Personal name Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
It is universal for a person to have a name; the rare exceptions occur in the cases of mentally disturbed parents, or wild children growing up in isolation. A personal name is usually given at birth or at a young age, and is usually kept throughout life; there might be additional names indicating family relationships, area of residence, and so on. The details of naming are strongly governed by culture; some are more flexible about naming than others, but for all cultures where historical records are available, the rules are known to change over time.
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2 Naming convention 3 Name order 4 Nonhuman creature names 5 See also |
Structure
Common components of true names given at birth include:
Some people (called anonyms) choose to be anonymous, that is, to hide their true names, for fear of governmental prosecution or societal ridicule of their works or actions. Another method to disguise one's identity is to employ a pseudonym.
The Inuit believe that the souls of the namesakes are one, so they traditionally refer to the junior namesakes, not just by the names (atiq), but also by kinship title, which applies across gender and generation without implications of disrespect or seniority. In Judaism, someone's name is considered intimately connected with his fate, and changing a name (e.g. on the sickbed) may avert a particular danger.
Depending on national convention, additional given names (and sometimes titles) are considered part of the name.
Naming convention
In contemporary Western society (except for Iceland), the most common naming convention is that of a given name, usually indicating the child's sex, followed by the parents' family name. In earlier times, Scandinavian countries followed patronymic naming, with people effectively called "X son of Y"; this is now the case only in Iceland.
Different cultures have different conventions for personal names. This is a list of articles about particular cultures' naming conventions.
- Arabic name
- Chinese name
- German name
- Icelandic names
- Indian name
- Japanese name
- Korean name
- Roman names
- Names in Russian Empire, Soviet Union and CIS countries
- Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan names
Name order
Since a name is made up of several parts, it may matter what order in which a name is put. The order family name followed by the given name is known as eastern order. This order is used in Chinese and Korean names. In China and Hong Kong, a person's name is his or her family name, rarely more than five letters, followed by his or her given name, which is typically longer than the family name. In Korea and Taiwan, the family name, which is almost always three or four letters long, will be followed by two given names, the second one typically being on or two letters longer than the first, but these names are rarely longer than six letters. The reverse order is known as western order, which is used in the Americas and Europe.
Nonhuman creature names
Apart from the Linnaean taxonomy, some individual nonhuman animals and plants are given names, usually of endearment.
In some cultures, pets or sporting animals are sometimes given names similar to human names. Other cultures, such as the Chinese, give the animals nonhuman names, because it would be offensive and disrespectful to the person of the same name; even cultures that give human names to animals sometimes do so to an ugly animal to insult the bearer of the name. For examples of nonhuman names,
- An emperor during the Three Kingdoms period, Liu Bei's horse was called "Dilu" (的盧), meaning "Truly Dark", which might be metaphorically named for the ill fate it supposedly brought its previous owners.
- Liu Bei's general, Guan Yu's horse was "Chi Tu" (赤兔), meaning "Red Hare", reflecting on the amazing speed of the horse.
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