I had an interesting idea today, which somehow transformed into a rather lengthy thought train, which, in turn, pushed me to browse quite a bit of Wikipedia, and, finally, to write this blog post. It’s just one of those things that I spent some time thinking about which has no practical purpose rather then annoy and entertain readers of this blog and confusing Google into bringing in more people, searching for rather random things.
I started off with names and naming conventions. People names, to be more precise, and how different cultures approached the naming. Remember, those Arabic names that trace the ancestry of a person using the “ibn” word, which means the “son of”. Abdul ibn Hasan ibn Abdurahman ibn Foo ibn Blah ibn .. it can go for ever. No, remember those surnames based on the profession of a person, used by many cultures. Baker, Fisher, Hunter, Miller, Parker, and so on.
Wouldn’t it be fun to see these two paradigms mixed up. We’d still use “ibn” to indicate the “son of” part. But instead of meaningless father’s name we’d use father’s profession. In conjunction with the regular first name and last name that could give some really awesome names. For example, my son could have been Maxim ibn Programmer ibn Engineer ibn Projectionist Mamchenkov. How cool is that? For a change, most people’s full names would be interesting. The downside? Those families with the same profession running through generation would be really boring. But they would still have something to feel proud about. John ibn Doctor ibn Doctor ibn Doctor ibn Doctor ibn Doctor Healer. I’d be more than willing to trust my health into his capable hands!
What would your name be like?
