Thanks Eric for your comment. However, I am a bit unsure what you mean by the last sentence. Do you mean all names are created based on personality and character traits? : )

I realized that even in immigrating to America from Taiwan, if I had kept to my translated Chinese name (Ku Kuo-Han), I would still only be recognized as Kuo, a third of what I would be in Chinese. For example, in Chinese, we call George Washington by his last name, Washington or Hua Shun-Dun. Now if Hua Shun-Dun were to immigrate to America, Hua would turn into his last name and we would probably call him Shun or maybe Shawn, out of convenience.

I’ve been learning American Sign Language and deaf people have sign names that are given to them based on personality and character traits. It’s a big part of their identity and who they are. I don’t see how names in other languages are any different.

“Nothing much has happened, except a small, seismic mental shift. The twist in our names takes them a tiny distance from us — but it’s a gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters. Our Polish names didn’t refer to us; they were as surely us as our eyes or hands. These new appellations, which we ourselves can’t yet pronounce, are not us. They are identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself… [They] make us strangers to ourselves.”

More than anything else in my move, I found this change of name to be most jolting, even though it was only the spelling, and only on official forms. It felt as if someone had taken away a piece of my identity. It also reminded me of a passage in Eva Hoffman’s “Lost in Translation” in which she speaks very eloquently about the same sense of loss she encountered when her name was altered, immigrating from Poland to Canada.

In Esperanto, there are no silent letters and no letter “y” so people would not know how to say my name. They would pronounce Penelope nearly right except that the emphasis n Esperanto is always on the second last syllable, which would be a bit odd. The most-proper way to Esperantize my name is to use the affix -nyo to make a clearly feminine diminutive (Penjo, which sounds like “Penyo”) but I usually just use Peni, which sounds right and means “to try”, which kind of suits me!
Asian Esperanto-speakers often choose words they find attractive as easily-remembered names. Often males choose nouns (like Ĉielo=Sky) and females choose adjectives (like Natura=Nature) and this allows easy identification of gender by the last letter being o or a. It is a useful consideration that should be more widely used, I think.

Very interesting post. Names are very important as people read loads of things in the name: religious leaning in particular which may or may not be true. My full name is Muhammad Ali Khan. My international friends call me Khan, my friends in Pakistan mostly address me by Ali whereas my professional colleagues and family members especially elders call me Muhammad Ali.

All three i.e Khan, Ali and Muhammad Ali triggered a different identity in me, I suppose. I resisted MAK consciously given by my colleagues in UK however, few very close friends of mine have started calling me Khan Sebba ( Sebba is the surname of my supervisor). I seemed to have liked it because I admire my supervisor a lot. I sometime think I am all: Khan, Ali, Muhammad Ali and Khan Sebba. What I like most about the last name is the fact that it breaks the traditional category between Muslim and Jews. Combination of both.

Khan

After elementary school and high school and in advance of post-secondary studies, I thought it would be an opportune time to revert to my birth name. Over the years, I observed it was typically newcomers from Asia, Southeast Asia in particular, who sought to adopt an English alias while immigrants from other parts…ran out of space, continue reading at ffeimo.tumblr.com .