Names, nouns and their (phonological) restrictions

[hwhatting]

Russian has a morphological formation peculiar to names, the personal adjective.

You mean the possessive adjectives in -ov and -in? Those can also be formed from proper nouns, even though that's less frequent (in my experience, -ov is not very productive nowadays anyway, and -in is also rarer than using the genitive; still you encounter the suffixes frequently due to all the personal and place names that have been formed with them).

[Richard W]

Russian has a morphological formation peculiar to names, the personal adjective.

You mean the possessive adjectives in -ov and -in? Those can also be formed from proper nouns, even though that's less frequent (in my experience, -ov is not very productive nowadays anyway, and -in is also rarer than using the genitive; still you encounter the suffixes frequently due to all the personal and place names that have been formed with them).

I was thinking of those with further(?) derivation via -skij, though now I'm looking for examples I can't find much.

[hwhatting]

I was thinking of those with further(?) derivation via -skij, though now I'm looking for examples I can't find much.

You mean names like Berezovskij, Dzerzhinskij, etc.? Those are quite frequent, although some of them are actually of Belarussian or Polish origin (like Dzerzhinskij). But even this combined suffix can be used with proper nouns, e..g. otcovskij "belonging to (the) father", materinskij "maternal", as in otcovskij dom "father's house", materinskij instinkt "maternal instinct".

[Linguoboy]

I think the difference lies with our social closeness. If I know a person Maria, I will probably address her as that, not as Mary, Marie or something. If we are integrating half the world like that on a social or mental level, we might decrease our needs for name translation. But, who knows? Maybe it has to do with something completely different?

I think it's more down to major changes in cultural norms. European names used to be Christian names: Not only were they selected from a finite list of saints, Biblical figures, and religious attributes but your name was often assigned according to a calendar of feast days maintained by a central ecclesiastical authority[*]. Thus there was a clear basis for determining which names were formal equivalents[**].

All of this has gone by the wayside in modern times. Membership in Christian sects is at its lowest levels since the Barbarian Conversions and although there is still a lot of conservatism in name-giving[***], there's also a great deal of innovation. It's very common now to give names derived from diminutives or invented from whole cloth. Take the comparatively simple example of my father-in-law's given name "Joe". Would you make it "Pep" in Catalan and "Beppo" in Italian (the most common diminutives of the equivalents of "Joseph" in those languages)? What about a name like "Peggy" (my great aunt's) where the relationship to "Margaret" is obscure even to English-speakers? Do you "translate" names like ""River" and "Leaf", in the same way that our ancestors translated "Grace" and "Gottlieb"?

And then there's just a loss of formality in general in how we refer to people. When performers are going around naming themselves with squiggles and alphanumeric strings, the idea of someone having a fixed "real name" is almost quaint. The closeness of the globalised world (where I might namecheck a Eurovision singer from across the world in an Instagram post and actually get a reply from them) may, as you suggest, play a role, but I think it's really just the final nail in the coffin for trends which have been well-established for some time.

[*] To go back to the example of Mozart, his first two given names according to the baptismal register are "Joannes Chrysostomus", because he was born on the feast of John Chrysostom (known in his lifetime as Ἰωάννης ὁ Χρυσόστομος because he was a Byzantine archbishop). Devotion to John Chrysostom was widespread in both Western and Eastern Christianity, so basically every vernacular of Europe has a recognised equivalent of this name.

[**] There were Jews and Muslims (and members of other confessions) in Europe as well, of course, but in most countries they were to various degrees excluded from public life unless they converted, which involved taking a Christian baptismal name. Moreover, as fellow People of the Book, many had given names with widely-known Christian equivalents, e.g. משה (= Moses), يوسف (= Joseph), etc.

[***] The priest who baptized my late husband in 1946 refused to accept the name "Cameron" unless it was hyphenated to "Cameron-Joseph" because there is no saint or martyr named "Cameron" recognised by the Catholic Church. Sixty years later, at my nephew's baptism, the priest called on the blessings of "Saint Owen?" with an interrogative intonation which indicated he didn't actually know if he was invoking someone on the official roster or not. [For the record, he was.]

[Raphael]

Now I'm wondering why, among Christian or Christian-descended speakers of English and also some other European languages, "Michael" has traditionally been so much more common than "Raphael". I mean, both are names of Old Testament archangels, right?

[xxx]

In France, the all-powerful registrars only tolerated national celebrity or calendar names...
until the births resulting from immigration family reunification made this untenable,
with the influx of ex-colonised people into the beloved bosom of their ex-colonizers...

[Linguoboy]

Now I'm wondering why, among Christian or Christian-descended speakers of English and also some other European languages, "Michael" has traditionally been so much more common than "Raphael". I mean, both are names of Old Testament archangels, right?

Sure, but their roles are completely different. Michael was considered to be the leader of the host of angels who drove Lucifer and his followers from Heaven; in many accounts he is regarded as the leader of all the angels of Heaven full stop. Because of this he was very readily identified with various pagan deities of warfare and there is evidence that cultic sites dedicated to them were consecrated to Michael and rechristened in the process of Christianisation, particular in the Germanic lands. (This probably explains why Michael became one of the official patron saints of Germany and not Raphael.) His cult continued to grow during the Middle Ages, as he was the subject of various miraculous apparitions which led to the creation of new pilgrimage sites (notable Mont St-Michel in France) and he played an important role in Christian eschatology (as the leader of the hosts of Heaven in the final battle), a subject that became very popular during the Black Death and after.

There's just nothing comparable for Raphael. By the time healing saints started to see their cults swell due to the Black Death and other plagues, he'd been eclipsed by more dynamic figures like St Roch.

[Raphael]

Ah, thank you!

[Ares Land]

I was going to mention that Michael seems a lot more popular than Raphael in popular devotion, but linguoboy beat me too it

In France, the all-powerful registrars only tolerated national celebrity or calendar names...
until the births resulting from immigration family reunification made this untenable,
with the influx of ex-colonised people into the beloved bosom of their ex-colonizers...

They say getting the registrars to accept some Breton first names is still a chore. I googled 'Fañch' and parents are still, in 2024, getting in court over the diacritic.

[xxx]

yeah, the last barrier is the usual alphabet...
(but then it's probably the omnipotent computers that will be harder to overcome...)

[Linguoboy]

In France, the all-powerful registrars only tolerated national celebrity or calendar names...
until the births resulting from immigration family reunification made this untenable,
with the influx of ex-colonised people into the beloved bosom of their ex-colonizers...

They say getting the registrars to accept some Breton first names is still a chore. I googled 'Fañch' and parents are still, in 2024, getting in court over the diacritic.

Speaking of which, I ran into my second Gwenael (oubien Gwenaël} this past weekend, and like the first, he was a Parisian with no clear ties to Bretagne. Was there just a momentary toquade for Breton names in the Métropole in the 80s?

[bradrn]

In France, the all-powerful registrars only tolerated national celebrity or calendar names...
until the births resulting from immigration family reunification made this untenable,
with the influx of ex-colonised people into the beloved bosom of their ex-colonizers...

They say getting the registrars to accept some Breton first names is still a chore. I googled 'Fañch' and parents are still, in 2024, getting in court over the diacritic.

Speaking of which, I ran into my second Gwenael (oubien Gwenaël} this past weekend, and like the first, he was a Parisian with no clear ties to Bretagne. Was there just a momentary toquade for Breton names in the Métropole in the 80s?

Wait, were you in Paris on the weekend?

[zompist]

yeah, the last barrier is the usual alphabet...
(but then it's probably the omnipotent computers that will be harder to overcome...)

There was a brief period when you could blame computers for not supporting diacritics etc., but that time is past. The politicians didn't get the memo, though. There was news lately about North Yorkshire deciding to rename streets without apostrophes— e.g "St Mary's Walk" > "St Marys Walk".

Banning ñ is pretty amazing— Latin-1 has included it since 1987. For a real apostrophe (’ not ') you need Mac encoding (1984) or Unicode (1993). These days you can even properly represent the name Spın̈al Tap.

A modern system should easily handle names like Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; --

[Travis B.]

A modern system should easily handle names like Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; --

That's our Bobby Tables!

[Travis B.]

And anyways, anyone who writes a system that won't accept arbitrary UTF-8 ought to be ashamed of themselves.

[Linguoboy]

Wait, were you in Paris on the weekend?

Well, the Paris of the Midwest.

[Emily]

i think the question isn't "why did we stop translating people's names" but "why were we doing it in the first place", and the likeliest answer to me is that texts that were distributed between language areas in europe tended to go through the intermediary of latin. so if you wrote a report about about hans in bavaria, you would write about iohannis, which would only naturally become jan in bohemia, jean in france, giovanni in italy, and john in england. latin doesn't serve that international function it used to, so that's probably (a part of) why we don't do it anymore

There was a brief period when you could blame computers for not supporting diacritics etc., but that time is past. The politicians didn't get the memo, though. There was news lately about North Yorkshire deciding to rename streets without apostrophes— e.g "St Mary's Walk" > "St Marys Walk".

the US Board on Geographic Names (which falls under USGS) has an official policy of not allowing possessive 's in place names, because public places belong to the public and not an individual. "Only five BGN decisions have allowed the apostrophe for natural features. These are: Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; Ike's Point, New Jersey; John E's Pond, Rhode Island; Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Arizona; and Clark’s Mountain, Oregon." why were those ones approved? who knows

[foxcatdog]

Maybe it's a subtle dab on said individuals implying they aren't people.

[xxx]

I think it's natural to translate names
in order to be able to pronounce them or even write them identically,
within the linguistic community, since it's out of the question
for everyone to be able to pronounce or write them like all their foreign bearers...

how inclusive should a registry office be...
should I be able to use my conlang/conscript to register my children...

in 3SDeduciveLanguage(1Sense=1Sign=1Sound),
there's no question of importing mouth sounds to name anything...
translation is de rigueur,
and the contemporary practice of names that mean nothing is out of the question...

[keenir]

in 3SDeduciveLanguage(1Sense=1Sign=1Sound),
there's no question of importing mouth sounds to name anything...
translation is de rigueur,
and the contemporary practice of names that mean nothing is out of the question...

Ah...so, in that case, when we're talking to you, we can call you Triple Pirate Palmtree ? On a map, thats what your username would equate to.