What's in A Name

What’s in a Name?
TEACHER: Good morning everybody! Good morning Felipe, Monica, Theo, and I can't
remember your name.
STUDENT: Patricia.
TEACHER: Right! Patricia. Those are all beautiful names, and that's our topic today,
names.
Names are a cultural universal. This means everyone uses names. A person's name
can tell us a bit about a person's family. Today, we'll begin by looking at first names and
how people choose names for their children. And then we'll talk about family names and
look at the different categories of family names. Although the scope of the lecture today
is English-language names, we can use the same approach, you know, to look at names
from any culture.
Let's take a brief look at first or given names. There are several ways parents choose
the first name for their child. The first way is by family history. Parents may choose a name
because it is passed from generation to generation. For example, the firstborn son might
be named after his father or grandfather. Although family names are also passed to
daughters, it is usually as a middle name. Adding junior or the second, for example William
Parker the second, is only done with boys not with girls’ names.
The second way parents choose a name is after a family member or friend who has
died recently, or after someone they admire, like a well known leader or a famous musician.
Although most English first names mean something, for example Richard means powerful,
and Anne means Grace, nowadays meaning is not the main reason people select their
baby's name.
The third way is to provide a push for the child. Parents want to choose a name that
sounds very successful, a strong name might help them in the business world, for example.
Or they might choose a name that works for either gender, like Taylor or Terry. So given
these three methods, what is the most common way parents choose the name? Many
parents choose a name simply because they like it, or because it's fashionable or classic.
Fashions in names change just as they do in clothes. One hundred years ago, many names
came from the Bible. Names such as Daniel, and Anna, and Hanna, and Matthew. Then, 50
years ago, biblical names went out of fashion. Nowadays names from the Bible are
becoming popular again. Similarly, parents often choose classic names, names that were
popular in 1900, 1950, and are still popular now. Classic names for boys include Thomas,
David, Robert and Michael. And for girls, Anna, Elizabeth, Emily and Katherine, just to name
a few. They're classic, they never go out of style.
Let's look at the origin of last names, also called family names or surnames.
Researchers have studied thousands of last names and they’ve divided them into four
categories. The categories are place names, patronymics, added names, and occupational
names. A recent survey showed that of the 7,000 most popular names in the United States
today, 43% were place names, 32% were patronymics, 15% were occupational names, and
9% were added names.
The first category is place names. Place names usually identified where a person lived
or worked. Someone named John Hill lived near Hill, for example, and the Rivers family
lived near a river. If you hear the name Emma Bridges, what image do you see? Do you see
a family that lives near a bridge? If you do, you get the idea.
The second category is patronymics. That's PATRONYMICS. A patronymic is the
father's name plus an ending like SEN or SON. The ending means that a child, a boy, is the
son of his father. The names Robertson, Peterson and Wilson are patronymics. Robertson
is son of Robert, Peterson is son of Peter, and so on.
The third category is added names. Linguists sometimes call this category nicknames.
But when most of us hear the word nickname, we think of a special name a friend or a
parent might use. The word nickname is actually an old English word that means an
additional name, an added name. So I'll use the term added name. This category of last
names is fun because the names usually described a person. Reed, Baldwin and Biggs are
examples. Reed was from red, for red hair. Baldwin was someone who was bald, someone
who had little or no hair. And Biggs?
STUDENT: Someone big?
TEACHER: yeah, someone big. Right. Now, if we look around the room we could probably
come up with some new last names, like curly or strong.
Now, the fourth category is occupational names. The origin of the family name was
the person’s occupation. The most common examples of occupational names still used
today are Baker, someone who bakes bread, Taylor, someone who sews clothes, Miller,
someone who makes flour for bread, and Smith. Now, Smith is actually the most common
name in the Western english-speaking world. The name comes from an old English word
“smite”. That's SMITE, which means to hit or strike. In the old days, a smith made metal
things for daily life, like tools. Every town needed smiths. What's interesting is that many
languages have a family name that means smith. In Arabic, it's Haddad – HADDAD, in
Spanish, it's Herrera – HERRERA, in Italian, it's Ferraro - FERRARO, and in German, it's
Schmidt, spelled SCHMIDT. All these names mean smith. Though names may tell us
something about someone's family history, you need to keep in mind that they may not
tell us much at all about the present. For example, there's usually not much connection
between the origin of the name and the person who has it now. Take the name Cook for
instance. A person named cooked today probably doesn't cook for a living. Also many
people change their names for various reasons. Lots of people who have moved to the
United States have changed their names to sound more American. This happens less now
than in the past but people still do it. People also use pen names, or stage names, to give
themselves a professional advantage. For example, the writer Samuel Clemens used the
pen name Mark Twain, and Thomas Mapother IV uses the stage name Tom Cruise.
So, let's recap now. In today's lesson, we looked at how parents choose English first
names. We also looked at some common origins of family names. In the next class, we look
at how names are given in Korea and in Japan. This is covered in the next section of the
book. That's all for today.

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