linked to Black Lives Matter, but that doesn’t mean it refers only to very recent people or to activists. 10-15 years from now, if all continues along the same trajectory, even references to Black ancestors (i.e. people of the past) will look weird without the capitalised B in American English. What seems ‘neutral’ or not changes over time, sometimes quickly and dramatically.

It’s all relative, pretty much. As far as I’m aware, we don’t know how Hans Jonathan himself described himself, racially speaking. Even if we did know, odds are that none of the words/phrases would have been from American English. And then, even if we solved the translation issue, we’d still have the offset in time. If we treated it like a period-recording of Baroque music and aimed to use the ‘neutral’ descriptors of the time period, at least in American history…well, some of those words are slurs in the American present and we can’t magically get the readers to ignore that. Plus it would be disingenuous to expect anyone to just do so. Geneva Smitherman has written a bit about this in American Speech with some examples. DI readers have a way of being from the present, and most of us have a ton of social intuitions about language, but only from our own lifetimes.

(It’s the same reason why onlookers tend not to see how vernacular the language in Shakespeare was at the time of original performance. The illusion comes from how archaic-sounding a lot of those words are now. Most of us don’t have Elizabethan-era intuitions about English-language usage.)

TL;DR this was accidentally relevant to my day-job in sociolinguistics.