23. May 16th '2021
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2.
I was recently tagged in an interesting Twitter thread on names, surnames etc when I remembered Shakespeare’s famous lines which has always struck me as a testament to the playwright’s genius. On the face of it, the line assertion is manifestly untrue. Our names do make a difference—as demonstrated by a paper by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan titled, "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination"; but Shakespeare wasn’t making a commentary on hiring practises. Rather, he was speaking to the irrational frenzies proffered by love, which can transcend awkward names and murderous familial rivalries. But names and naming conventions have often offered up various kinds of intellectual puzzles—perhaps most technically interesting of them is the Bienayme-Galton-Watson stochastic process that was born out questions regarding the vanishing of family names in 19th century, which is used in percolation theory and so on. Elsewhere, G. V. Desani famously and playfully translated Mahatma Gandhi's name: Action-Slave Fascination-Moon Grocer to tell us—offering a gloss on that name Salman Rushdie notes: “He was as rich and devious a figure as that glorious name suggests.” What then follows here are a few sketches of ideas on names and naming conventions, which might be worth thinking more.
One of the richest man in the world, according to Forbes, is Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud—a name which reads: Alwaleed son of Talal who is the son of Abdul Aziz who belongs to the Saud clan. In contrast, in the Anglo-Saxon world even among the most powerful and rich, we find typically today names that are truncations of latinate derivations, eg., Bill Gates. In its most distilled version, names in the English speaking world have progressively attenuated from some original meaningfulness. In the movie ‘Pulp Fiction’, in one of the scenes where Bruce Willis' character kills a boxer in a knockout game—a taxi driver, named Esmeralda, makes small talk with him and asks, "what is your name". Willis grunts and says, "Butch". She retorts somewhat disinterestedly, "What does it mean?" With his trademark smirk Willis replies, "Our names don't mean shit these days." While that maybe debatable, we do have instances where the entrepreneur Elon Musk famously named his child, X Æ A-12 — a name that sent many scouring on Google for meaning and pronunciations. To wit, in India, in my parents’ generation, names like Mohanlal, Jawaharlal, Vasanthakumari etc were common, while these days, it seems every second male child born is a Rahul or Raj or Karan, every girl is a Ria or Dia or Piya. Among Muslims of Malabar, whereas the contemporaries of my parents were Abubakr and Pathumma, Sayyidali and Chekkutty, their children and children have all become Rizwan, Mehr, Shahin and so on. Why have naming conventions in India changed—especially in less than two generations?
Casual empiricism tells us that across humanity there is a wide variation in how individuals are identified. That is, there is a question of why do certain cohorts have longer names than others. Or, are names solely markers that tie across generations as in Alwaleed's case; and if so, why did that practice die out say in the West? More ‘structural’ questions are:
Are naming conventions governed by some strategies that respond to underlying socio-economic conditions?
Empirically, can variation in naming strategies be decomposed into within group and between group variations.
Consider the following conjectures:
In preliterate societies, where population is typically low and population mobility is limited, names typically has little information in terms of network hierarchy. Everybody knows everybody and the marginal cost of additional names is high. As population sizes increase, along with it as specialization and endogamous rules of marriage proliferate, there is the emergence of a real and liturgical hierarchy. In such societies, there continues to be a great premium on claiming relationship with the ostensible elite few. Names come to then include markers that signals where in the pecking order individual belongs to.
However, if a name is considered as a technology to record the past; a more specific and elaborate name is typically more costly for an individual who belongs to the group that was originally in the low-wealth (thus low-human capital) group in the agricultural regime. If wealth, or access to wealth is proxied by name size, then a caste-intensive society like India it is perhaps not surprising that in equilibrium -- ‘high’ caste individuals typically have longer and more descriptive names. And, in equilibrium, those with little social capital will adopt names that willingly obscure their relationships in an hierarchical network. With the rise of democracy however, names that exclusively mark one’s ‘elite’ status come with a disadvantage and thus, in equilibrium, we should see more of those who were previously the elite now adopt new strategies of self-identification—be it a via patronymic, a village name, or some occupation sans political import.
In contrast, for a society that also has a long continuous historical tradition; but has not developed a critical agriculture induced size or were in servile status —names as identification mechanisms over generations serve little purpose. In my childhood, I remember itinerant men and women who worked as seasonal laborer—they were one level above bonded labor—in my grandmother’s home, who were simply called ‘andan’, ‘neeli’, ‘chaami’ and so on—and they lived and died with this monosyllabic descriptors as their sole registers in this world. But their children have gone onto become ‘Ramakrishnan’, ‘Muralidharan’ and so on—that this happened as India democratized, subaltern political consciousness rose to fore, and education increased is perhaps no coincidence, along with what one could call ‘Sanskritization via nomenclature’.
Consider, alternatively a situation where tracking an individual involves a cost to the searcher and all individuals are symmetrical and identical on all dimensions other than their names. This cost particularly rises as the political entity called the State begins to tax more methodically, but is hampered by two key factors: mobility of population and specialization. The identification strategy in equilibrium is to adopt longer names that distinguishes them either on basis of family, guild or employment based markers—one that precisely marks one for the taxes owed. Not surprisingly, Francis 1 (1494-1547), the king of France issued royal orders that all his subjects were to take up a surname. Similarly, Henry VIII issued imperial edicts to the same effect. What is perhaps not surprising, is that the two were contemporaries and both France and England were at comparable stages of economic development.
But names also act as signaling mechanisms. In societies where warfare is incessant between two literate, agrarian and religiously heterogeneous societies; names become a memory device which prevents oneself from homogenization. In Spain, where the Muslims and Spaniards jostled and lineages were hard to discern—and names now included ‘multiple surnames' showing father, mother, title, and place of origin’. As Jacques Barzun noted, consider the name: Maria Teresa Velez del Hoyo y Sotomayor. Across the world, in Joseon era South Korea, when commoners were forced to have names—they chose the names of their elite clans, ‘Kim’, ‘Park’, ‘Lee’ and so on. In neighboring China, the naming conventions get progressively complex due to the elaborate admixture of sound-syllable-social rank-occupation. This passage is instructive, ‘Most Chinese surnames (xing) consist of only a single syllable (e.g., Wang, Zhang), but 2-syllable surnames are also found (e.g., Sima, Ouyang). The surname precedes the personal name (ming), which will consist of one or two syllables. On reaching adulthood, a man also may take a style name (zi). Many literati also use one or more hao (artist’s name, pseudonym), which in many cases has a connection to the name of their study or garden; they may also assume religious names. Chinese women may also adopt a hao alongside their personal name. In many contexts, both before and after marriage, women are designated only by their surname (e.g., Li Shi, the woman surnamed Li: Miss Li, Madam Li, Lady Li). Manchus have a clan name (e.g., Gioro); lineages within clans are distinguished by prefixing a second term to the first (e.g., Aisin Gioro). Manchu men may have names taken from a wide range of words (e.g., Dorgon, means badger) and are designated by their personal name without the use of their clan or lineage name. After 1644, once the Manchus moved their capital to Beijing, they increasingly came to use names made up of auspicious Chinese characters, style names and hao.’
When an individual's talent are an outlier on one dimension; like Leonardo or Dante or Gretzky a single name suffices to transmit relevant information efficiently through a society's cultural meme. Analogous, but motivated differently, if the technology to identify individuals, despite mobility and burgeoning populations, improves, one should assume that name lengths no longer reflect their utility as markers and will inevitably shrink. Amid this historically inflected discussion, I haven’t discussed the rise of pseudonymous profile—where, as Balaji Srinivasan writes, our names become like our social security numbers. To be used sparingly, even rarely. For all else, we identify ourselves through very avatars or profiles. This, of course, raises the question of how do we port reputation from platform to another if we use pseudonymous profiles. Would Romeo, who was Romeo to Juliet in real life, be the same if he were montague11 on Twitter? Shakespeare says, to Juliet who was in love, the platform wouldn’t matter. The rest of us, who are not in love with Romeo, might disagree. He’s just an attention seek troll we might (perhaps unfairly) conclude. And block him.