History of Christian names

by Charlotte M. Yonge

Fifthly, from a weapon, as the Teuton Gar, a spear.

Sixthly, from a jewel, Mote Mahal, in Persian, pearl of the harem; the Greek, Margarite, a pearl in Greek; the Teutonic Stein, a stone or jewel in Teutonic.

Seventhly, religious names, dedicating the child to the Divinity, such as Ishmael, heard of God; Elijah, God the Lord; and among idolaters, Artemidorus, gift of Artemis; Jovianus, belonging to Jupiter; Brighid, the Irish goddess of smiths and poets; Thorgils, Thor’s pledge.

To these we may add a few names of flowers, chiefly borne by women, and always indicating a poetical nation, such as Susanna, Lilias, Rhoda, Rose, and the Slavonic Smiljana, the amaranth, a description of name never found among the unimaginative Romans.

Also a few indicating a time of deep sorrow and distress, when the child was born, such as Beriah, son of evil, named when it went ill with his father Ephraim; Jabez, sorrow; Ichabod, the glory is departed. These being of ill omen, never prevailed among the joyous Greeks; but among the quick-feeling Kelts we find Una, famine, and Ita, thirsty, names recording, no doubt, times of sorrow. Also Posthumus and Tristan, though not originally bearing the meaning since attributed to them, and Dolores, a name of Spanish Roman Catholic growth, have all been applied to express the mournful circumstances of some “child of misery, baptized in tears.”

Natural defects have likewise furnished names, such as Balbus, the stammerer; the Irish Dorenn, the sullen; and Unchi, the contentious. These are most common among the Romans, owing to their habit of continuing a father’s name, however acquired, to the son. And the Romans likewise stand almost alone in their strange and uncomplimentary fashion of giving individual names from numbers, one in which they have not been imitated, except now and then, where the number of a family has become so remarkable as to be deemed worthy of commemoration in the names of the younger children. There is, however, said to be a family in Michigan where the sons are called One, Two, Three Stickaway, and the daughters First, Second, Third Stickaway.

The invention of original names usually takes place in the early stages of a people’s history, for a preference soon arises for established names, already borne by kindred, and as the spoken tongue drifts away, from the primitive form, the proper name becomes a mere appellative, with the original meaning forgotten, and often with a new one incorrectly applied to it. The names in popular use almost always belong to a more ancient language than that spoken by the owners; or else they are imported from some other nation, and adapted to the mouths of those who use them. Flexibility of speech is only acquired at a very early age, and persons who have never spoken any other than their mother tongue, have no power to catch foreign sounds, and either distort them, or assimilate them to words of their own. The ear catches the word imperfectly, the lips pronounce it after their own fashion, and the first writer who hears it, sets it down to the best of his ability, to be read, as it may chance, by others, ignorant of the sound the letters were meant to represent, and thus striking out absolute novelties. Even where it travels by the medium of writing, the letters of one language are so inadequate to express the sounds of another, that great changes take place in pronunciation, even while the spelling remains unaltered, and these become visible in the popular contractions.

Thus a foreign conquest, or the fusion of one nation into another, while introducing two orders of names to the same country, and in breaking up and intermixing their original forms of speech, yet leaves untouched the names belonging to the old language, though the spoken tongue goes on living, growing, and altering.

The Hebrew is an instance of this process. It was a living tongue up to the Babylonish captivity, and constantly formed new names from the ordinary speech of the people; but when the Jews returned they spoke the Aramean dialect; the old Hebrew was dead. They still called their children by mangled and contracted Hebraisms, inherited from their forefathers, but were in general not aware of their meaning, and were willing to give them Greek terminations to suit the literary taste of the East. That there was no vigour to throw out new names, is attested by the very scanty number of Aramean derivation. Yet it is these corrupted Hebrew names, marred by Aramean pronunciation, by Greek writing, and by the speech of every country, that are the most universally loved and honoured in every Christian land.

Greek may be said to have never died, and it has, from first to last, been the most vigorous of all languages in creating and spreading names, which are almost all easily explicable. Hellas, though frequently conquered, has by its glorious literature, both pagan and Christian, gained wide dominion for its language, and even the present vernacular of the peasant and sailor is not so decayed but that they can comprehend a line of Homer or a verse of St. John. Thus there is a long list of Greek names ever new, with comparatively few importations from other tongues, and for the most part conveying their meaning and augury.