by: Matthew Sutherland
A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches Proverbs 22 1
WHEN I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of the first cultural differences to strike me was names. The subject has provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since.
The first unusual thing from an English perspective is that everyone here has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom, we have nicknames in kindergarten but when we move into adulthood we tend I am glad to say to lose them.
The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as overbearingly cutesy for anyone over about five. Fifty five year olds colleague put it Where I come from a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy would be beaten to death at school by pre adolescent bullies and never make it to adulthood. So probably would girls with names like Babes, Lovely Precious, Peachy, or Apples Yuk ech ech.
Here however no one bats an eyelid. Then I noticed how many people have what I have come to call door bell names. These are nicknames that sound like well doorbells. There are millions of them Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of the more common. They can be and frequently are used in even more door bell like combinations such as BingBong, DingDong, TingTing, and so on.
Even one of our senators has a son named Ping. None of these doorbell names exist where I come from and hence sound unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear
Someone once told me that one of the Bings when asked why he was called Bing replied because my brother is called Bong. Faultless logic. Dong of course is a particularly funny one for me as where I come from dong is a slang word for well perhaps talong is the best Tagalog equivalent.
Repeating names was another novelty to me having never before encountered people with names like LenLen, LetLet, MaiMai, TingTing, or Ning-Ning. The secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one, LeckLeck. Such names are then frequently further refined by using the squared symbol as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while
Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming their children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with the same letter as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy
More imaginative parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of assonance or rhyme, as in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy. Notice the names get worse the more kids there are best to be born early or you could end up being a Baboy
Even better, parents can create whole families of say desserts. Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie, or flowers Rose, Daffodil, Tulip. The main advantage of such combinations is that they look great painted across your trunk if you’re a cab driver. That’s another thing I’d never seen before coming to Manila. Taxis with the driver’s kids names on the trunk.
Another whole eye opening field for the foreign visitor is the phenomenon of the composite name. This includes names like Jejomar for Jesus Joseph and Mary, and the remarkable Luzviminda for Luzon Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not. That’s a bit like me being called something like Engscowani for England Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland.
Between you and me Im glad Im not.
And how could I forget to mention the fabulous concept of the randomly inserted letter H. Quite what this device is supposed to achieve I have not yet figured out but I think it is designed to give a touch of class to an otherwise only averagely weird name. It results in creations like Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, Bhong, and Jhimmy Or how about JhunJhun, Jhun2.
How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with names like John Smith. How wonderful to come from a country where imagination and exoticism rule the world of names.
Even the towns here have weird names. My favorite is the unbelievably named town of Sexmoan ironically close to Olongapo Where else in the world could that really be true. Where else in the world could the head of the Church really be called Cardinal Sin Where else but the Philippines.
Source:
http://www.onlyinthephilippines.com/main/category/culture/Linkback:
https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=24147.0
