On nomenclature
(doesn’t the subject line sound like someone biting, chewing, and swallowing)
“What is your name?”
Couched in the question is an implicit assumption that each person has one name. This assumption is often false. On the fewer-than-one (i.e. zero) side, at least one culture, the Matsigenka/Machiguenga, is reported to use no personal names at all, instead referring to each other purely in terms of kinship (source; which incidentally mentions “aborigines in Australia” who also do not have personal names). Several cultures do not name their children or have only interim names until they reach a certain age, e.g. various Native American naming traditions and Chinese “milk names” (sorry, not the best sources, only illustrative).
On the more-than-one-name side, ‘weak’ violations of this assumption are pretty common. Joseph is also called Joe, or Bubby at home. But even those who call him Bubby would agree that his name is Joseph. While a writer’s pseudonym may be her identity in certain contexts, we would still speak of her ‘real’ name. The violation gets stronger in cases where someone consciously distances themselves from an official name; e.g. if Evan presents as female and always goes by Eva, I don’t know whether the average person would consider her name to be Eva or Evan—or both.
Yet stronger violations are found in cultures that routinely confer many names on a single individual—I offer as an example my own culture, where I know several family members who go by different, unrelated, equally ‘serious’ names in different contexts, and do not always consider one of them to be their ‘true’ name just because it appears on official documents. In fact, this comes up a lot in Hindu mythology too. It doesn’t make sense to speak of the ‘real name’ of important mythological figures (like Ram) whose dozens of appellations each express a different aspect of their identity (like Raghav = descendant of Raghu, Janakinath = husband of Janaki = Sita, etc.).
In French, you don’t ask “what’s your name?”, rather you ask « comment tu t’appelles ? »– “how do you call yourself?” Which is still a bit odd, maybe we should be asking, “how are you called?” or even “how would you like to be called?” (Where the unspoken words in the latter are, “by me / in this context”, which is often what determines the answer!)
Not quite a word
Names aren’t just random strings of sounds but neither do they carry quite the same amount of meaning as regular words. Consider Hindu names: taking a look at 50 trendy Hindu baby boy names, not only are many of them commonly-used words in my native language (Marathi) and presumably in other Indic languages too, but also they are listed with their meanings, presumably because that’s an important part of choosing the name. Likewise for Chinese baby boy names. (I’m told by a couple Chinese friends that Chinese given names are also used in normal language as words in their own right but correct me if this is a misrepresentation.) Yet when I meet someone called Aakash, I don’t consciously make an association with sky or expect the person to have anything in common with their namesake.
(But this doesn’t rule out subconscious associations on my part or on the person’s own part. “Nomen est omen”, as the Romans (Romens?) would say, and check out nominative determinism for more. (And I will take this moment to plug UNSONG, a kabbalist fantasy webserial whose whole premise in a sense is nominative determinism, e.g. in this chapter.))
Contrast this with common lists for Western-centric baby boy names which don’t list meanings. Not to say that they don’t have meanings (e.g. see here) but rather that their meanings are less transparent to ordinary language-users than might be the case in other cultures. Extra-ordinary language users probably do think about this at least a little: for instance, students in an English literature class (“why did the author choose this name over any others?”), actual writers, and something I recently discovered, translators—especially those translating names from a more transparent-meaning culture into a more opaque-meaning one.
If you read my previous post about Scion of Kunti (कौंतेय/Kaunteya) (are you coming? :D), I described how the play is about Karna, an important mythological figure from the Mahabharata. But then who is Kaunteya? It’s an alternative appellation for the protagonist that is a Sanskrit declension of Kunti, Karna’s mother, to produce a genitive form (meaning ‘of/from Kunti’) that emphasizes the mother-son relationship just as much as Karna’s identity as an individual. This would be evident to a Marathi reader but the best I could do in English is to denote the relationship explicitly. (Note that ‘Scion of Kunti’, like ‘Kaunteya’, could refer to any child of Kunti, and this connotation is actually important for the play.)
An area where transparent-meaning names have kind of always been the norm might be the Internet. Usernames, handles, nicks, logins of all sorts are often just normal words, like DoomLord315, but the act of sending a message to DoomLord315 has little if anything to do with summoning the actual Doom Lord (315). But I think there’s significant literary potential to, e.g., write a play for characters in a chat server that works into its substance the connotations of seemingly arbitrary identifiers.
Death to form fields
Forms that ask for your first & last name are pretty common, along with middle initials, prefixes and suffixes if any, etc. As usual, the Western world overlooks the fact that names elsewhere don’t all work that way. What does it mean to have a first/given/last/middle/family/paternal/maternal/Christian/… name? What does it mean to be a ‘Jr.’? What if I’m not a ‘Mrs.’ but a ‘Mme.’; wait a minute, why are we still even considering marital status and binary genders?
Among other applications, these questions are important when it comes to technology internationalization. Personal names around the world from W3C goes into a lot of (oddly satisfying?) detail about how almost every assumption about the structure of names is violated, complete with form design recommendations and further reading references, and on the same theme, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names by Patrick McKenzie.
I personally haven’t had too many headaches with forms but I am slowly realizing the pain that name fields must be causing to so many people! Pain, that is avoidable with just a little design education! Surely even X Æ A-12 doesn’t deserve it?
And more about name etymologies from “Brandon”. The author brings up a very interesting point about how Native names are ‘translated’ while other names from Western history are merely transliterated, and how this affects our perception of those histories. Personally, I have always felt that translating Native names is a little demeaning, and if I cannot pronounce or remember their name as they want it to be, that is my problem, not theirs. But of course the name-holder’s / their culture’s preference about this trumps mine.