By: Mukul Sharma
July 12, 2003

Good Question: Why do people from other countries have weird names?

One of the greatest mysteries linguists from the time of Aristotle down have pondered over is why people from other countries have silly sounding names like Obiang Nguema, Tirit Vahi or even Wala Walla.

Is it some perversion on the part of parents that makes them give such ridiculous names to their children or are they simply trying to show what a great sense of humour they have?

Because if it is the former then child-rearing has some serious rethinking to be done — at least so that wards are not taunted throughout their short young lives by foreigners with better and classier names. If it is the latter, then it’s not funny any more.

For instance, in a classic experiment conducted in 324 BC by the Athenian lexicographer Demitrophanes...

(Incidentally, what sort of a name is THAT supposed to be either?? Can anyone in their right minds ever be called such a thing? Do YOU know anyone called Demitrophanes? Would you want to? It’s obviously the kind of stuff only a mother with a completely brainless sense of bonding can possibly love.)

(Imagine if you will for a moment the poor fool when he was in primary school. “Dammit Demit,” the harassed nursery teacher might easily be heard saying during attendance on any given day, “how do you expect me to pronounce this crap of a name you have on a daily basis? People will think I’m drunk or gargling with a mouthful of marbles.”) ...anyway, during the course of the experiment the great man discovered what has today come to be known as the First Law of Funny Names.

This states simply that the ludicrousness of a name is in direct proportion to the distance between the so-named and oneself.

In other words if you happen to be a resident of Bihar and are called Giriraj Thakur, then someone across the border in West Bengal named Gajanendranath Tagore may not be all that stupid sounding. Neither for that matter would a Gurung Thapa a little further north-east.

The nonsense would really start once one went beyond Myanmar and Thailand and junk and came across special effects like Gnug Thrp and Ghian Tucgan and Gug-Gug T’Gug. And don’t even THINK of going down to Australia because there’d be Goolagongs and Woomeras reversing off the walls like boomerangs.

On the other hand, the Second Law of Funny Names discovered late last century by scientists at the Santa Moniker Institute of Personal Proper Nouns in the USA states that the weirdness has to do with how weird the country’s name itself sounds.

We in India for example don’t truly have strange sounding names (excepting some like Gangophadhyayya, Namboodaripaad, Lyngdoh and Jhunjhunwalla) because, fortunately, India is not a daft sounding country.

Neither are Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bhutan. But does it really comes as a shock to anyone that places that sound like Kyrgyzstan, Eritrea or Liamuiga and Nevis would have people named Issaias Afwerki, Cheddi Jagan and Arkezhan Kazhgeldin living there?

Of course not, yet few people realise that the Second Law can and is broken regularly by perfectly normal sounding countries such as America and Canada.

Consider Callista Flockhart. Even though it sounds like a high potency homeopathic medicine for the treatment of terminal herpes, she’s actually a well known television star with a non-existent figure who’s currently dating Harrison Ford. This fact by itself is enough to put one off calling other people funny names forever.

Which brings us finally to Iceland. This is an unusually amazing country in that it has defied all biological norms by having only ‘dottirs’ and ‘ssons’ in their names as in Gudrun Njallsdottir or Harlem Haraldsson.

Whereas other countries routinely have aunts, cousins, fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers scattered all over their landscape, Iceland has only daughters and sons and nothing else. Something like Sukarnoputri carried to its logical conclusion.