Jan Van der Eecken (6/19/2013)
Hehe,I'm born Flemish, in other words Belgian. There the lower case 'v' in 'Van' means you've got some royal blood somewhere, maybe generations ago. So I'm obviously not in that league, I just come from the oak tree. In the Netherlands they don't make that distinction. So they are all kings 🙂
Same was true in Germany and Austria before the abolition of the nobility in 1919. The word "von" roughly translates to "of" or "from". Von with a capital "V" was a nobiliary particle - it indicated that the bearer was of the nobility. When the nobility was abolished, many German nobles just made "von" part of their names. In Austria, even the use of "Von" or "von" in a name was abolished, so former Austrian nobles just dropped it from their names.
Jason Wolfkill