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Nick Nicholas. You wouldn’t think it’d be that popular a name, right? And yet, I’m the SIXTH Nick Nicholas here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are you the first to have registered with your name or did a homonym or namealike register before you?

The Nick Nicholas’s that do show up change; there was a jazz musician, there was an anti-spam programmer, there was the CEO of Time, there was a magician, there was a car salesman…

… these days:

1. A gynecologist in Middlesex
2. A golf writer in Florida
3. Me (LinkedIn)
4. Me (Academia.edu)
5. Me (my homepage)
6. The car salesman, in Florida. (So that’s what he looks like…)

The next hit is “Nick (Nicholas) Ilyadis”. “Nick (Nicholas) X” comes up a lot when I ego-surf.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why does the definition of one word recall other n words and m definitions?

• Attempts at a rigorous semantics of definitions will inevitably have to bottom out on a list of Semantic primes, a set of concepts that have to be taken as givens rather than defined themselves.
• Identifying that list of primes, and using them for definitions, has not been a popular pastime. It’s work. Natural semantic metalanguage is an admirable initiative in that direction.
• Unfortunately, NSM also wanted to use those primes in human-intelligible definitions. That makes things dirtier. The initial Spartan beauty of Anna Wierzbicka’s Lingua Mentalis had 14 primes; now it’s in the 60s.

Fear.

An entirely intelligible response to a hegemonic culture with substantial overlap with your own: fear that your culture will be assimilated into the hegemon, that the country will become unrecognisable to you, that the virtues you are familiar with and have come to cherish will be eroded. That you will cease being you, and start being the Other.

In the panoply of worldwide reactions to hegemony, this one’s rather on the benign side. It’s not Trumpism. It’s not Sinophobia. It’s mostly jocular. And I’m sure it’s exactly what happens in Canada too—except that Canadians are much more polite about it than Aussies are.

(Except possibly for the Québécois, câlisse!)

You might wonder why Australians weren’t as overtly hostile about their former hegemon Britain. But there were flareups, even back in the unenlightened days before Gough Whitlam. The Bodyline tactics in cricket in 1932, leading to Australians boycotting UK products. The strain of Australian nationalism of the 1880s and 1890s, hosted by The Bulletin. The class and sectarian war behind the idolisation of Bushrangers.

Oh, and Why don’t Australians celebrate Halloween? BECAUSE IT’S A SEPPO HOLIDAY!!!

(Psst.

Psst!

C’m ’ere.

Yeah, you.

Some of my best friends are Seppos. But don’t tell anyone, OK?)

The respondents so far have not given a satisfactory answer. How’s it feel when your culture is exoticised, eh?

I share Anon’s attitude towards Anglo nomenclature. Let’s try to unpack it.

Traditional societies have traditional approaches to naming people. If you’re a Roman, there’s only a dozen praenomina, some clan names, and a nickname cognomen that ends up being a surname itself. If you’re Ancient Greek or a Germanic tribesperson, there’s a fixed pattern of compounds. If you’re a Christian in Europe up until a century ago, there’s a fixed repertoire of saint names.

That’s not primarily about religion and books of fairy tales. That’s about having roots and a community and a cultural context.

One respondent found that horrifying. You know what I find horrifying? Running out and getting a random name for your kid just because. Saddling someone with Dweezil or Thursday. Dweezil dealt with it, sure (EDIT: he insisted on making it official when he was 5); but Dweezil was born in the Anglosphere.

(EDIT: And he was 5.)

And here’s the thing. The outlier isn’t OP, with his distaste of creative nomenclature. The outlier is the Anglosphere. Coming up with names with unfettered creativity, without any attention to community norms, is not the normal course of affairs.

And it wasn’t the normal course of affairs in the Anglosphere either, until the 20th century. There are fads and perturbations from the ’20s on, but the massive shakeup in most popular names in the US seems to date from the 1970s: Top 10 Baby Names by Decade

What changed around then? More and more individualism. Less sway of traditional structures, including religion and extended families. Hippie stuff. Social mobility. After that, it just snowballs in those particular communities: if noone calls their kid John or Mary any more, you don’t either. (In fact, Mary’s now are a retro thing.)

But that’s started as an Anglosphere thing. It’s been much slower to happen in Europe, and in fact parents wanting to emulate Anglosphere name creativity often bump into legal barriers.

The legal barriers aren’t to kill your buzz, man. They’re codifications of what was long presumed to be the normal way of doing things.

… And yes, were I to have kids, this would be a major issue of contention in our household…

Yes, it would.

I’m not going to bother with examples other than grave (Germanic: tomb; French: serious).

It is a common perception that language change is driven by trying to avoid ambiguity. In fact, language has an astounding tolerance for ambiguity, because context usually takes care of it. Instances where words change in order to avoid ambiguity (eg French hui > aujourd’hui ) are actually pretty rare.

• Placeholder name
• List of placeholder names by language

The typical use in English of placeholder names for persons is to emphasise their random selection, or their representativeness. Hence the rich assortment of List of terms related to an average person, including J. Random Hacker for computing, Tommy Atkins for the British Army, or The man on the Clapham omnibus for the legal system.

Going through the Wikipedia language list for all the following:

• Dutch makes a class distincion between the average couple Mieke en Janneke, and the lower class average young couple Sjonnie en Anita. That’s easy to replicate in the various dialects of English, with whatever given names happen to be in vogue in a particular community.
• Hebrew has Buzaglo for a simple lower-class citizen (a Moroccan Jewish surname, reflecting the lower status of Mizrahi Jews).
• Finnish has Pihtiputaan mummo (“the grandmother from Pihtipudas”) for someone who’s the last to adopt new technology. Again, I’m sure other languages have equivalents. Ditto French Madame Michu as an unsophisticated computer user.
• Hungarian Gizike and Mancika are “stereotypically obnoxious and ineffective female bureaucrats”. (This sounds like Patty and Selma from the Simpsons.)
• Legal Latin as codified by Justinian used Titius and Seius as names for Roman citizens, and Stichus and Pamphilus as names for slaves.
• In Portuguese, João Ninguém or Zé Ninguém (Jack Nobody) are used for someone who is unimportant.
• In Russian, Dzhamshut is a derogative placeholder for a gastarbeiter from southern Former Soviet countries.
• In Tagalog, Hudas (= Judas Iscariot) is a placeholder for people the speaker considers to be a malefactor or treacherous.

A2A, because apparently I have a great big “kick me” sign on me. (Only joking, Snežana Đorić (Снежана Ђорић)…

… or am I?)

Look, my personal opinion, as a taxonomist of the world (a Lumper and not a splitter) , is to look at what used to be one language, turned into four over a decade, of which at least two are identical, and exclaim Oh FFS.

But my personal opinion doesn’t matter.

Nor indeed does my professional opinion. Because I’m not professionally a linguist. But also because this isn’t really a linguistic matter.

Every time someone says “a language is a dialect with a military”, like Daniel Nikolić did here, a little piece of Zeibura S. Kathau dies (Zeibura S. Kathau’s answer to Do you agree that the difference between a dialect and a language is an army?). But, well, it’s not like Daniel’s wrong here.

Linguists want the distinction between languages to be about mutual intelligibility. But if the weird dialect is spoken by your fellow nationals, you’ll expend that much more effort to understand it and call it your own; and if the not-as-weird dialect is spoken across the border, you’ll expend that much less effort.

Sociolinguists want the distinction between languages to be about Abstand and ausbau: separateness and development. The development comes with status; the separateness… well, the separateness can end up manufactured. When Serbo-Croat was one language, the separateness was quashed; when Serbo-Croat became four languages, the separateness was cranked up.

A language is deemed a language when people call it a language. I can think it’s silly; I can exult that the Montenegrin-language Wikipedia did not go ahead. But it’s not up to Nick Nicholas to tell the Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins and Bosnians that they’re speaking the same language, FFS, or to roll his eyes when the same polling booth in Bosnia uses Jekavian in Latin alphabet and Ekavian in Cyrillic alphabet (Mjesto, Место).

(… That’s a Russian Italic т, isn’t it. Sucks to be Serbian/Macedonian, I know.)

There are linguistic and sociolinguistic criteria for whether it’s one language or four; but if the language speakers are convinced one way or the other, well, that’s how it is.

FFS.

Already posted this as a comment:

… The business with Yahuda’s supposedly suppressed book is a longstanding urban legend in Greek nationalist circles (such as Davlos magazine).

An urban legend uninformed by the existence of Worldcat:

• Hebrew is Greek (Book, 1982) [WorldCat.org]
• Hebrew is Greek.

Or Amazon:

• Hebrew is Greek: Joseph Yahuda: 9780728900134: Amazon.com: Books

The nearest copy of the book to me is in the Australian Catholic University. 18 km from my house, and across the road from the Catholic Education Office, where I have routine business. Next time I’m there, I should get a photo…

Strike that: some soul has uploaded the book to Hebrew is Greek : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Oh, and no book reviews ever? People *do* realise that the academic press is Googlable nowadays, don’t they?

Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr

with the wonderful summation:

It is, therefore, just as if one were to claim that Milton’s Paradise Lost was a text in Russian. If the reader objected that it looked very like an English poem and not at all like a piece of Russian, he would be shown a set of permutations of vowels, consonants, prefixes and terminations, from which it would emerge that each word of Milton’s text was in fact a Russian word; and, since the Russian words, remarkably, added up to pretty much the same general meaning as the English had had in the first place, it would have been demonstrated that Russian and English are the same language anyway.

….

For scholarship, then, this book, though learned-looking, full of words in Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic script, attractively printed, extending to nearly 700 pages in length and being correspondingly expensive to buy, is of no importance or interest. The author simply does not know what he is talking about.

And the sample etymologies from Yahuda that George Stamatis supplies—

Cain < Ka-en < Κα ην < Γα ην < Γηινος (‘from the earth’)

Israel < Eis-ra-el < εις (‘powerful’) + ρα (‘king’) + ηλ (‘sun’)

don’t make me dispute James Barr’s conclusion.

To build on Matthew McVeagh’s answer and comment:

Go to the renowned Zompist Numbers List.

Two and Three, *duwō and *treyes, are reasonably similar across Indo-European.

One gets conflated with Single/Same, *oynos / *sem, and ends up looking different.

Four and Five have a *kw, which went different ways in different languages, and get affected by analogy: *kwetwores *penkwe

More analogy kicks in with higher numbers, and they are less frequent to begin with as Matthew pointed out. (We have a long-standing suspicion that 7 is a loan from Akkadian, and 10 is somehow related to the word for fingers.) (EDIT: “two hands”.) But they’re still surprisingly consistent.

Anything in Common metre can be sung to anything else in Common metre. A favourite party trick in Australia, given that our national anthem is in Common metre. And so is the theme song of Gilligan’s Island.

See also Songs that scan to other songs, for more such examples.