Lauura wrote: I don't think there are names that mean things like "he who is good for nothing" or "the one we're all fed up with", don't you think?

I know that in italy, that's in the region Emilia, a person has a name meaning "I didn't want you [to be born]" = "Antavleva" in regional dialect
Nero wrote:My name is Thomas, and my parents only picked it because it didn't have a female form (Alex -> Alexandra, Carl -> Carla, Thomas -> ?)
having a female form can be annoying for male children here . Most of our names have both forms when taken from male names, but obviously it doesn't often happen the opposite [I never heard Margherito o Roso for instance, but honestly, they look like very ugly to me.]
When you begin to attend school, children use short forms, especially in case of very common names.Now since most of those names share female and male meaning, the short form can create confusion.
There's a tendency to use the form Franci from Francesco, which is the original male name for both [female Francesca], so when you share your name with someone else, you often jump up in the air thinking they're calling you when it's someone else, but you see they're calling often a little girl

They also can play jokes with your name changing the final -o into -a. With names like Raul or Alan this can't happen. Pretty much no one is gonna bother with that.
Also you can be someone sharing the name Francesco o Francesca with someone else until you you complete the high school,and so on in the place where you work since is the most common name of Italy [Not to mention Saint Francis is the patron of Italy], so , again, you can happen to think they're calling you when it's mostly always someone else.
There's a certain tendency to use Franci o similar spellings by females, while guys have seemed to begin to use Fran [like I do] to avoid gender misunderstanding, following the Spanish trend [Fran seems to be exclusively used by guys in Spain, that 's great, IMO] in the place of Franco [that can also be an original ethnical name, not a short form like in this case] Franco is not anyway a short form that the majority of the guys seems to like much here .
Francy wrote:My full name, Francesca, means "free of spirit and state" It was the name the Latin gave to the people living in France at that time (the celts) when they weren't still under the Latin dominion... I like it very much!!!!
Franks were a germanic tribe which settled in France but they were not Celts. France bears a name which could be fit for the Dutch, I think, since the dutch are descendents from the Franks who installed in the zones nowadays inhabitated by Flemish and Dutch .The name France was given for all the territory subjected to the Franks Empire including the modern France,and then Netherlands, Belgium, Germany,Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Northern Italy and part of Spain but the core of the Franks was in the Netherlands-Belgium, as linguistic scholars have studied that dutch came from Lower-Franconian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Frankish_language
"The meaning of "free" (English frank, frankly, franklin) arose because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks had the status of freemen"
Then, after it was clear that this Empire has 2 big ethnical groups based on the language family they spoke -Latin and Germanic languages- , the part including germanic populations was called Germania and the name France remained mostly to what turned to be French [excluding Italy]Ironically Germania was used by Latins and Francia came from Germanic.
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankerne:
Det latinske navn francus (fletal: franci) betyder "fri" på de germanske sprog. Man finder oprindelsen til ordet frank i et andet ord, frekkr (= "hårdfør", "tapper"), som også er germansk.