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Post by Elis on Feb 3, 2018 15:46:28 GMT
On a German forum I got involved in a discussion on names. One woman is pregnant and since her and her husband's last name is Finnish, she chose the name Iny for her baby which she said was Finnish. Another woman criticized her very harshly, saying if thhey lived in Germany, a Finnish name wasn't appropriate. Admittedly, I have a strong opinion on the subject since we did not choose German names for our baby, either. We discussed and decided on the names yesterday (like my sisters and I, the baby will have three names) and since the last name isn't German, we thought a German first name would sound a bit odd anyway. This lady implies the child would either be bullied or not be taken seriously if she had a name that ends with y and she claimed that the name should be common in the country where one is living even if the family is not (entirely) from that country. (She also condemned any names which used to be short versions of longer names like Jette instead of Henriette, Lotta instead of Charlotte). What I got from her rather short and pretty cold remarks is that, if you live in Germany, you should give your child a German name, no matter where you (or members of your family) are originally from. To me, that sounds extreme and like people are asked to adapt way too much. Am just interested to know about views in other countries. I have run into lots of kids from very different countries with names that sounded very strange to our ears: from India, Bangladesh, Georgia, Vietnam, Egypt, China... sometimes the names seemed very unfamiliar, but it was always easy to get used to them. And I don't get why people should leave the names they know behind when they move to a different country. I doubt that woman would give her children Chinese names if she ever moved to China.
Not that I would consider changing our baby's name, btw. Am just curious because these views seemed awfully narrow-minded to me.
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Post by JoeP on Feb 3, 2018 18:26:33 GMT
Narrow minded indeed. This is the kind of thing people threatened by other cultures say - people who haven't had the experience of integrated cultures and how everyone actually just gets along and is respectful and interested.
If the names from the original culture are going to be very difficult to pronounce, there's a case to be made for given a child at least one name, or an official nickname, that's in the host culture. Thus it seems most Chinese have a western name. (And this causes me some confusion at work where the Chinese people have their western names in their email addresses but their Chinese names in the records on some of the systems I use! So ... is Xuexin Xu actually Max Xu? And which Chen is Lingbiao Chen?)
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Post by Kye on Feb 3, 2018 18:28:23 GMT
I had an interesting situation with my kids' names. My 1st child, a boy, has an English name --Christopher Hermann, even though we live in Quebec. Both his father and I are English speakers, so it made sense. My daughters' father is French speaking and the girls have his last name: Gauthier (very French). My older daughter is named Laurence --a perfectly acceptable girl's name in French, but a boy's name in English. My younger daughter is named Natasha --a Russian diminutive of Natalia-- but she spells her name the English way. In French they usually spell it Natacha. So for all three of my kids' names I didn't follow any of the "rules".
I can't see that it's anyone else's business what someone names their own child!
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Post by Alvamiga on Feb 4, 2018 11:04:16 GMT
If you want to be more universal, you could always name your child in emojis!
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Post by Mari on Feb 4, 2018 17:20:42 GMT
I would choose a name that I like, though I must say that I would find it odd to name my child George for example. It's a perfectly acceptable English name (though a bit old-fashioned?), I'm sure, but as a Dutch person married to another Dutch person it would feel odd to name my child thus. Moreover, our own names are also very Dutch. I see lots of strange names in my carreer though. I had a boy named Karma in my class. Now that was just sad. My mother always says that an name you choose has to pass the playground test: would you shout the name across the playground without causing yourself or your child embarassment? In that case it's acceptable, otherwise you might want to rethink it, or keep the name for an official name rather than their day-to-day name. There are many names I really love, but that don't pass the playground test. For example Juniper for a girl or Alexandrei.
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Post by Miisa on Feb 5, 2018 9:23:45 GMT
Um, Iny is NOT a Finnish name, I have never heard of it and it is nowhere to be found on any lists...
We got a bit of resistance in Finland for deciding to name our son Sean, but were given the rights as I had foreign heritage. Leant my lesson and went with a more multinational name for our daughter some years later.
Nice as it can be to have a exotic name, I sort of am in favour of giving a name that is not too out there or difficult to write/pronounce for locals, childhood is a hard enough time without having everyone point out *another* oddness about you.
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Post by Elis on Feb 5, 2018 10:47:10 GMT
If I had a German husband and a German last name, I think I would have chosen names which are international and just as common in Germany as they are in English-speaking countries. Noah is very popular right now and the pronounciation in German is just a tiny bit different from the probounciation in English. Same with Emma or Sophie or Olivia for girls. And I do find it a little odd when people with a very German or even clearly Bavarian last name choose an exotic, foreign first name and the poor child is then named Jerome Hinterhuber. It does sound odd. My mother also has a pupil whose name could be pronounced German, but she insists on a sort of "pseudo-English" pronounciation which she learned from her German parents whose English pronounciation is apperently not very good.
On the other hand, a really German name would sound a little odd with our English/New Zealand last name and besides, we decided to choose Frank's father's name as one of the names for our baby and the one everyone is going to use. That's a good, solid, normal name which isn't too hard to pronpunce for Germans, either: no th, no English r. With some of my Indian pupils, I have noticed that one or two of them had German names, but lots of my pupils are from Turkey, Georgia, Egypt etc. and have foreign last names as well as foreign first names. It fits well and the names have never been hard to learn. Maybe an s is pronounced like sh or a c like a j, but that's it. Admittedly, there are negative examples which I haven't encountered myself, but heard about: a Turkish boy named Anal, for example, which would not be good in either English or German (the meaning of anal is the same in German). Karma doesn't sound great, either.
So I think that, while parents should make sure the name is one which can be pronounced where they live, it seems a bit unfair to demand that they choose a name which is common where they live and which doesn't go well with their last name. A bit like demanding that they give up part of their cultural identity. And if Jerome Hinterhuber is mocked or criticized because the exotic first nnname doesn't go well at all with the Bavarian last name, why would people think that Emil Singh sounds less odd?
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Post by Kye on Feb 5, 2018 11:51:53 GMT
One good thing about living in a large multicultural city is that kids are very tolerant of each other's names. Few kids get teased for that --there's so much variation out there.
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 5, 2018 14:33:29 GMT
Yes, the more multicultural the region is, the more tolerant the locals seem to be about differentiation. It is where the dominant culture is overwhelming that the pressure to conform on issues like this tend to be the strongest.
I actually rather enjoy hearing the Emil Singh and Seiji Horowitz names; it means that assimilation is ongoing. I wonder that nobody has mentioned nicknames in this discussion. A lot of folks I know with unusual given names also often have nicknames given by either family or friends. Some folks are not known by their official name at all, but go through life using their nicknames in most social circumstances. This is very strong in my family....my father's nickname in his youth became my given name, because my mother liked the name. He had formally changed his name to his nickname when he had reached majority. My uncles and half of my aunts all have nicknames unrelated to their given names by which most folks know them. Even family members of my generation do not know the real names of many of their elders.
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Post by Elis on Feb 5, 2018 14:52:04 GMT
My family has never really been big on nicknames. My sister and I tried it, but it didn't last for long. Frank and I don't have any nicknames and we don't even call each other "precious" or anything like that. Not sure why, I've known people with nicknames, but they were never a thing in my family or in Frank's.
Generally, I don't care whether a family with a Bavarian last name gives their child an exotic first name, none of my business. But it is the kind of thing people tend to criticize here. At the same time, these people then claim that a family that is (partially) from a different country should give their kids German names since they live here. To me that sounds like demanding an extreme form of integration which has nothing to do with actual integration and it sounds a bit racist to me as well. And if people laugh about Jerome Hinterhuber, I don't get why they suddenly think that Emil Singh is basically a requirement. I guess that's why this seems racist to me. Maybe also because every now and then some right-wing people claim there are school classes where not a single child has a German name, along with the anxiety that Germans are disappearing. Luckily, in a city like Bremen people don't seem to care much, we encounter all kinds of "foreign" names every day and I tend to be more shocked by names like Shy-Ann or Gandalph-Merlin (I really saw that recently, I think someone had copied it from a newspaper!).
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Post by Elis on Feb 5, 2018 15:04:43 GMT
We got a bit of resistance in Finland for deciding to name our son Sean, but were given the rights as I had foreign heritage. Leant my lesson and went with a more multinational name for our daughter some years later. Oh, ad I wanted to ask: do they really just allow Finnish names? In Germany, from what I know they allow names from any country as log as they are proper names. The name Niamh, for example, would probably be allowed (even though I doubt any German person would kow how to pronounce it and so one wouldn't do the chid any favours) because it is a proper name in other countries and that is enough. They have allowed quite a few names from TV-series once they became names in other countries and I guss names like Apple or Blanket might be allowed for that reason, but I guess if I wanted to name my child Table or Chair, it wouldn't be allowed unless some celebrity gave their kid that name (I think the name Tiger was eventually allowed since some actor gave his daughter that name).
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Post by Kye on Feb 5, 2018 15:28:51 GMT
In Quebec. there's a government body which has the power to disallow names, but they have to be pretty extreme. They did not allow "Spatule" as a name (spatula) but they're okay with things like Marie-Quebec... They're francocentric though, and did not want to allow Ivory as a name because they said it was a brand of soap!
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 5, 2018 15:31:04 GMT
Tiger Woods would have legitimated that name worldwide.
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 5, 2018 17:03:42 GMT
In Quebec. there's a government body which has the power to disallow names, but they have to be pretty extreme. They did not allow "Spatule" as a name (spatula) but they're okay with things like Marie-Quebec... They're francocentric though, and did not want to allow Ivory as a name because they said it was a brand of soap! Well, I guess that would eliminate Marie Claire as a name then, wouldn't it? It a major magazine brand, isn't it?
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Post by tangent on Feb 5, 2018 17:36:27 GMT
I'm reading this with interest but don't have anything original to add. I would hope parents chose what is best for their child rather than indulging their own fantasies.
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Post by Mari on Feb 5, 2018 17:54:09 GMT
I can imagine that seeing your child for the first time might change your mind on the name as well.
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 5, 2018 20:13:08 GMT
Um, Iny is NOT a Finnish name, I have never heard of it and it is nowhere to be found on any lists... We got a bit of resistance in Finland for deciding to name our son Sean, but were given the rights as I had foreign heritage. Learnt my lesson and went with a more multinational name for our daughter some years later. Nice as it can be to have a exotic name, I sort of am in favour of giving a name that is not too out there or difficult to write/pronounce for locals, childhood is a hard enough time without having everyone point out *another* oddness about you. So, Miisa....I've never gotten the whole story on the name you are packing around. Your given name looks to be what I would consider 'typical' in the way of Finnish names (and I don't really know 'Finnish names'). But that surname looks distinctly Scots. So, I have assumed that you married and took your husband's surname, which is now your children's surname. Am I wrong? Is your surname really Finn and I'm just unaware of such Celtic constructions in Finnish names?
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 5, 2018 20:34:16 GMT
My personal experience with naming conventions taught me one thing....Don't name your kid with a name which is verbally ambiguous.
Me? My middle name is 'Dane'. It was a name my mother chose, along with my given name of 'Kelly', which I shared with my father. But, I was not a 'Junior', because our middle names differed. This means my family called my by my middle name, which I took to elementary school with me. It was only when I entered secondary school at age 14 that I was required to fill out lots of forms demanding my family name, then first name, then middle initial, which is how I filled them out.
When this happened, I found my high school teachers, staff, and fellow students referring to me as 'Kelly'. At the time, it was clear, distinct and not confused with any other name. The clarity was wonderous. The same could not be said for 'Dane'. It was unusual enough that is was often confused for other names...Dean, Dave, Dan, Don, Dawn, Dwayne, Wayne, Zane, Shane, and even Diane one time (misread from a class roll). I had been forever spelling out my name....'D...A...N...E'. It was tedious. With the change, the only question I ever got about 'Kelly' was, "is that 'y', or 'ey'?" Of course, since that time, fifty years ago, the name 'Kelly' has transited from being primarily a male (and Irish) name to a primarily female name, often spelled with a terminal 'i'. So, I occasionally get mail address to "Ms.", which, of course, means it is tossed immmediately.
I suspect that the Siobhans of the world suffer in similar fashion.
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Post by Miisa on Feb 5, 2018 20:36:01 GMT
We got a bit of resistance in Finland for deciding to name our son Sean, but were given the rights as I had foreign heritage. Leant my lesson and went with a more multinational name for our daughter some years later. Oh, ad I wanted to ask: do they really just allow Finnish names? In Germany, from what I know they allow names from any country as log as they are proper names. The name Niamh, for example, would probably be allowed (even though I doubt any German person would kow how to pronounce it and so one wouldn't do the chid any favours) because it is a proper name in other countries and that is enough. They have allowed quite a few names from TV-series once they became names in other countries and I guss names like Apple or Blanket might be allowed for that reason, but I guess if I wanted to name my child Table or Chair, it wouldn't be allowed unless some celebrity gave their kid that name (I think the name Tiger was eventually allowed since some actor gave his daughter that name). There is an effort by the authorities to curb the more extreme names, the argument being that the child is the one who has to live with it and should not be subject to the idiotic or inane hims of its possibly thoughtless parents. If the background of the parents is foreign, a name from their region will usually be allowed, though sometimes I might imagine that Finnish culture and language has to be taken into account, and they might be advised as to that. More resistance would, for instance, be made if someone with a French heritage tried to name their son Pascal, than, say, Claude, as paska is Finnish for poo. Still, it would not be impossible, but they would be silently judged, which is of course cultural self-harm in respectable circles. Yet, we have some little Mangoes and baby Gandalfs running around, just not a lot. Names on the official nameday calendar are always permitted if they are gender-appropriate, even though they too can cause problems. For instance, Pelle is on the Swedish-language but Finnish national nameday list as it is a not unusual Swedish name and Finland is bilingual, yet in Finnish it means clown, like calling your child Bozo or something. Still, that would be allowed. New names are other added to the nameday calendar and old ones are taken off if they lose popularity. Ronja became very popular when my generation started having children and is now on the calendar, though it had never been a name of any kind here until Astrid Lindgren's book from 1981. Obviously, enough girls had to be called that for it to get that popular, so going off-list is by no means impossible. The name Iny from the first post would likely not go through without a fight, unless it was altered to be closer to an actual Finnish name. When I say "learnt my lesson" I didn't mean that I didn't want to argue with the pastor or other authorities, but rather that I saw the problems people had even with "Sean" and how it was likely to play out further as he got older and decided to spare my daughter that. As someone who always over and over had to explain at least part of my name or as a child even endure taunts wherever I went in the world, I also saw the drawbacks to having a snowflakey "special" name, and my sister also had a hard time with hers and stopped using her first name (Siobhán) in Scandinavia altogether. Yeah, sure, it is great fun the first 500 times you spell it out...
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Post by Miisa on Feb 5, 2018 20:48:47 GMT
Um, Iny is NOT a Finnish name, I have never heard of it and it is nowhere to be found on any lists... We got a bit of resistance in Finland for deciding to name our son Sean, but were given the rights as I had foreign heritage. Learnt my lesson and went with a more multinational name for our daughter some years later. Nice as it can be to have a exotic name, I sort of am in favour of giving a name that is not too out there or difficult to write/pronounce for locals, childhood is a hard enough time without having everyone point out *another* oddness about you. So, Miisa....I've never gotten the whole story on the name you are packing around. Your given name looks to be what I would consider 'typical' in the way of Finnish names (and I don't really know 'Finnish names'). But that surname looks distinctly Scots. So, I have assumed that you married and took your husband's surname, which is now your children's surname. Am I wrong? Is your surname really Finn and I'm just unaware of such Celtic constructions in Finnish names? No, my (now ex-) husband took my name. Not a common practice here, but nor is it unheard-of. My dad is from Northern Ireland and my mum very Finnish, and they were living the UK when I was born. My mother was obviously very homesick and I suppose loved old songs and I guess my dad lost a bet or something, leading to the abomination of "Marja-Liisa McKeown" (complete with 2 more very Finnish middle names that are also about a generation and a half from being fashionable even at the time). Yes, I am the one and only person of that combo of first and last names. And as a result I don't quite seem like I belong anywhere. though I suppose that goes along with me also sounding foreign everywhere. Oh, and my family don't abbreviate my name, like, ever. That is something I adopted in my adulthood and they refuse to go along with.
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Post by JoeP on Feb 5, 2018 20:52:14 GMT
So, Miisa....I've never gotten the whole story on the name you are packing around. Your given name looks to be what I would consider 'typical' in the way of Finnish names (and I don't really know 'Finnish names'). But that surname looks distinctly Scots. So, I have assumed that you married and took your husband's surname, which is now your children's surname. Am I wrong? Is your surname really Finn and I'm just unaware of such Celtic constructions in Finnish names? It's much more complicated than that
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Post by Miisa on Feb 5, 2018 20:55:29 GMT
I suspect that the Siobhans of the world suffer in similar fashion. Indeed they do. My sister of that name seems to have been my Dad's revenge when we no longer living in the British isles at my mother picking my name some years earlier. Well, at least that sounds very Irish and she seemed to fit right in there. She is now planing on living in Ireland.
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 5, 2018 21:19:11 GMT
Sorry, Miisa...But I have to admit, I like your 'abomination'. But then, I've liked your contraction of it, too. The double 'i' is a striking usage.
I know a fair number of folks who chose to keep their nicknames. I have friends 'Amber' (formerly Nancy) and 'Sky' (formerly Tim) who came by their names via the hippy dippy counter-cultural communities of the late 20th century. My father's father had a penchant for nicknaming his nine kids, I ended up with one of his as my given name.
I had one set of friends who decided that neither wanted to take the other's surname, nor were they particularly excited about their own surname, but they both loved the ocean so, when they married, they both changed their surname to 'de la Mare'. I thought that was inspired.
My wife liked my surname because it worked so well with her given name, Ivy. But, she loved her surname and kept it as a 'full-out' middle name (meaning she almost always used it) without a hyphen to our surname. The only folks who would recognize her married middle name were other Jews...it is a Jewish name which I, a clueless goy, mistook for a Welsh name, 'Geffen'.
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Post by Kye on Feb 5, 2018 22:14:48 GMT
My name, Kye, was my nickname and the one I used all through high school and university. I only started using Karla again when I moved to Quebec and had to use official documents when I started working. Not too many people call me Kye any more, but I like it when they do. I also use Kye as my fb name to keep inquisitive parishioners from finding me.
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Post by whollygoats on Feb 5, 2018 22:35:23 GMT
Oh...So you're not a native Quebecois? Nor Quebecker, for that matter.
I understood that the surname was a married name. But so was the English surname before, right? And, the maiden surname was perhaps Hungarian?
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Post by Kye on Feb 5, 2018 23:19:44 GMT
I only have one last name --the one I was born with: Holmes (which was my father's last name). I was born in Ontario and moved to Quebec in 1976.
My mother's last name was Poch. Indeed, Hungarian.
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Post by Miisa on Feb 6, 2018 6:37:48 GMT
The grass is always greener, huh? I had a very long, very Finnish first name, and wanted to give my children the gift of a shorter and more Anglo-friendly one, but they don't see the blessings. My ex-husband had a very Finnish, blending-in surname, and as such jumped at the chance to have something more unusual and special, memorable even.
How many people actually love the name they were given and that was used for them? Although they exist, I would not be surprised to find they are a minority.
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Post by Mari on Feb 6, 2018 8:13:20 GMT
I only learned to appreciate my names when I went abroad, but I still don't like my mum for naming me after my grandmother. Even my grandmother begged my mother not to give me that name since she herself had officially changed her name from Grietje to Margriet. She hated her own name that much, but my mum was stubborn, so now I'm stuck with it too. Fortunately as an official name and not my daily name. My daily name is also unusual in my generation, though later generations seem to have picked up on it. I don't have any beef with it, except for the fact that I don't like the way foreigners pronounce it, so I prefer Mari with the emphasis on the ma, not the ri. I'm not a Marie.
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Post by Elis on Feb 6, 2018 8:46:06 GMT
My parents gave me a name which, although it wasn't really common in my generation, is common enough in Germany and not difficult to pronounce at all. But in the area I grew up in, they speak this dialect and pronounced my name wrongly from the start. So did my own grandmother who wasn't very happy with my name anyway and had hoped my mother would name me Carina or Sabrina (I don't like either name very much). Anyone who wanted to pronounce my name right was able to do so, but many people seemed to have the attitude of "This is our dialect and if we want to ruin a name, we're perfectly entitled to do that". They just couldn't be bothered. It was one big reason why I hated my name. And since my maiden name was only one letter away from a German first name for females, I have always had a lot of explaining to do anyway. Now we still have to do it, but nobody assumes we're introducing ourselves by a first name which is an advantage and makes things easier. Aside from maybe when I was 16 or 17 and far away from actually having children, I never wanted to give children a snowflakey, oh-so-unique name, but also not one which you shout on the playground and five other kids come running as well - not one of the year's fashion names like Noah, Anton, Lina, Leni or Matilda. Because of the English last name, Frank and I decided on an English (or at least not exclusively German) first name and ended up choosing his father's name which we both like. It is a perfectly normal name in the English-speaking world and while it is not common here, pretty much everyone has heard it and it's easy to pronounce for Germans (unless they want to ruin it like my name, but that can be done with any name). It's also not embarrassing in any way and can't be turned into something nasty, so I guess our choice is good enough. Since in my family, everyone has three Christian names and I like that, we have chosen three for our baby as well, but the last two will exist mainly on paper - my father's name (pronounced English so it goes well with the rest - Frank's suggestion because he likes the name) and a name which means "gift of God". Certain English names do have a bad image here: Jayden seems to be the little boy with behavioural problems and a single mother on benefits (which is a mean prejudice, but it is there), same with Jeremy, Jason and Tyler (and lots of different versions of that). And one new thing which I find creepy is to take an English name and spell (and pronounce) it German: Kessrin instead of Katherine or Endru instead of Andrew. This has been allowed by officials, as long as the spelling is phonetically more or less the same as pronounciation. Again, I guess people might want to be unique and therefore change the spelling. The same way, Jana somethimes becomes Yana or an old-fashioned German name is combined with a modern English name to end up with a combination like Heinz-Jeremy. And then, of course, there are all the names from TV-series. Even Lucifer is gaining popularity. Once I jokingly told Frank we should name our kids after characters in Stargate SG1 - not the humans since Jack, Samantha or Daniel are pretty common names, but the alien races. A boy could be named Teal'c or Rya'c and a girl could be named Shan'auc or Jolinar. Obviously, we would never even try to do that to a child, though. But if someone in the USA starts, Germans might actually be allowed to do so one day. Katniss already exists as a name. There is a website in Germany where people collect weird names. Sometimes they end up making fun of names which are foreign, but not weird (like Patryjca which I think is the Polish version of Patricia), but there are lots of strange names and odd name combinations. Chantalismus Mostly, I think they serve to tell parents which names not to choose for their children.
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Post by tangent on Feb 6, 2018 9:30:27 GMT
My generation always chose names that were non controversial, which means there were often duplicates at school. I used to be the only Steve at my church but now another Steve has joined and it feels like he is pushing in!
Pat is also very common at my church. At one time there were five Pat's.
But Henry, my first name, has been fairly uncommon since the 1920s except among royalty. It is making a come back now, though.
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