Birth name

Last updated

A birth name is the name given to a person upon birth. The term may be applied to the surname, the given name, or the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a birth certificate or birth register may by that fact alone become the person's legal name. [1]

Contents

The assumption in the Western world is often that the name from birth (or perhaps from baptism or brit milah ) will persist to adulthood in the normal course of affairs—either throughout life or until marriage. Possible changes of a person's name include middle names, diminutive forms, changes relating to parental status (due to one's parents' divorce or adoption by different parents). The term "birth name" is also sometimes used for trans people even in cases where it is still their legal name, similar to the term deadname.

Maiden and married names

The French and English-adopted née is the feminine past participle of naître, which means "to be born". is the masculine form. [2]

The term née, having feminine grammatical gender, can be used to denote a woman's surname at birth that has been replaced or changed. In most English-speaking cultures, it is specifically applied to a woman's maiden name after her surname has changed due to marriage. [3] The term , having masculine grammatical gender, can be used to denote a man's surname at birth that has subsequently been replaced or changed. [4] The diacritic mark (the acute accent) is considered significant to its spelling, and ultimately its meaning, but is sometimes omitted. [4]

According to Oxford University's Dictionary of Modern English Usage , the terms are typically placed after the current surname (e.g., "Margaret Thatcher, née Roberts" or "Bill Clinton, né Blythe"). [5] [4] Since they are terms adopted into English (from French), they do not have to be italicized, but they often are. [5]

In Polish tradition, the term de domo (literally meaning "of the house" in Latin) may be used, with rare exceptions, meaning the same as née. [lower-alpha 1]

Notes

  1. In historical contexts, "de domo" may refer to a Polish heraldic clan, e.g. "Paulus de Glownia nobilis de domo Godzamba" (Paul of Glownia noble family, of Godziemba coat of arms). See also De domo (disambiguation).

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender; the values present in a given language are called the genders of that language.

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.

In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deixis</span> Words requiring context to understand their meaning

In linguistics, deixis is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words tomorrow, there, and they. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to be fully understood—for example, English pronouns—are deictic. Deixis is closely related to anaphora. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concept is sometimes applied to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is treated as a particular subclass of the more general semiotic phenomenon of indexicality, a sign "pointing to" some aspect of its context of occurrence.

French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other Romance languages.

A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex. Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender.

A gender-specific job title is a name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job. For example, in English, the job titles stewardess and seamstress imply that the person is female, whilst the corresponding job titles steward and seamster imply that the person is male. A gender-neutral job title, on the other hand, is one that does not specify or imply gender, such as firefighter or lawyer. In some cases, it may be debatable whether a title is gender-specific; for example, chairman appears to denote a male, but the title is also applied sometimes to women.

Gender asymmetry is an aspect of the constructed international auxiliary language Esperanto which has been challenged by numerous proposals seeking to regularize both grammatical and lexical gender.

A possessive or ktetic form is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a number of other types of relation to a greater or lesser degree analogous to it.

Epicenity is the lack of gender distinction, often reducing the emphasis on the masculine to allow the feminine. It includes androgyny – having both masculine and feminine characteristics. The adjective gender-neutral may describe epicenity.

French names typically consist of one or multiple given names, and a surname. Usually one given name and the surname are used in a person's daily life, with the other given names used mainly in official documents. Middle names, in the English sense, do not exist. Initials are not used to represent second or further given names.

The grammar of Old English is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more inflected. As an old Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system that is similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as the umlaut.

Polish names have two main elements: the given name, and the surname. The usage of personal names in Poland is generally governed by civil law, church law, personal taste and family custom.

Crasis is a type of contraction in which two vowels or diphthongs merge into one new vowel or diphthong, making one word out of two (univerbation). Crasis occurs in many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, and French; it was first described in Ancient Greek.

Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids reference towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases in a coequal manner, and discontinuing the collective use of male or female terms. For example, the words policeman and stewardess are gender-specific job titles; the corresponding gender-neutral terms are police officer and flight attendant. Other gender-specific terms, such as actor and actress, may be replaced by the originally male term; for example, actor used regardless of gender. Some terms, such as chairman, that contain the component -man but have traditionally been used to refer to persons regardless of sex are now seen by some as gender-specific. An example of forming phrases in a coequal manner would be using husband and wife instead of man and wife. Examples of discontinuing the collective use of terms in English when referring to those with unknown or indeterminate gender as singular they, and using humans, people, or humankind, instead of man or mankind.

Bulgarian nouns have the categories: grammatical gender, number, case and definiteness. A noun has one of three specific grammatical genders and two numbers, with cardinal numbers and some adverbs, masculine nouns use a separate count form. Definiteness is expressed by a definite article which is postfixed to the noun.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender</span> Usage of wording balanced in its treatment of the genders in a non-grammatical sense

Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender is the usage of wording that is balanced in its treatment of the genders in a non-grammatical sense. For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masculine nouns and pronouns when referring to two or more genders or to a person of an unknown gender in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages. This stance is often inspired by feminist ideas about gender equality. Gender neutrality is also used colloquially when one wishes to be inclusive of people who identify as non-binary genders or as genderless.

In Romani culture, a gadjo (masculine) or gadji (feminine) is a person who has no Romanipen. This usually corresponds to not being an ethnic Romani, but it can also be an ethnic Romani who does not live within Romani culture. It is often used by Romanies to address or denote outsider neighbors living within or very near their community.

Generic antecedents are representatives of classes, referred to in ordinary language by another word, in a situation in which gender is typically unknown or irrelevant. These mostly arise in generalizations and are particularly common in abstract, theoretical or strategic discourse. Examples include "readers of Wikipedia appreciate their encyclopedia", "the customerwho spends in this market".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender in English</span> Overview about gender in English language

A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine, or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period; therefore, Modern English largely does not have grammatical gender. Modern English lacks grammatical gender in the sense of all noun classes requiring masculine, feminine, or neuter inflection or agreement; however, it does retain features relating to natural gender with particular nouns and pronouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other sexes and neuter pronouns for sexless objects. Also, in some cases, feminine pronouns are used by some speakers when referring to ships, to churches, and to nation states and islands.

References

  1. "French administration must routinely use woman's maiden name in letters". The Connexion . 27 January 2014. Retrieved 1 February 2014. Laws have existed since the French Revolution stating that 'no citizen can use a first name or surname other than that written on their birth certificate' – but many official organisations address both partners by the husband's surname.
  2. "nee", The Free Dictionary, retrieved 5 July 2023
  3. "née – definition of née in English from the Oxford dictionary". Archived from the original on 13 January 2014.
  4. 1 2 3 Butterfield, Jeremy (10 March 2016). Fowler's Concise Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-106230-8.
  5. 1 2 Garner, Bryan (11 March 2016). Garner's Modern English Usage. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-049150-5.