Abstract

This paper deals with the practice of naming children after kin, one of the most powerful expressions of social or personal relatedness between kinspersons. Based on a thematic analysis of over 200 posts from a Polish parenting forum devoted to naming decisions, the author outlines the forum users’ main attitudes toward this naming practice and the arguments employed to justify their appraisals and decisions. Analysis shows that, on the whole, the closer the child is related to the name source in terms of kinship, the more negative the attitude toward such a choice of name. Positive attitudes were most often framed in terms of personal relatedness between the name-source relative and the parent(s). On the other hand, the dominant theme underlying the rejection of such names was the uniqueness of the child’s identity, which, according to the users, should find its expression in an individualized forename.

摘要

本文讨论以亲戚命名孩子的做法，亲属是亲戚之间社交或个人亲密关系的最有力表达之一。在对来自波兰育儿论坛的200多个致力于命名决策的帖子进行主题分析的基础上，作者概述了论坛用户对命名实践的主要态度，以及用以证明他们的评估和决策依据的论点。分析表明，总的来说，就亲属而言，孩子与名字来源的关系越密切，对这种名字选择的态度就越消极。积极态度通常是根据名字来源亲戚与父母之间的个人关系来构筑的。另一方面，拒绝此类名称的主要主题是孩子身份的唯一性，根据用户的说法，