There is such a children’s riddle: “Without which a person cannot live?” Whatever you offer in response, all your logical and completely probable assumptions will be overturned by a riddle – without a name.
From this children’s wisdom we will make an important conclusion for parents: to give a child a name is more than choosing the word you like. Therefore, we will talk about the proper handling of the name. If you were surprised or did not even believe that the choice of a name and attitude to it may be illiterate, it is in vain. Indeed, literacy is not only the ability to read and write. We are talking about another literacy – the possession of sufficient knowledge in the proposed field of activity. Any work must be done with knowledge of the matter, and such as choosing a name – even more so.
A name is not just a word, it is something more – a personal name of a person. It accompanies him all his life. A person always builds a very personal relationship with his name. This is his second self, after all. And the most paradoxical thing is that it’s I who do not choose the person himself, but the parents.
A person has three main emotions (with various variations) about his name: like, dislike, indifferent. This means that the parental choice of the name was either successful or not. Let’s see how the choice of a name is made, or, to put it scientifically, a name, and what difficulties parents are waiting for here. How can one not make mistakes with one’s linguistic ignorance.
It would seem that there is nothing easier than giving a name to your child – take what you like – and no problems. So, according to surveys, the vast majority of parents do. However, the catch lies in this “liked it.” It is not at all obvious that your tastes will coincide with the taste of your child, of course, when he grows up and can tell about it.
The secret of popularity
What do people usually like about a particular name?
Firstly, its popularity, that is, a fashion for a certain circle of names. It seems to parents that, say, Anastasia, Daria, Nikita, Danila sound beautiful and, nothing more, the parent does not want to think. For example, that the frequency of the name is already going wild, that has outgrown reasonable limits.
Secondly, another mod influences the choice of a name no less often – the rarity of a name. Then the parents, on the contrary, do not follow the “public taste”, but begin to look for something from different sources, something more ancient. Here, parents can seriously overdo it. And along with Matvey, Arseny, Rostislavs, Svyatoslavs, Valeriy, Kira, Vasilisa, Foka, Thomas, Makar, Samson, Mechislav, Ratibor, Agafya, Efrosinya, Melania appear. In the latter case, parents should understand that living with a rare name that falls out of the modern language situation is an additional burden on the psyche and emotions of your child. Have you prepared him for this?
Still “beautiful” parents seem exotic names that have experienced “Western” or literary influence. Of course, there are quite extreme cases when a Russian child is called Julia, Anna-Maria, Richard, Askold, Ken. But most often, parents are limited to the choice of names that sound foreign, but fit into the Russian language: Eduard, Arthur, Angelina, Alina, Aelita.
Sometimes a “birth” of a new name happens when parents insist on one form or another of it. For example, Lina (although this is an abbreviated form of the names of Capitolin or western Magdalen, Carolina), or Alina (taken from a poem by Pushkin, it is also an incomplete name from Adeline or Angelina, then popular names), or Arina (in the home name of the Pushkin nanny, whose full name is Irina). As a rule, registry office workers register such names: parents have the right to insist on their choice of a name, even if this form of name is not entirely complete from a language point of view.
All the above reasons explain the choice of a “beautiful” name without any additional parental explanations. It would be unfair if not to say that there are reasons for informed parental choice.
To the question of choosing a name for a child, the answer “in honor of someone” is in second place. It can be relatives (the closest and very distant), beloved friends and girlfriends, celebrities (most often singers and movie actors), literary, cartoon and film characters and … guardian angels. In recent decades, parents have increasingly checked their choice with whether this name is in the church tradition to give the child protection of the heavenly patron.
And, finally, the so-called “exceptional situations” of choosing a name: a girl was born in May (Maya), in July (Julia); Mom looked at the picture where there were funny teddy bears (Mikhail); the girl is beautiful as a flower (Rose, Lily); a long time waiting for the child (Bogdan) and many more different individual stories that sometimes surprise with their whimsical logic of choosing a name.