Author Topic: People’s names form a veritable catalogue of very ancient ghosts  (Read 2924 times)

Joe Carillo

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You may not know it, but your given name may have come from a veritable catalogue of ancient ghosts and obscure saints. In “Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly,” a wide-ranging essay and book review of A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia (Oxford Press, 496 pages, edited by T. Corsten), James Davidson marvels at the upheavals and changing fashions in the naming of people over the centuries in various parts of the Western world. He observes that the personal names given by parents to their children carry powerful connotations of religious affinity as well as class and culture, all of which can have serious consequences on the child’s future.


Davidson observes in particular that in the early 1800s, nearly 25 per cent of all females in the United Kingdom were called Mary: “If you add to these many Marys the crushing numbers of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns (Nancys, Nans and Hannahs), you would have the Christian names of something close to 80 per cent of the female population. There was a similar pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William.”

But then Davison points out that around 1850, when Gothic-looking steeples rose around the UK, medieval-sounding names like Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy crowded the baptismal font, only to be supplemented a little later by endless Geoffreys. “This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of names,” he says, but “…it might better be described as an outbreak of name-consumerism, as parents increasingly invested their energies in baptismal choice.”

Of the book A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names itself, Davidson expects the “humble-sounding not quite perfect and not always consistent” compendium to end up “as something little short of a register of all ancient ‘Greeks’ whose names were permanently recorded on paper or stone, from the age of Homer to early Byzantium.”

Read James Davidson’s “Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly” in the London Review of Books now!

ANOTHER READING ON LANGUAGE:
In Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language (Walker & Company, 205 pages), American linguist Deborah Fallows writes about the three years that she had spent living in China and her efforts to immerse herself in the Chinese language. Says nonfiction writer Lesley Downer in her review of Dreaming in Chinese for The New York Times: “Rather than draw sweeping conclusions, Fallows sticks to her own experiences and observations, which makes her book all the more valuable… Dreaming in Chinese will be a fascinating introduction to a foreign culture.”


Read Lesley Downer’s “Character Building” in The New York Times now!

Read an excerpt from Deborah Fallows’ Dreaming in Chinese now!

« Last Edit: October 05, 2017, 10:53:47 AM by Joe Carillo »