At 12:16 PM 04/12/2000 -0400, you wrote:
In English, last names are often transparent, though not often applicable any more; first names are usually opaque -- in English, however transparent they may be in, say, Hebrew. This seems to be pretty generally the case in European languages; most other places I know about seem to have meaningful names throughout and even some drive toward applicablity (at least as a wish) for the part that is conventional (the individual name, as opposed to the inherited one).
Note that my daughter's middle name was chosen in part because it is transparent and applicable in Lojban, though opaque in English and Russian (la ka-trina); this is nice since her fist name gets mangled by the "la" rule - la .andjelys.)
lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)