Ceci n'est pas une endive - Tag - name

Choosing a Name: The Last Name

notafish — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:40:00 +0100

Choisir un nom de famille pour son enfant. Il fut un temps où la chose était plutôt simple, mais la loi et les mouvements migratoires font de ce qui pourrait être une aventure simple un parcours du combattant. Entre le double nom et les doubles tirets, donner un nom de famille à notre fille aura été une vraie gageure.

Now, the first part of this was a long time ago. It was about the First Name. Here comes the story of the Last Name, prompted by the fact that I got my daughter's German passport a few weeks ago.

You'd think that having chosen the first name, we'd be done. But no. Even the last name is a culturally tainted venture, which bears in itself much more trouble than one would think, and not only cultural trouble.

Most of our societies are rather patriarcal. You get the name of your father. Even the ones that sometimes think themselves much more open and allow women to keep their names really are patriarchal. Take Portugal, which collates both the father's and the mother's name in a unique new name. This ends up in children having different names from that of their parents. Which isn't understood by French authorities, at least a few years back, who had no idea how to take care of my French cousin marrying a Portuguese man and which name was really his (different from both of his parents).

In Germany, you're only allowed to give the name of the father or the name of the mother. Not both. Fortunately, Germany recognizes foreign laws when it comes to names. In France, the law changed with a text passed in 2002 (that came into force in 2005) which basically opens a whole new realm of possibilities for last name transmission. Following French law, you can now give to your children either your name, that of your partner, or both together (in both the order you--him or him--you). The catch is the double hyphen that comes into play. Yes, you read that well, a double hyphen.

Now, it seems that French law requires this double hyphen ^[1] if both parents' names are chosen. It will allow the kid to drop one or the other name when they marry or have kids (for more information, see here, in French).

When we declared our daughter, we asked for the double hyphen. No need to say that the German authorities were a little puzzled about this rather freaky way of writing a name (an accent on my last name was already quite a challenge). But the German Ministry of the Interior had issued a text about that French specificity, which allowed us to get that straightened out. Our daughter's birth certificate displays the double-hyphen. And so does her German passport, which is quite a victory, since when I went to fill out the papers for her to have a passport, the woman at the desk did make it very clear that although she would try and see what she could do concerning my accent (on which I was very set), there was no way she could enter a double-hyphen in the system. We have indeed signed a disclaimer when we registered our kid that said we were aware of the fact that this funky double-hyphen might not be reproduced on official papers so I was prepared. And amazed when I saw that the passport bore both hyphens.

I am kind of looking forward how this name pattern plays out in the future. I am happy to have been able to give my name to my daughter, I am not sure she'll find that so cool when it comes to filling out administrative papers... Time will tell.

Notes

[1] I have come across a quick note which seems to say that this is not the case anymore... go figure. [edit] see here this relatively short ticker which confirms this, and this article pointed out by keriluamox in the comments

The Bowl Theory

notafish — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:32:00 +0200

I'm being lazy today, and I am just translating an article I wrote quite some time ago on my other (dead) blog, which explores the way words are interpreted with a cultural filter.

The full title for this post was The Bowl Theory, or The Dictionary Has its Reasons Which Reason Does Not Know ^[1]

Let us take the French word "bol". If you flip through (even virtually) a bunch of dictionaries, you will find the following definitions:

In French :

BOL, subst. masc.
A. 1. Pièce de vaisselle de forme généralement hémisphérique servant à prendre certaines boissons
A piece of china generaly of a hemispheric shape, used to take in some beverages.

In English :

bowl –noun
1.a rather deep, round dish or basin, used chiefly for holding liquids, food, etc.

In German, it's already a bit more complicated. Leo translates bol by Schale which my dictionary ^[2] describes in the following terms:

Schale -n
1 - eine relativ flache Schüssel
''a relatively flat "Schüssel"^[3]
2 - Tasse
A cup

Which brings us back to the definition of Schüssel, still in that Langenscheidts dictionary

Schüssel -n
1 - ein tiefes, rundes Gefäß, das oben offen ist und in dem man Speisen auf dem Tisch stellt.
A deep and round recipient, often open at the top, which is used to serve food on the table (see image provided).

So. If you stop at the base definition of the word bol, you end up on roughly the same thing. A round and hollow utensil. So far, so good. However, it becomes complicated when you start using the word in every day life.

Imagine the simple sentence :

Tous les matins, je prends un bol de chocolat. (Every morning, I take a bowl of chocolate).

For a French person, no problem, it's a rather logical use of the word bol. It is even, one could say, the primary use of the word bol. In France, you drink a bow of coffee, or a bowl of tea, preferably with a croissant in the morning. Occasionally you have a bowl of soup, that works too.

Except that when you tell an English speaker I'm drinking a bowl of chocolate., they're bound to look at you funny. Because bowl in English speaking countries is more often used for soup than it os for coffee. For coffee at breakfast, you have cups or mugs, not bowls.

Let me not even speak about the Germans, which only know the Tasse (cup) for chocolate and have only heard about Schale or Schüssel in relation with fruits, icecream or even salad. Not to mention that they probably have never seen a bol as I know it.

All of this to illustrate how much culture influences language and the difficulty that you may face trying to translate a word without explaining the context. Even words that we might use on an every day basis carry way much more history and cultural influences than you'd think. I can't imagine what the British would do if I asked them for a bowl of tea, or the Germans if I asked for a bowl of coffee...

I'd be interested though, what the meaning of bol is in other languages. Are there more meanings of the word out there?

Notes

[1] This is actually a pun on a French phrase: "Le coeur a sa raison que la raison ne connaît pas" which I might explain one day or another.

[2] Langenscheidts Großwörterbuch - Deutsch als Fremdschprache (German as a foreign language)

[3] Dictionaries make a point of referring to an equivalent object to explain a word. If you don't know the definition of said object, you're dead. When of course said object does not refer in turn to the word you were looking for in the first place...

Choosing a Name: The First Name

notafish — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:54:00 +0200

I never got around to telling the story of our daughter's name. It is, indeed, one heck of a story, which starts even before she was born. You have to remember that she has a German father and a French mother. This led, before her birth, to endless dicussions about what names are suitable in both languages. We had a few criteria we tried to respect when choosing her first name.

The first criterion was pronunciation. We wanted to make sure that the name would not vary to much from one language to the other. This rules out all the names having very specific pronuciations, such as names starting with "J" for example, which the Germans make soft (as in yum) or "H", which the French tend to forget to pronounce altogether (Hans is "Ans" in French, and "Hans" in German).

Pronunciation is one thing, but spelling is another, which is actually related. We couldn't take a name that people couldn't read in one or the other language. This ruled out my favorite "Benoît" (Ben-o-wha in French, Ben-o-it for the Germans) and names with French nasals or specific French spellings (Agnès is read A-ni-es in French, Ag-ness in German, I find on nice, the other one not so).

Another criterion was ambiguity. Some names are very easily recognizable as female or male, others are just extremely ambiguious in one language, when they are not in the other. Again, Delphine is very French, but never leads to confusion about the gender. Arne, on the other end, written or spoken, for people who are neither Swedish, nor Northern Germans, is often mistaken for a woman's name. So we needed a name that would be very clear.

And finally of course, a name we both liked. Which is, as we found out, probably the hardest thing of all. Not som much because we have different tastes, but because cultural differences kick in very fast. The German sounding names I liked were either terrible, out of fashion, too fashionable or plainly unheard of, the French sounding name Arne liked were either terrible, out of fashion, too fashionable or plainly unheard of. Funny to see how much culture the name carries.

Well, we settled for the first name Emma, classic, simple, read and pronounced in most languages in exactly the same manner, hardly ambiguous, and which we both liked. It took us around nine months... And then came the last name. But this will do for another post.