On Names

On Names:

Via the always interesting Arts & Letters Daily, a piece on the subject of names. It starts off with how much names have changed in the last hundred and fifty years in England and America; but it ends up as a wide exploration of naming conventions in Europe, including during Anglo-Saxon England and ancient Greece.

One of my favorite facts about ancient Greek names is that you should always take a moment to find out what they mean. They often sound very much more dignified to us than the Greeks intended them to be. This isn't the case for the god-related names, but a surprising number of them translate in some interesting way. (The author makes the point that we often don't translate Greek names like we do Indian names: "Crazy Horse," for example.) Take noble Odysseus, for example. To a Greek ear, that name sounds like "Troublemaker." We have in the Iliad, then, 'noble Troublemaker, whose counsel is like the gods'.'

The other interesting comment is about the sudden shift in naming conventions following the Norman conquest. Names like "Lady Noble Beauty" were much more interesting, and would have been much more personally meaningful, than what the Saxons suddenly adopted following the conquest. "It is rather as if an orchestra had been replaced by a recorder ensemble."

Of course, more shocking than that to an American ear may be the practice in modern Italy, where a judge feels that he has the right to rename your child if he doesn't like the name you picked.