Such is not the case in Japan.Įven ancient names have meanings that can be understood if one knows the original language. Even names like Anthony, Charles, and Edmund have meanings it is just that they are lost on most people who don’t know the original languages of the names and their original forms. These are names the Japanese can relate to they have a meaning in our lingua franca, English. Consider the modern English names Heather, Holly, Pearl, Felicity, and Patience. This is an unsatisfactory solution, as it does not address how to deal with era-bridging figures such as Itagaki or Saigō Takamori.Īnother thing to keep in mind is that Japanese is written with what some may consider ideographs or pictographs every element has not only a sound but a meaning. Some publishing houses maintain the multiple-personality disorder of keeping in original order “historical” names (i.e., people before the Meiji Restoration of 1868), and reversing to “Western order” those post-dating the Restoration. This is a trend slowly being reversed by magazines and newspapers in Japan, which are now starting to use the proper name order regardless of media. It is a modern oddity that even today the names of Japanese, when appearing in English, are often reversed and written in the correct order when using kanji. The first Ashikaga shōgun, Takauji, was thus Ashikaga Takauji, not Takauji Ashikaga, despite the order sometimes given his name in many Western books. But the 146 American baby girls born in 2012 whose parents chose to call them Khaleesi are a reminder that in names, as in life, we're always going back to the future.The first thing that needs to be remembered about Japanese names is that the surname comes first. The Pastons wouldn't have been thrown by meeting a Joffrey or a Margaery, especially since medieval spelling was a creative business. And that might mean HBO rather than history Game of Thrones, not the real wars of the roses. The clue may be in the small print: coming into fashion, we're told, are "medieval- style" names. What we do know is that babies were often named by or for their chief godparent, which could produce unpredictable results: the two eldest sons of the 15th-century Paston family were both called John, which also – confusingly – happened to be the name of their father.īut a world in which everyone is called John is clearly not the olde England this survey has in mind. Medieval Netmums would have had their work cut out, mind you, since no public records were kept of baptisms (or marriages or burials) before the parish registers of the 16th century. And if the crown had passed to Henry's grandson Alfonso, heir to the throne for 10 years before his early death in 1284, there might well have been an Iberian flavour to the "most popular" lists by the turn of the 14th century. It wasn't until the mid-13th century, when Henry III decided to call his son and heir after the Anglo-Saxon royal saint Edward the Confessor, that Edward – until then as unprepossessing a choice as Egfrith – became once again a name to conjure with at the font. After the conquest of 1066, everyone who was anyone aspired to the Norman names of the new ruling classes – William, Robert, Matilda, Joan – rather than the Aethelflaeds and Aelfgifus of the defeated Anglo-Saxons. So if these aren't actually medieval names, what are? Well, fashions came and went in the middle ages, just as they do now.
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