A name (etymology: from OE nama; akin to OHG namo, Latin nomen, nominis, and Greek όνομα, ultimately from PIE: *nomn- [1]) is a label for a human, thing, place, product (as in a brand name) and even an idea or concept, normally used to distinguish one from another. Names can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. A personal name identifies a specific unique and identifiable individual person. The name of a specific entity is sometimes called a proper name (although that term has a philosophical meaning also) and is a proper noun. Other nouns are sometimes, more loosely, called names; an older term for them, now obsolete, is "general name".
The use of personal names is not unique to humans. Dolphins also use symbolic names, as has been shown by recent research.[2] Individual dolphins have individual whistles, to which they will respond even when there is no other information to clarify which dolphin is being referred to.
Naming is the process of assigning a particular word or phrase to a particular object or property. This can be quite deliberate or a natural process that occurs in the flow of life as some phenomenon comes to the attention of the users of a language. Many new words or phrases come into existence during translation as attempts are made to express concepts from one language in another.
Either as a part of the naming process, or later as usage is observed and studied by lexicographers, the word can be defined by a description of the pattern to which it refers.
Besides their grammatical function, names can have additional or pure honorary and memorial values. For example, the posthumous name's primary function is commemorative.
Care must be taken in translation, for there are ways that one language may prefer one type of name over another. For example, there are "merchants' and sailors' terms" for their own convenience: the spellings Leghorn, Genoa, and Rome do not appear on Italian maps. Also, a feudal naming habit is used sometimes in other languages: the French often refer to Aristotle as "le Stagirite" from one spelling of his place of birth. Finally, claims to preference or authority can be refuted: the British did not refer to Louis-Napoleon as Napoleon III during his rule.
Proper names function the same way as common nouns do in many natural languages. Philosophers have thus often treated the two as similar in meaning. In the late nineteenth century, Frege argued that certain puzzling features of both names and nouns could be resolved if we recognized two aspects to the meaning of a name (and, by extension, other nouns): a sense, which is equivalent to some sort of description, and a referent, the thing or things that meet that description. So the sense of dog might be "domestic canine mammal", and the referent would be all the dogs in this world. Proper names would then be special cases of nouns with only one referent: the sense of Aristotle might be, "the author of de Caelo", while its referent would be the one person, Aristotle himself. (See Sense and Reference.)
Bertrand Russell rejected Frege's position, and claimed instead that true names must never be equivalent to a description. However, he conceded that most of the apparent "names" in English really were equivalent to descriptions, specifically to definite descriptions. (These are descriptions which contain the claim that they apply to only one object: see Theory of descriptions.) If there were any real names they probably were more like "this" and "that". This position is perhaps more fairly glossed as the view that there are two different functions nouns can serve: (1) describing (and perhaps indirectly referring); and (2) referring (directly, without description); and that all or almost all English names really do the former. This position came to be known as Descriptivism with respect to singular terms, and was prominent through much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.
In 1970 Saul Kripke gave a series of lectures arguing against Descriptivism, and holding, among other things, that names are rigid designators--expressions that refer to their objects independently of any properties those objects have. Of course, we must often use descriptions to pick out our references—to explain to others which object we are talking about, by reference to some property we both agree it bears; but it does not follow that any of these properties constitute the meaning of the name.
Kripke's work led to the development of various versions of the Causal theory of reference, which in various forms claims that our words mean what they do, not because of descriptions we associate with them, but because of the causal history of our acquisition of that name in our vocabulary.
For Wikipedia's own naming conventions see Wikipedia:Naming conventions
A naming convention is an attempt to systematize names in a field so they unambiguously convey similar information in a similar manner.
Several major naming conventions include:
In computer programming, identifier naming conventions
In computer networking, computer naming schemes
In the sciences, systematic names for a variety of things
In astronomy, planetary nomenclature
In classics, Roman naming conventions
Naming conventions are useful in many aspects of everyday life, enabling the casual user to understand larger structures.
Street names within a city may follow a naming convention; some examples include:
In Manhattan, roads that go across the island (East-West) are called "Streets", while those that run the length of the island (North-South) are called "Avenues". Manhattan streets and avenues are numbered, with "1st Street" being near the southern end of the island, and "219th Street" being near the northern end, while "1st Avenue" is near the eastern edge of the island and "12th Avenue" near the western edge.
In Ontario, numbered concession roads are East-West whereas "lines" are North-South routes.
In San Francisco at least three series of parallel streets are alphabetically named, e.g. Irving, Judah, Kirkham, Lawton, Moraga, Noriega, Ortega, Pacheco, Quintara, Rivera, Santiago, Taraval, Ulloa, Vicente, Wawona.
The same tendency is seen in central Boston, Massachusetts, where Arlington Street is followed by roads to the west running parallel to it and named Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, and Hereford.
In Brampton, Ontario, different sections of town all have streets starting with the same letter and the alphabetical order reflects chronology.
In Phoenix, Arizona, roads east of Central Avenue are termed streets while those west are Avenues.
Large corporate, university, or government campuses may follow a naming convention for rooms within the buildings to help orient tenants and visitors.
Parents may follow a naming convention when selecting names for their children. Some have chosen alphabetical names by birth order. In some East Asian cultures, it is common for one syllable in a two syllable given name to be a generation name which is the same for immediate siblings. In many cultures it is common for the son to be named after the father. In other cultures, the name may include the place of residence. Roman naming convention denotes social rank.
Products may follow a naming convention. Automobiles typically have a binomial name, a "make" (manufacturer) and a "model", in addition to a model year, such as a 2007 Chevrolet Corvette. Sometimes there is a name for the car's "decoration level" or "trim line" as well: e.g., Cadillac Escalade EXT Platinum, after the precious metal. Computers often have increasing numbers in their names to signify the next generation.
Courses at schools typically follow a naming convention: an abbreviation for the subject area and then a number ordered by increasing level of difficulty.
Many numbers (e.g. bank accounts, government IDs, credit cards, etc) are not random but have an internal structure and convention. Virtually all organizations that assign names or numbers will follow some convention in generating these identifiers. Airline flight numbers, Space shuttle flight numbers, even phone numbers all have an internal convention.
Hebrew names are names that have a Hebrew language origin, classically from the Hebrew Bible. They are mostly used by people living in Jewish or Christian parts of the world, but some are also adapted to the Islamic world, particularly if a Hebrew name is mentioned in the Qur'an. A typical Hebrew name can have many different forms, having been adapted to the phonologies of many different languages. An integral facet of the Jewish religion worldwide is to give a Hebrew name to a child that is used religiously throughout his or her lifetime.
Not all Hebrew names are strictly Hebrew in origin; some names may have been borrowed from other languages since ancient times, including from Egyptian, Aramaic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, German, and English.
Hebrew names used by Jews (along with many Hebrew names used in Christendom) often come from the Jewish Tanakh, which contains the Torah: The Five Books of Moses, which are also the first five books in the Christian Old Testament, along with two other collections of books, Nevi'im: The Prophets, and Kethuvim: The Writings.
Many of these names are thought to have been adapted from Hebrew phrases and expressions, bestowing special meaning or the unique circumstances of birth to the one who receives that name. An example of a name with a special personal meaning is יהודה Yəhûḏāh. An example of a name indicating circumstances of birth is ראובן Rəʼûḇēn, which means "Look, a son."
Hebrew devotion to Elohim (God) is often indicated by adding the suffix אל -el/-al, forming names such as מיכאל Michael and גבריאל Gabriel.
Hebrew devotion to YHWH is often indicated by adding an abbreviated form of the Tetragrammaton as a suffix; the most common abbreviations used by Jews are יה -yāh/-iyyāh and יהו -yāhû/-iyyāhû/-ayhû, forming names such as ישׁעיהו Yəšaʻªyāhû, צדקיהו Ṣiḏqiyyāhû and שׂריה Śərāyāh. Most of Christendom uses the shorter suffix preferred in translations of the Bible to European languages, primarily Greek -ιας -ias and English -iah, producing names such as Τωβιας Tōbias and Ιερεμίας Ieremias.
In addition to devotion to Elohim and YHWH, names could also be sentences of praise in their own right. The name טוביהו Ṭôḇiyyāhû means "Good of/is the LORD."
Latin (Latīna, pronounced [laˈtiːna]) is an ancient Indo-European language that was spoken in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. The conquests of Rome spread the language throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe. It existed in two forms: Classical Latin, used in poetry and formal prose, and Vulgar Latin, spoken by the people. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of the Roman Catholic Church Latin became the ecclesiastical language of the Roman Catholic Church and the lingua franca of educated classes in the West.
After having lasted 2,200 years, Latin began a slow decline around the 1600s. But Vulgar Latin was preserved: it split into several regional dialects, which by the 800s had become the ancestors of today's Romance languages. English, though originating as a Germanic language, derives 60% of its words from Latin,[1] largely by way of French, but partly through direct borrowings made especially during the 1600s in England.
Latin lives on in the form of Ecclesiastical Latin spoken in the Roman Catholic Church. Latin vocabulary is also still used in science, academia, and law. Classical Latin, the literary language of the late Republic and early Empire, is still taught in many primary, grammar, and secondary schools, often combined with Greek in the study of Classics, though its role has diminished since the early 20th century. The Latin alphabet, together with its modern variants such as the English and French alphabets, is the most widely used alphabet in the world.
Latin is a member of the Italic languages and its alphabet is based on the Old Italic alphabet, derived from the Greek alphabet. In the 9th or 8th century BC Latin was brought to the Italian peninsula by the migrating Latins who settled in Latium, around the River Tiber, where Roman civilization would develop. During those early years Latin came under the influence of the non-Indo-European Etruscan language of northern Italy.
Although surviving Roman literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin, the actual spoken language of the Western Roman Empire was Vulgar Latin, which differed from Classical Latin in grammar, vocabulary, and (eventually) pronunciation.
Although Latin long remained the legal and governmental language of the Roman Empire, Greek became the dominant language of the well-educated elite, as much of the literature and philosophy studied by upper-class Romans had been produced by Greek (usually Athenian) authors. In the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which would become the Byzantine Empire after the final split of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires in 395, Greek eventually supplanted Latin as the legal and governmental language; and it had long been the spoken language of most Eastern citizens (of all classes).
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. Apart from Latin itself, the alphabet was adapted to the direct descendants of Latin (the Romance languages), Germanic, Celtic and some Slavic languages from the Middle Ages, and finally to most languages of Europe. With the age of colonialism and Christian proselytism, the alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Amerindian, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, Vietnamese, Malay and Indonesian languages. More recently, Western linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin alphabet or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin alphabet) when they transcribe or devise written standards for non-European languages; see for example the African reference alphabet.
In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any straightforward derivation of the alphabet used by the Romans. These variants may discard some letters (e.g. the Italian alphabet) or add extra letters (e.g. the Polish alphabet) to or from the classical Roman script, and many letter shapes have changed over the centuries — such as the lower-case letters. The Latin alphabet evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet, called the Cumaean alphabet.