{"id":23586,"date":"2018-09-24T09:04:35","date_gmt":"2018-09-24T08:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=23586"},"modified":"2018-09-24T09:04:35","modified_gmt":"2018-09-24T08:04:35","slug":"whats-in-a-name-a-lot-more-than-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=23586","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s in a name? A lot more than you think."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, the Office of National Statistics published the most popular baby names in England &amp; Wales for 2017. This gave me an opportunity to up-date my extensive <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/useofnames.html\">website essay<\/a> on naming practices around the world where I have drawn out just how different these practices are from our experience in Britain.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It is assumed that the meaning of names is unknown and unimportant &#8211; but (virtually) all names have meaning if only we knew it and, in many, many cultures, names are chosen precisely because of their meaning.<\/li>\n<li>It is assumed to be respectful to name a child after a parent or grandparent which is commonplace in Western culture &#8211; but, in China, it is considered very disrepectful to use even one character from the name of a parent or grandparent.<\/li>\n<li>It is assumed that given names are gender-specific &#8211; but many African and all Chinese given names can be applied to boys and girls.<\/li>\n<li>It is assumed that, when someone has more than one given name, the first is the one used in everyday life &#8211; but in Germany it is the second or the given name nearest the family name that is the &#8216;call name&#8217;.<\/li>\n<li>It is assumed that people have a single family name &#8211; but, in Spain and Portugal, they have two.<\/li>\n<li>It is assumed that family names are not gender-specific &#8211; but, in most Slavonic countries, family names ending with \u2018-ov\u2019 and \u2018-in\u2019 add an \u2018a\u2019 in their female form and Polish and Lithuanian have their own endings for female last names.<\/li>\n<li>It is assumed that given names come first and family names come last &#8211; but the reverse is the case in countries like China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and even Hungary.<\/li>\n<li>It is assumed that all countries have family names as well as first names &#8211; but Myanmar and large parts of India do not have family names.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, the Office of National Statistics published the most popular baby names in England &amp; Wales for 2017. This gave me an opportunity to up-date my extensive website essay on naming practices around the world where I have drawn out just how different these practices are from our experience in Britain. It is assumed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23586"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23589,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23586\/revisions\/23589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}