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Article: ... or natural world symbolism?(how humans pick personal names)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- April 12, 1997
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince can well attest, every society has rules when it comes to picking personal names. Anthropologist Ben G. Blount of the University of Georgia in Athens is looking into what those rules are and how much the natural world influences personal names across different groups. The inquiry is a spin-off of cross-cultural research into the universal ways people name living things (SN: 11/16/96, p. 308).
Blount began with an analysis of English, in which personal names have been well cataloged but, it turns out, hardly inspired by nature. Only 202 of the 4,828 names in the 1990 A Dictionary of First Names (Patrick Hanks and Flavia ...