伟大的剧作家莎士比亚曾经说过这样一句话：“What is in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell and sweet”，亦即“名字有什么关系？把玫瑰花叫做别的名字，它还是照样芳香。”名字与其所指事物间究竟有无联系一直是语言学家研究的内容。不过，美国的一项最新研究告诉我们：名字的确能透露出不少信息。比如，许多美国姓氏与种族背景相关。姓华盛顿的人中，近九成是黑人，姓杰斐逊的人当中，有75％是黑人。

美国人口普查局新近公布了分析2000年普查数据得出的美国姓氏排行榜。研究人员从对2.7亿人的调查中发现了600万个不同姓氏，姓氏中最常见的是“史密斯”，超过200万的人都拥有此姓氏。其它常见姓氏包括约翰逊、威廉斯、布朗、琼斯、米勒和戴维斯。

此外，两个西班牙语裔的姓氏——加西亚和罗德里格斯首度闯入美国前十大姓氏榜中，说明西语裔姓氏人口在美国迅速成长。

请看下面的这段新闻报道：

The English poet and playwright William Shakespeare asked "What's in a name?" The United States government has an answer.

The United States Census Bureau has released a report about family names.  The information comes from the study of the American population in two thousand. 

The report tells the most common last names of Americans and some information linked to them.  It says people recognize others by their names, and that people can tell a lot about a person just from knowing his or her name.

Almost two hundred seventy million people provided information to the Census Bureau in two thousand.  The researchers found six million different last names among them. One million or more people have one of seven names.  The most common is Smith. More than two million people answer to that name. 

The next most common names are Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller and Davis.  More than one million people are called each of those names. Two hundred sixty-eight other family names are also fairly common. Each of those names is shared by more than one hundred thousand people.

The study also found that for the first time, two Hispanic names are among the top ten most common names in the country.  They are Garcia and Rodriguez.  Each name is shared by more than eight hundred thousand people.  The report says more than ninety percent of all people with those names are Hispanic. 

One newspaper report says it is probably the first time that any non-English sounding name has been listed among the most common.  The presence of those names on the list shows that an increasing number of Hispanic people are living in the United States. The number grew by fifty-eight percent in the nineteen nineties to almost thirteen percent of the population.

Other Hispanic names appearing in the top twenty-five most common names are Martinez, Hernandez, Lopez and Gonzalez.