What’s in a name?

Russian and English names: similarities

We interviewed a number of students who study in school 41. In the survey 100 teenagers were asked the questions: Do you know people with the same name? Do you like your name? Would you like to change your name? Does the name have effect on your life? Was the meaning of the name important for your parents? Do you know the meaning of your name? The bar chart below shows that 90 out of 100 Russian teens like their names. Only 10% want to change their names. The meaning of the name was not important for around 60% of parents and only 10% know the meaning of their names. And only 40% believe that the name has effect on their lives. And only 10% of pupils have unique names. (Appendix 4).
The analyses of similarities of Russian and English meanings of names shows, that people have the same ideas, interests, hope, thoughts, trust, values such as religion, bravery, good heart, praise of beauty, courage and etc.
Having considered the various ways of influencing the choice of name, the most common is choosing a name based on what it means. In Russia and in the UK, this method is the most popular. Conducting research in school, I made a list of 10 names for boys and girls, which are the most popular. These names symbolize certain personality traits that are now very sought after. Data obtained during the study are listed in table. They are in compliance with the English names (Appendix 5) 
During the research we have found some interesting facts about phonetic similarities between Russian and English names. We thought, that these similarities are the result of historical loanword. The names Anastasia, Catharine, Thea, Mary, Ann, Julia, Elizabeth, Sophie in English have their identical form in Russian: like Anastasia, Ekaterina, Daria, Maria, Anna, Julia, Elizabeth, Sofia. Semantic similarities we have already mentioned, that in Russian and English a name has some semantic meaning. One of our aims was to find semantic identical names in Russian and English. We have studied different kind of dictionaries of names and have found many examples of identical names.

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