(Don’t share your real name, obviously)
Okay so, wall of text warning:
My legal name is a Chinese name, three characters.
Family name (one character) is said/written first, then the given name (two characters for me… and I assume for most people).
Its a very interesting name, and overall naming system, each character has meaning, well other than the family name which I don’t think it really means anything.
My older brother’s first character is the same as mine, only the second character is different. (It’s [Family Name] + [Character A] + [Character B], Character A is the same.)
I have never met anyone with my exact name, well to be fair, being in the US made those odds even rarer. I did meet someone with the same family name in a US school, and they also had the same DoB as me, which was very weird coincidence.
But my name is so rare in the US, if it ever got leaked, that’s practically a unique identifier.
When I look at my name, idk I kinda feel a sense of antiquity. I have a genology book and the pages are falling apart, I had to scan it and made a .pdf from it. I mean those names are from hundred of years ago, I guess they had to keep remaking/rewriting those books because I doubt something from pre-1800s would’ve survived till now. It makes modern tech feel so futuristic when I think about it, I mean, that geneology book could potentially live om forever, without any deterioation unlike a book.
But simultaneously, when I look at my name, it kinda reminds me of my parent’s emotional abusive and neglectful behaviors. Ugh, idk, feels so conflicted about it. I really wanna ask questions about the past, but we aren’t really on speaking-terms anymore.
When people ask my name, it’s always just so awkward, since… the pronounciation is totally foreign to them. I kinda wanted to choose an English name for simplicity here in the US, but like… I didn’t pick one when I was younger and I think its kinda too late to use one now. Idk what name to even choose.
First name is ultimately derived from Hebrew, it’s one of the most common names in the English-speaking world, and variations of it are similarly popular in basically every place where Abrahamic religious have a foothold.
It’s fine. I’ve met plenty of people with my name, I don’t particularly like or dislike it, it is just my name.
My last name is kind of interesting. It’s ultimately of Italian origin, but sometime after arriving in America someone basically decided that it sounded too Italian, dropped the vowel at the end, swapped out about half of the remaining letters, and created a new name that kind of sounds similar to the original.
Looking at it, you’d probably never peg it as an Italian name. Sometimes people look at it and try to pronounce it as if it were French, but that’s not how we pronounce it.
I rather like my last name. I probably use it more than my first. It’s got a nice ring to it, it’s unique, there’s rarely going to be anyone else around with the same name to avoid confusion, it’s got some fun family history to it, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t exist anywhere in the world outside of my family.
Unfortunately, my family is pretty uncreative with male names, if you look at the top 100 names in the US from the last 100 years, my entire family tree can basically be found in the top 10 or 20. I’m aware of at least one other person with the same first and last name as me and there’s probably a good handful more, and there’s a solid chance they have the same middle name as me too.
I rarely see the extended family so not a huge deal.