I like names, but this is a very euro-centric. My ideal "let's talk about names" article would cover a lot more different societies and be a bit more universa

I like names, but this is a very euro-centric. My ideal "let's talk about names" article would cover a lot more different societies and be a bit more universal in its outlook. There's a world of fun stuff with names in Arabic or Japanese, and how various states try to control what people name their kids. (Saying this, I understand it's a bit shallow to react primarily to an article's title). >Moreover, at birth human infants are unable to appropriate names for themselves, consequently, another older person must confer a birth name. There are groups that don't name babies at or near birth (e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/parents-in-a-remote-amazon-village-barely-talk-to-their-babies-mdash-and-the-kids-are-fine/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/parents-in-a-remo... leave it for a year, and I can't find a citation but I think I recall some other groups pushing naming even further). >the nomen, which was a hereditary name (or surname) identifying a person as a member of a distinct gens, i.e., family, tribe, or clan, which constituted an extended Roman family, all members of which shared the same nomen and claimed descent from a common ancestor. As an aside, if a roman slave was freed, they (at least in some periods) took the praenomen and nomen of their former master. (cf https://latininscriptions.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/resources/resources/AshLI-RomanNamesWORKSHEET3-FreedmenandFreedwomen.pdf https://latininscriptions.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/resources/resource... . this article also has some details: https://carolashby.com/roman-names/ https://carolashby.com/roman-names/). Reading the article makes me really want someone to write a "Naming Systems Very Different from Ours" series of articles along the lines of the classic "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours" [ http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo... ].