21
Jun
How to Name a Child (Photo from www.flickr.com By elladog)
In France, I discovered that the process of naming a child can be a cultural adventure.
Claudine Brillant and her husband live in a small village outside of Chartres. They decided to find a name for their child by pulling out a calendar. French calendars list names of Catholic saints and their commemorative dates.
Starting with the month of January, Claudine ran her finger down the days, looking for a name. She got to Sainte Sandrine; she looked at her husband, who shook his head. With a name like Sandrine, kids at school might tease her and call her Sardine. They finally settled on the name Sophie from Sainte Sophie found on May 25.
In Tours, central France, a young couple went cruising through old cemeteries to look for not-so-common names for their unborn child. They had a baby a few weeks ago and named her, Adelaïde.
In my family we don’t bother being creative with our name search; we honor an ancestor by naming the child after him. It keeps things simple.
“There is a mistake here. My Mom is not that old!” exclaimed my nephew, who is browsing through our family tree on my iPad.
I looked over his shoulder and checked to see.
“That’s not your Mom; it’s your great-aunt,” I replied.
The two women have the same name, Mulanga, but were born 20 years apart. Mind you, these are first names. Family names do not exist traditionally in Luba culture.
In my family, name repetition is rampant. My grandmother Mbuyi already has 7 descendants named after her; I have so many cousins named Mbuyi, including my oldest sister.
But you don’t have to follow the Luba tradition to find a name for a child. If you open old literature books, you might find interesting names like the Gaulish name, Wouivre, which means snake or a river that snakes through the landscape.