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The Names We Give
| Article
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20185 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,717 Words |
| Author
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Roger Welsch
Roger Welsch is a contributing editor to The World & I. |
Navajo is a language of verbs. The tongue is full of verbs, it's all about verbs. In Navajo everything is fluid, moving, doing, acting, changing. Lakota is a language of adjectives. In it we hear attributes without even knowing the substance. The Lakota word for God is Wakonda, meaning "great, mysterious . . ." Don't bother to ask "Great, mysterious what" That's not the way Lakota works.
English, on the other hand, is a language of nouns. Names. We name everything. Everything. Names, names, names. "What is this thing?" we ask, not "What is this thing like?" or "How does this object behave?" First of all, above all, we want to know its name. Kevin Costner's hero in the movie Dances with Wolves begins his exploration of the Lakota language by wanting to know the name of that beast we call a buffalo (and others call bison), and the Lakota, of course, consider him mad.
Many of our nouns (the word comes from the Latin nomen, for name) are often arbitrary and conventional. Mark Twain liked to mock the popular notion that our language is logical while all others are little more than gibberish by depicting Adam and Eve wrestling with the problem of assigning English nouns to everything. Adam, he would say, named the giraffe "giraffe" because it looks like a giraffe. We call a giraffe a giraffe, in short, because we call it a giraffe. It is our traditional label for that particular creature. Not everyone's. Just ours. In our society we all understand that traditional name, and in language, that's what counts.
Germans call what we call a tree a Baum. That sounds natural enough to them. The French call it arbre. That botanical organism answers equally well to all its thousands of names around the linguistic world. To everyone it looks equally like a "tree," "Baum," or "arbre."
The way in which we name ourselves--or, more precisely, the ways in which we name our children (or our parents named us) and what those names mean to us and others--is not a simple matter. Unlike plain old nouns, our proper nouns are a good deal more than arbitrary convention.
Our family names are often not much than vestigial, like our appendix. Their historical meanings are interesting but no longer of any real importance to most of us unless, for example, you are of Iraqi descent and suddenly find your nation of residence at war with your country of heritage. Then your proud name can become a
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