Academic Writing Assignment #4

Thesis using Cause & Effect as Pattern of Development

Governments Law against Unusual Names

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An Icelandic woman; Bjork Eidsdottir, had accidentally broke the law by naming her newborn girlBlair, since it was considered too masculine by the Government.  A German boy was prevented from being named as Matti, because the authorities felt that the gender of the baby would be unclear. In 1993, a Japanese couple was not allowed to name their child Akuma, meaning “The Devil”. Throughout history, many countries and states; such as Germany, Sweden and Iceland, restricted and even prohibited certain names. These countries enact these name restrictions in order to prevent confusion, meet certain grammatical rule, and save the child from possible harassment.

When a person hears of another person’s name for the first time, it would serve as temporary mental image of the otherperson; at least provide a clue of their gender. Normally, you could understandably expect Sinta to be a female, Soertono to be an elderly man, and Samson to be a male. There is nothing you could possibly picture from someone named “Number 16 Bus Shelter”; which is a legal name in New Zealand, according to bbc.com. Moreover, what if when you meet someone you’ve been hearing aboutnamed Susyand found out that somehow she is actually a man. These confusing situations are what the government had in mind when they enacted their infamous naming policy.

When thinking of your future child name, grammar should be the least one of your concerns. Even so, there is some “Grammatical Rules” that used during the naming process. Name; in general, should contain both vocal and consonant letter, and not contain any foreign symbol or number. This makes sense, withoutthis rule, some names would be impossible or even weird to say. That is why there are no Kanji or Windings letter in any Indonesian name, for now. Nevertheless, there is still someone who  name their children Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced Albin). Obviously, the name waslater prohibited in Iceland;since there is apparently no letter “C” in Iceland (only used in foreign words) it wouldn’t be sensible for it to be used inaname.

Finally, the last reason (arguably the most important one) behind naming restriction is to protect the child from possible future harassment. Most people shouldknow how unnecessarily mean children these day could be; considering that, it wouldn’t be weird to see children making fun of one of their kind on the courtesy of his/her name. Having name such as Mustard M Mustard, or Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii;would make socializing without being make fun of every 5 minutes very difficult. This, in turn, would lead the children to be socially awkward, since he/she felt different to most people due to their unique name. With this in mind, it is reasonable that our government is able to rejectweird names which come up in birth certificates from time to time.

Name had always been an important part of human’s life. It gives us something to differentiate us from others, make us seemingly unique, and helps us personalize ourselves. Yet, even though we are given the liberty to choose our children’s name, there are still some boundaries to it. As a part of a democratic nation, we are given freedom to do as we please; but that doesn’t mean that we can just go around removing people’s facial feature from their head, freedom had its own limitationin order to prevent anarchy.The same could be applied to creating a name, there had to be several limitation in naming, in order to prevent another Hitler or Osama Bin Laden named human.