these are definitely not the same Chwioch;
different Merseians can have the same personal name.
But could there be a naming system in which each name was unique to just one individual? In our system, parents choose a name from an existing stock and sometimes name a child after someone else. Names encapsulate history. Pope John Paul II named himself after his predecessor who had named himself after his two predecessors who were named after two authors of the New Testament, one of whom was named after the first King of Israel.
The Hand of the Vach Ynvory is my shield.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I can see it being possible for some peoples or races having systems in which each person has a unique name only he, she, or it would use.
And maybe this other Paul Shackley is distantly related to you!
Ad astra! Sean
There are only a finite number of phonemic combinations in any language: moreover, very unfamiliar ones are harder to remember. Once the number of individuals in the interaction sphere goes above a dozen or so, standard names are just more efficient.
Where the Anglophone naming system is unusual is that our names don't "mean anything" -- they're (to us) arbitrary sounds.
That's because most of our names aren't of English origin.
Back when they were, English names "meant something" -- Alfred meant originally "Counseled by the Elves", for example. Germanic names actually sound like stereotypical Native American ones if you translate them -- things like "Iron Bear" or "Quick Knife" or "Wolf Killer" or theophoric ones like "Friend of Thor". (Most Icelandic names are still of that sort.)
This changed for the English after 1066 -- the English adopted Norman-French naming customs, so the names are mostly of Latin origin, often biblical like Paul or Saul, or Frankish-Germanic filtered through Old French, like say "Framberta" -- "High and Noble" in Germanic, then Latinized.
So our names became arbitrary sounds to us.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
While our names might be only arbitrary noises now, they still mean something when considered in their original languages. My middle name of "Michael" came from Hebrew and means "Who Is Like God?" And many loan names were adopted in Scandinavia when the peoples there converted to Christianity. Jon, Pal, and Magnus, for example.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment