What is it with our names that people say it tells a lot about who we will be and who we are? Perhaps it is a true assumption that in a way the names we have manifest parts of who we come to be.
In my inquiry, I say that the names we, as a people, say something about how our culture is. To be specific, we Filipinos somehow embody our personality and culture as a people in our names. But what do the names we have mean for our culture? This inquiry is what this entry is all about. The main question I asked branches further into these:
Do the names we have manifest the diversity and adaptability of our culture? Or do they embody the colonialist mentality of the Filipino people? What does it implicate on the culture of the Filipino people?
One assumption here is that Filipinos were mostly and are often named after the reigning influences of the time. Most often than not, these influences are foreign influences. Why? Because it is the deemed dominant culture or how we politely imply as “better culture” at that time. This then highlights the submissive and subordinate trait of Filipinos. Another hypothesis though is that this adapting of foreign names was one way on how Filipinos in the past and at present try to “survive” with the times while trying to persist their culture. To see which it is that is truer, I tried to make a scientific study of it.
I went around asking my peers and older relatives how their names came to be. I found out that from generations before, most of them have their names patterned after a character from either the Bible, history, or a famous celebrity. The latter and most recent generations are often named after their grandparents or influential characters of the Bible or history as well. A very significant commonality though was that most of the influencing characters are of foreign origin. One of the peers that I interviewed was named Ivan. His name was based on the name of his grandparents. His grandparent’s name “Ivan”, on the other hand, was taken from the historical figure Ivan the terrible. The reason for naming he says is “I think it’s because my grandparent’s parents wanted him to be sturdy when he grew up.”
Common names of older generations are also mostly influenced by the Spanish background where most are named Maria, Eduardo, Andres, Juan, Felipe, Corazon, and the like. The latter generations, I found were more influenced by American and other European origin. Names such as Martin, Jessica, Camille, Irene, Erin, Patricia, and Czarina are just some. Of course those from the bible are also persistent like Ruth, Daniel, John, Paul, Peter and such.
How does this then implicate over the Filipino culture? Is it submissiveness of the people that they accept the other culture already? In part it is because it is the embedded colonial mentality upon the Filipino people that persists in such preferential conditions. The preference for foreign material is then no doubt a product. But what about adaptability? It could also be an answer but the strength of which could not be given much justification. But the great possibility of it is this: that the adapting of foreign names by our ancestors could have been one of their means to try and protect their children from the cruelty of the ruling foreign entities, mainly the Spanish reign. Such masking then came to be a habit that the real Filipino names have been forgotten. As time passed, it has become a form of coping for Filipinos in order to try to “fit in” with the society dictated by the “other”. So to speak, it is not much that fanaticism is in play, but is appears that the origin of Filipinos coming to have foreign names is because of the desire to survive the times in the context of the social construct they were living in.
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