What do names like Mathilda, Enzo, Claude, Jennifer, Franck, Lucy, Henry, Victoria, David, Emeline, Gregory, …etc…, – tell us about these persons but more than that, what does it tell us about their own parents?
ALL SORTS OF NAMES
1/ More often than not, a child’s name is above all the expression of its parents’ desires and aspirations and even when the name is chosen to “please grandma” or to pay homage to a missing parent, that name has a strong meaning, a meaning which will follow that child throughout his or her life.
Names of regional inspiration show how much parents may be attached to their regional traditions or, more often, to an imaginary land: we all have a dream land in our hearts. French names such as Loïc, Nolwen, Emeric, Kevin, Gwenaël, or the Irish names Sean or Liam, … all testify to the attachment of parents to Celtic traditions. In the same way, names of Nordic origin such as Astrid, Mathilde, Oleg, Danica or Igor hardly hide the desire for power and recognition of the parents who hope, by giving a “Viking” or Slavic name to their offspring, to make them “true little warriors”.
Sometimes French parents do not even try to hide their aspirations for real or usurped nobility by giving their children “extended” names such as Louis-Philippe, Marie-Adeline, Charles-Henri or Marie-Charlotte. Sometimes the certification “old French aristocracy” is obtained by using medieval first names such as Guenièvre, Roland, Grégoire or Romuald.
NAMES OF RELIGIOUS OR ETHNIC INSPIRATION
Religiously inspired names are not uncommon but, for the most part, they have become so much a part of everyday life that they go almost unnoticed. So who would seek any Jewish or Christian origin for names as Francis, Mary or Joseph?
On the other hand, the religious marker is more easily found with names such as Samuel, Aaron, Rachel or Elijah, which are more frequent in the Jewish community.
With the opening up of French society to new ethnic groups and religions, we find a growing number of names of North African origin such as: Mehdi, Aicha, Mohamed, Rachida, Ramzi, or Nassim.
Some communities such as the Chinese community do not hesitate to give newborn babies names that conform to local customs, to facilitate their integration into the host countries, whatever country they settle in. Thus, Henri Fong or Alice Tang in France became Francesco Fong and Maria Tang in Italy and Steve Fong and Jessica Tang in the United States. This is all the easier for them because in China individual persons’names, including first names, have a meaning (for example Xiao Mei would mean “Little Beauty” and Bao Li “Mighty Leopard”), whereas in the West, most proper names are just “labels” without any particular meaning.
The ban on ethnic statistics does not allow us to know precisely the place of the different communities that have settled on French territory, but family names and, often even first names (in the case of married women), betray these origins. The name is therefore not only a “private affair” but it becomes a marker and even an important cultural, social and ethnic discriminant.
NAMES IN FASHION
To further complicate matters, the choice of a name is not always rationally motivated. Sometimes the giving of a child’s name merely responds to fashion phenomena. Since the 90s, in France there has been a resurgence of feminine names ending with “a” such as Léa, Emma, Mia or Julia, a trend that is not about to die out. On the other hand, for male names, the “l” or “el” sounds have become more common in recent years with names such as Léo, Louis, Gabriel or Raphaël.
Sometimes, for the sake of originality, a simple letter is enough to make a name sound trendy: “Mariah” sounds so much sexier than the boring “Maria“.
WHEN NAMES ARE BURDENS…
The law allows all deviations as long as the first names are neither insulting nor ridiculous. It is a necessary limitation because the child’s name, in so far as it determines the child’s relationship with others, will necessarily affect to some extent, the character of the adult.
Giving a ridiculous or insulting first name condemns a person to a life of easy mockery: how many “Jean Bonnot” (in Frenche “jambonneau” means “big piece of ham”) or the all too evocative “Clitorine” have suffered all their lives for their parents’ imprudent choice!
In the same way, giving a newborn baby the name of an older brother or sister who passed away too soon can have serious consequences on the child’s psyche. Such child will then have to bear a double identity, a double burden. It will have to fill the immense void left within the family by the elder, the brother or sister he or she will never know, the one who is in everybody’s mind but whose name, never mentioned by the parents, is engraved in the family’s collective sub-conscious. This type of “psychological inheritance” was quite common in the past when infant mortality was much higher and parents’ imagination more limited, but it underlines the fact that we are all, willingly or unwillingly, the authors of a story that does not belong to us.
Yes, the name given to us by our parents influences our life much more than we believe. It shows that from the day of our birth, our environment influences us and determines us much more than we determine it. That’s our first great lesson of humility.