LECTURE AUDIOSCRIPTS UNIT 1 Whats in a Name? TEACHER: Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Felipe, Monica, Theo, and I cant remember your name. STUDENT 1: Patricia. TEACHER: Patricia, right, Patricia. Those are all beautiful names, and thats our topic today-names. Names are a culture universal. This means everyone uses names. A persons name can tell us a bit about a persons family. Today, well begin by looking at first names and how people choose names for their children. And then well talk about family names, and look at the different categories of family names. Although the scope of the lecture today is English-language names, we can use the same approach, you know, to look at names from any culture. Lets take a brief look at first, or given names. There are several ways parents choose the first name for their child. The first way is by family history. Parents may choose a name because it is passed from generation to generation; for example, the first born son might be named after his father or grandfather. Although family names are also passed to daughters, it is usually as a middle name. Adding junior or the second for example, William Parker the seconds only done with boys, not with girls names. The second way parents choose a name is after a family member or friend who has died recently, or after someone they admire, like a well-known leader or a famous musician. Although most English first names mean something, for example, Richard means powerful and “Ann means grace, nowadays meaning is not the main reason people select their babys name. The third way is to provide a push for the child. Parents want to choose a name that sounds very successful. A strong name might help them in the business world, for example. Or they might choose a name that works for either gender, like Taylor or Terry. So, given these three methods, what is the most common way parents choose a name? Many parents choose a name simply because they like it, or because its fashionable or classic. Fashions in names change just as they do in clothes. One hundred years ago, many names came from the Bible names such as Daniel, and Anna, and Hannah and Matthew. Then fifty years ago, Biblical names went out of fashion. Nowadays, names from the Bible are becoming popular again. Similarly, parents often choose classic names, names that were popular in 1900, 1950, and are still popular now. Classic names for boys include Thomas, David, Robert, and Michael. And for girls: Anna, Elizabeth, Emily, and Katherine, just to name a few. Theyre classic. They never go out of style. Lets look at the origin of last names, also called family names or surnames. Researchers have studied thousands of last names, and theyve divided them into four categories. The categories are: place names, patronymics, added names, and occupational names. A recent survey showed that of the 7,000 most popular names in the United States today, 43 percent were place names, 32 percent were patronymics, 15 percent were occupational names, and 9 percent were added names. The first category is place names. Place names usually identified where a person lived or worked. Someone named John Hill lived near a hill, for example, and the Rivers family lived near a river. If you hear the name Emma Bridges, what image do you see? Do you see a family that lives near a bridge? If you do, you get the idea. The second category is patronymics. Thats P-A-T-R-O-N-Y-M-I-C-S. A patronymic is the fathers name, plus an ending like S-E-N or S-O-N. The ending means that a child, a boy, is the son of his father. The names Robertson, Petersen, and Wilson are patronymics. Robertson is son of Robert, Petersen is son of Peter, and so on. The third category is added names. Linguists sometimes call this category nicknames, but when most of us hear the word nickname, we think of a special name a friend or a parent might use. The word nickname is actually an old English word that means an additional name, an added name. So Ill use the term added name. This category of last names is fun because the names usually described a person. Reed, Baldwin, and Biggs are examples. Reed was from red for red hair. Baldwin was someone who was bald, someone who had little or no hair. And Biggs. STUDENT 2: Someone big? TEACHER: Yeah, someone big, right. Now, if we look around the room, we could probably come up with some new last names, like, uh. Curly or Strong. Now, the fourth category is occupational names. The origin of the family name was the persons occupation. The most common examples of occupational names still used today are Baker (someone who bakes bread). Tailor (someone who sews clothes). Miller (someone who makes flour for bread), and Smith. . . . Now, Smith is actually the most common name in the western English-speaking world. The name comes from an Old English word, smite, thats S-M-I-T-E, which means to hit or stri