An extension of the question: who decided certain adjectives in a foreign language would make good names for people?
Some names make sense because they could nicely describe someone:
Jennifer: Welsh “Gwenhwyfar” meaning “fair, white” and “smooth.”
Amy: Old French for “beloved”
Diane: Latin for “Heavenly, divine”
Donald: From the Gaelic for “ruler of the world”
Others . . . not so much:
Lynn: Welsh for “lake”
Katherine: Debated, but could be derived from the Greek meaning “far off,” “each of the two,” or “tourture”
Shirley: Old English for “bright clearing”
Melissa: Greek for “bee”
Kyle: From the Gaelic for “narrows, channel, strait”
“Hello Bee, I’d like you to meet my son Channel. Why don’t you go for a walk down to the bright clearing. Oh sorry, I wasn’t talking to you sweetie; go back to your tap dancing.”
Just looking at this first one, it’s like I said in my original post. They may have sounds that they use to identify themselves, but it’s not like one dolphin calls another dolphin by its name.
It all came to a point of crisis when one caveman sued another who lived in an adjoining valley, and the process server who was making out the writ ran out of room to chisel “The big guy with red hair who has a scar on his chest and picks his nose a lot who lives near the waterfall where the guy whose mate was eaten by a sabertooth tiger likes to swim.”
And as you know, names, up until recently at least, were primarily shorthand descriptors of this nature. And the larger communities became, the more information needed to be in those descriptors: “Og”; “Og Ogson”; “Big Smelly Og”; “Dead Og”; etc.
There is an awful lot of misinformation about names out there.
“Jennifer” is from Cornish, not Welsh, though it is cognate with Gwenhwyfar. It became an English name as the Cornish were shifting from Cornish-speaking to English-speaking, and was generalized later. “Donald” was a popular Gaelic name in Scotland, and was borrowed by English-speakers (who added the final -d on analogy with Ronald), rather than adopted directly from a foreign language. The name “Lynn” is not from the Welsh word for lake (llyn), which has a different initial consonant and a different vowel. Katherine is popular in English because of Saint Catherine, and the etymology has nothing to do with English other than shaping Katarina to English sounds. Shirley was a placename that became a surname and then a male given name and then a female given name. Kyle is another placename-turned-surname-turned-given-name.
I have no idea who thought up the first name, but who ever came up with Con Slobodchikoff, “professor emeritus of biology at Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff, [who] began studying social behavior among prairie dogs in his area about 25 years ago”, deserves an award on par with the one given Slartibartfast for designing the coastline of Norway.
It’s pretty obvious for social animals: so you can keep track of your allies and your rivals. What is known as “reciprocal altruism” is the basis for many animal societies. If a particular individual cooperates with you, you’ll be more likely to cooperate with him in the future. If another typically tries to cheat you, you’ll instead avoid him.
Humans are the most social species known, and it is of critically important in human societies to know who the other individuals are, and to keep track of how they treated you in the past. Names and identifiers undoubtedly go back a long way.
I’d think names started with unique sounds mothers made to communicate with their children. This might have entrenched the concept of a named identity in early humans or even pre-humans, wherever that line is. Once that was in place it would fall into use for more complex types of communication easily.
No, I think it’s the same idea. The cavemen just gave names to the things they thought were nameable. So they’d give all clouds one name because there wasn’t much difference between this cloud and that cloud. Same thing with rocks or sticks or fish. But people were individually distinct so each person got an individual name. In support of this, people can give individual members of a group an individual name when they feel that member of the group has a distinct identity. Those animals out in the woods are just a bunch of wolves. But this wolf I raised from a puppy is Rover. You can find a bunch of big sticks in the forest. But this big stick is my favorite club Basher.
I believe the standard explanation for this is that dogs don’t really learn their “names” but rather associate intonation and whole phrases with good things. So “Katie” doesn’t know her name so much as she associates a happy-toned “katiecome” sound means FOOD OR PETTINS EITHER WAY GOOD THINGS, whereas you probably don’t tend to reward Sarah when you say “katiecome” and Sarah comes to you so she doesn’t bother.
Same with the incomprehensible string of sounds “wheresmommy” though that may also have a side helping of subconscious influence. Where you act more excited when they get closer to your wife, leading them to gravitate towards her whether they really know what the hell you just said or not because hey, whatever they’re doing is pleasing the pack leader!
In other words, they don’t really have a symbolic interpretation of the sentence where they understand that “mommy” is a string of sounds that refers to an agent but rather they’ve memorized and are conditioned to the event chain Specific Sound->Corresponding Action->Good Thing Happens.
I’ll agree with the katiecome post. I love dogs, and I’m continually amazed at their doggy intelligence and caring, but they definitely aren’t little furry humans and don’t know their names.
Our 1yr old german shepherd mix is pretty good at coming when I call him, but he’ll not come if I say his name in casual conversation, unless I stop to look at him. Likewise, he’ll also come if someone calls him ‘Puppy’ or ‘Toenibbler’, as long as they’re looking at him and calling him in a happy tone.
My mum gave him his name, so all of us call him Hajduk; but my dad decided that he’d rather call him Zujo. He never calls him Hajduk. The dog has no problem with this. I really think he’s listening more to the tone of the voice/body movement than the words associated with the command. Saying ‘Zujo, sjedi!’ or ‘Hajduk, sit!’ will get you the same reaction, especially if you have a treat in your hand.
I don’t see how this is a significant problem. A named set can have named subsets. Job is a word but so is teacher and plumber and architect. Rover might be one particular wolf but he’s still a wolf.
Every dog I’ve spent any significant time around always reacted to it’s name. Whether called or overheard in casual conversation.
Out cats also have known their names and the names of the other cats. E.g., if you yell at one cat by name, the others would immediately look over at it to see what it’s doing wrong. (Once we discovered this, we of course had to test it, which left some puzzled cat looks when they saw nothing was actually going on.)
