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ChristianKl comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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Not all white names are made equal. You want a name that's associated with high status in the country in which you live.
In Germany being named Kevin is a low status signal. The same is true for most US names. Lower class people in Germany are more likely to give their children the name of US celebrities than German high class people.
I'm German and would agree. Kevin not only sounds low Status but is also a name for kids, so it's even handicapped in more than one respect.
I've thought about adopting "Aaron Alexander Grey", the middle name being my father's first name and Grey being an adaptation of my current last name that probably no one except Germans could really hope to pronounce correctly. Also I don't want to stay in Germany so Aaron Alexander Grey is more of an attempt at a name that I imagine may be overall an internationally well recieved name. Thoughts?
By the way if you're a German citizen you can't just change your name unless you provide a good reason... like having idiot parents who decided Adolf is a proper first name for their child (way after WW2 mind you). If ever, I'll probably change my name once I become a Swedish citizen where you can do that kind of thing. Being Swedish (at least by citizenship) is probably also a very good signal internationally speaking. Better than German for sure.
What do people named Kevin get called when they grow up then?
Names trend over time in rather smooth curves of popularity.
In the U.S., there aren't any laws about what you can call your kids, but the Social Security Administration tracks popularity of names. For instance, the second most popular girl's name this year is Emma, which was also the third most popular in 1880 ... and the 451st most popular at its low point in 1978. The most popular name today, Sophia, tracks a similar curve with a low point in the '40s.
The most popular girl's name in my age cohort was Jennifer — the #1 girl's name from 1970 to 1984! — but Jennifer has been on the way down ever since. Today's American girls are more likely to have an Aunt Jenny than a classmate Jenny. To me, Jennifer (or Jessica, Melissa, Amy, or Heather) sounds like someone my age, not a little kid. Young girls are named Ashley, Hannah, Madison, Alexis ... and baby girls are Isabella, Sophia, Emma.
Male names are stabler than female names, but mostly because some names (Michael, Matthew, Daniel, William ...) are persistently popular.
I suppose he means its a newly introduced name.
That's one interpretation, but I certainly wouldn't have used the phrasing he did if I meant to convey that meaning.
When think "A name for children," I think of variations on ordinary names which people usually grow out of, like "Timmy."
No I meant it like you interpreted it, "Timmy" and "Benny" are names that you would clearly associate with children rather than adults. And my impression is that Kevin is also in that category, though perhaps it's not as extreme a case as those two names. I never understood why parents would call their son Benny, why not officially call him Ben and use Benny in the family as long as he's a kid and doesn't mind?
No one ever heard of Benny the mighty conquerer or Benny the badass CEO. Benny is a cute name, not a serious name for a grown man. Kevin may be perceived differently in America, perhaps because the name is older there while in Germany it's indeed a rather new name...
http://www.freakonomics.com/2009/10/22/kevin-is-not-a-name-its-a-diagnosis/
...and oddly enough all the Kevins I remember from my old school years were always the class clown.
On the other hand, there is Benny the Jet.
Bacon. Spacey. Sorbo. Costner. Kline.
If you go to the ex-Eastern Block, you find German usually has the signal "awesome rich industrial powerhouse, want to imitate, the kind of capitalist overlord I would want to be become, bossing over everybody" and Swedish has the signal "pretty people with funny ideas like non-gendered kindergartens, lacking courage or else they would beat the shit out of immigrant rapists".
Basically in Eastern Europe German is the second most powerful signal after American, and since people tend to worship power it works...
Could very well be true. But it leaves open the curious question what on earth I would be looking for in the ex-eastern block ;)
Cheap talent mainly.
Same in my country. And my reason is pretty similar -- I've had people from my own country who constantly mispronounce my name, and I don't even want to think how badly foreign people would distort it, as I plan to emigrate. (Also I don't find it in the least bit euphonic, but that's not a reason I would ever admit to on a state form.)
But I gather from your comment that compatibility with foreign languages / pronunciations is not considered an acceptable reason in countries that have stricter laws concerning name change?
Also, that if you have dual citizenship and one of your countries allows you a name change, the other country is obliged to recognize the name change? Is that right?
What's supposed to oblige the country?
In general it probably gives you a decent reason to request a name change in the other country as well. If you however search an unreasonable name you might still get denied.
I don't know, I was asking whether I had understood the parent comment right. I don't know much about name change legislation, and would like to find out more.
I was thinking along the lines of, well, it's not as if any given country "owns" somebody's name -- it's a property of the person, right? As in, you can't have one legal name in one country and another in some other country. That's what common sense tells me at least. But then again I've been surprised by law on several occasions in the past, to say the least...
I know it's at least possible to have variant names; I am legally registered in different countries by parallell names analogous to "Venice" and "Venezia".
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Nope. Your relationship to your name doesn't fit most of the bundle of rights that the word "property" implies.
Of course you can. Why not? Consider immigrants who acquired a new citizenship but did not renounce their old one -- the names on their two sets of papers do not have to be identical.
That's a bad train of thought. You have to think about the institutions involved. There are certain things that international law guarantees to you, that your country is obliged to provide to you.
Things like "Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law." "Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him."
In this case also important: "(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality."
You don't really have an inane right for two nationalities. If a country allows you dual citizenship it's a nice thing to do. As such I wouldn't expect naming right to arise as a consequence.
That's certainly not the case.
If I remember right you can't have the same legal name in South Korea as in Germany or New York.
In South Korea your name needs to be written in Hangul and the legal documents about you are addressed to the name in Hangul. In Germany your name has to be in the standard Latin alphabet (I don't know how much accents it allows). Quick Googling suggests that the case for China is similar. You get to choose between Simplified characters or Traditional Chinese ones.
No, there are certain things that international law says are guaranteed to you, that international law says your country is obliged to provide to you.
You need the additional premise "if international law says a country is obliged to provide something, then that country is obliged to provide it". I see no reason to believe that premise. It doesn't seem to be true either as a statement about how countries should behave or about how countries actually behave.
Gee. Law's weirder than I thought. But these facts open up some promising possibilities, now that I think about it... after all it's the munchkin ideas thread. Thanks to everybody for clearing this up for me, and thanks to whatever higher power is least astronomically unlikely to exist for not giving me the suicidal idea to pursue law as a profession.
A double twist: there are German names that look like English names but are actually German names. Michael, Paul.
Just wondering: what would Germans associate with the name Helga for women? To me it sounds Viking-awesome (heiligr).
If you want to name your kids in a way that is compatible without pronounciation issues in the larger Central European area, from Denmark to Hungary or Serbia, there are unfortunately not so many choices. For boys, Robert, Norbert, Henrik and of course the ubiquitous Peter. For girls, Helga, maybe Judit, Eva, Anna, For example something like Catherine is not a very good idea because it is written different in every language, from Katalin to Yekaterina. Anna has only one mutant forms, Anne in English, otherwise quite stable. For boys the stablest name is Norbert it either doesn't exist in a language or if it does it is written and pronounce exactly the same.
However I think people are becoming more "creative" and less compatibility-oriented with names... I know a German couple living in London who have a son called Yuriy. Reason? Gagarin. "We wanted someone who goes up". Okay...
In general people in the creative class do so. It's not the names the average banker, doctor or judge gives their child.