UniLang

In my generation, it's not common at all to have two given names, but nowadays, it's extremely common.

So the way it's going here is the opposite of what's happening in neighbouring countries? Interesting.

linguoboy wrote:[*]Disambiguating sex. It’s not unusual to see individuals with an epicene first given name (like “Dana”) and an unambiguously gendered second given name. I’ve seen the same convention in other languages, such as Vietnamese.[/list]

And disambiguating individuals, in general. We have such a limited pool of names, and most of the family names are practically useless for differentiating people, that it's just more helpful to have 3 or 4 components to your name instead of just 2.

Even then, there's still loads and loads of Vietnamese guys who have the very same family name, middle name and "calling name" (the last syllable) as mine. My sister has 4 syllables in her name and that helps distinguishing her from the crowd a bit more.

Of course this has a historical factor to it. Vietnam inherited the 2-syllable and 3-syllable name layouts from ancient China. Same story with Korea. But we did innovate a bit and came up with 4-syllable names or more.

Well unfortunately my names don't follow any tradition. My first name is Lance which is my dad's middle name, but my middle name Jesse feels like somebody gave me their name and it's just weird to have a Biblical name being that I'm the furthest thing from a Bible thumper

I said earlier in this thread that my name means "Victor," but technically, I guess Vijay could mean either 'victor' or 'victory'. However, in Malayalam and Tamil, I prefer to say my name is Vijayan, which unambiguously means 'victor'.

My name is Liam, which is the shortened form of Uilliam... which is the Irish version of William and that... you get the picture! European names are always connected to another European country haha.

From what I know my name means 'helmet of will' or simply 'guardian'.

jonasdouglas1986 wrote:I recently search my name out of plain curiosity, and it simply means dove?

Jonas or Douglas?

Osias wrote:

jonasdouglas1986 wrote:I recently search my name out of plain curiosity, and it simply means dove?

Jonas or Douglas?

Jonas, from Biblical Hebrew יוֹנָה via Greek.

Douglas is Gaelic. The Scottish-Gaelic form is Dùbhghlas and it means "black stream". It's thought to be a surname derived from a place name which later became used as a given name.

Thanks!