The most important Cheremis dictionary in print was written by a native Cheremis philologist, V. M. Vasiljev.1 This book includes a preface written in German, in which we find the following paragraph (xIII): 'In der obigen Transkription sind die in den W-rterbfichern von S. M6ricz und G. I. Ramstedt eingefihirten Aenderungen in Betracht gezogen worden.' Now this sentence contains a very curious error, namely, in the reference to 'S. M6ricz.' By the latter, Vasiljev means obviously the Hungarian linguist M6ricz Szilasi, author of a well known Cheremis dictionary from the turn of the century.2 Szilasi's publication being in Hungarian, his name of course appeared upon the title page in the conventional order, that is, family name (Szilasi) first, followed by personal name (Moricz, i.e. 'Maurice'). Vasiljev's mistake was noticed already by Beke,3 who ascribes it to the former's ignorance of the Hungarian language. Beke then goes on to point out, by way of an explanation, that the Cheremis have no old family names, and have only recently acquired Russian-style names in the customary word order. That the Cheremis do, nevertheless, use constructions with surnames-of at least three types, as a matter of fact-can be established by reference to published texts. This is the aim of the present paper. Without enlarging upon the diachronic aspects of the problem here, it can be asserted that the constructions mentioned below are, in all probability, not recent developments; for one thing, there exist strikingly similar arrangements in several Ugric and Permian languages which are suggestive of a common source.4 The syntactic patterns which occur in the texts5 are illustrated below. The examples are re-transcribed phonemically. Type I. The personal name follows the father's name in immediate juxtaposition. This construction appears to be extremely rare; I have come across only a single clear instance: kargori bera(lan) '(for) Vera Gregory' [W 42]. A second example might be edom obraska, translated by the collector as 'Eram Obraska (heidnischer Name)' [P 29, 95]; but there is no way to determine which name refers to