2023年12月25日发(作者：)
朗文英语听力教程2Unit 1
What’s in a Name听力原文(总4页)
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Unit 1 What’s in a Name?
TEACHER: Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Felipe, Monica, Theo, . . . and I can’t
rememberyour name.
STUDENT 1: Patricia.
TEACHER: Right, Patricia. Those are all beautiful names, and that’s our topic today—names.
Names area cultural universal. This means everyone uses names. A person’s name can tell us
a bit about a person’sfamily. Today, we’ll begin by looking at first names and how people
choose names for their children. Andthen we’ll talk about family names, and look at the
different categories of family names. Although thescope of the lecture today is English-language names, we can use the same approach, you know, to look atnames from any ’s
take a brief look at first, or given, names. There are several ways parents choose the first
name fortheir first way is by family history. Parents may choose a name because it is passed
from generation togeneration; for example, the firstborn son might be named after his father
or grandfather. Although familynames are also passed to daughters, it is usually as a middle
name. Adding “junior” or “the second” —forexample, William Parker the second—is
only done with boys’, not with girls’ second way parents choose a name is after a family
member or friend who has died recently, or aftersomeone they admire, like a well-known
leader or a famous musician. Although most English first namesmean something, for example,
“Richard” means powerful and “Ann” means grace, nowadays meaning is not the main
reason people select their baby’s third way is to provide a “push” for the child. Parents
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want to choose a name that sounds very“successful.” A strong name might help them in
the business world, for example. Or they might choose a name that works for either gender,
like Taylor or Terry. So, given these three methods, what is the most common way parents
choose a name
Many parents choose a name simply because they like it, or because it’s fashionable or
classic. Fashions in names change just as they do in clothes. One hundred years ago, many
names came from the Bible—names such as Daniel, and Anna, and Hannah and Matthew.
Then, fifty years ago, Biblical names went out of fashion. Nowadays, names from the Bible are
becoming popular again. Similarly, parents often choose classic names, names that were
popular in 1900, 1950, and are still popular now. Classic names for boys include Thomas, David,
Robert, and Michael. And for girls:Anna, Elizabeth, Emily, and Katherine, just to name a few.
They’re classic. They never go out of ’s look at the origin of last names, also called family
names or surnames. Researchers have studiedthousands of last names, and they’ve divided
them into four categories. The categories are: place names, patronymics, added names, and
occupational names. A recent survey showed that of the 7,000 most popular names in the
United States today, 43 percent were place names, 32 percent were patronymics, 15percent
were occupational names, and 9 percent were added names.
The first category is place names. Place names usually identified where a person lived or
named John Hill lived near a hill, for example, and the Rivers family lived near a river. If you
hear the name Emma Bridges, . . . what image do you see Do you see a family that lives near a
bridge If you do, you get the idea.
The second category is patronymics. That’s P-A-T-R-O-N-Y-M-I-C-S. A patronymic is the
father’s name,plus an ending like S-E-N or S-O-N. The ending means that a child, a boy, is the
son of his father. The names Robertson, Petersen, and Wilson are patronymics. Robertson is
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son of Robert, Petersen is son of Peter, and so on.
The third category is added names. Linguists sometimes call this category “nicknames,” but
when most of us hear the word “nickname,” we think of a special name a friend or a parent
might use. The word“nickname” is actually an old English word that means an additional
name, an added name. So I’ll use the term “added name.” This category of last names is
fun because the names usually described a , Baldwin, and Biggs are examples. Reed was from
“red” for red hair. Baldwin was someone who was bald, someone who had little or no hair.
And Biggs?
STUDENT 2: Someone big?
TEACHER: Yeah, someone big, right. Now, if we look around the room, we could probably
come up withsome new last names, like, uh, Curly or Strong.
Now, the fourth category is occupational names. The origin of the family name was the
person’s occupation. The most common examples of occupational names still used today are
Baker (someone who bakes bread), Tailor (someone who sews clothes), Miller (someone who
makes flour for bread), and Smith. . . . Now, Smith is actually the most common name in the
western English-speaking world. The name comes from an Old English word, smite, that’s S-M-I-T-E, which means to hit or strike. In the old days, a smith made metal things for daily life,
like tools. Every town needed smiths. What’s interesting is that many languages have a
family name that means Smith. In Arabic it’s Haddad, H-A-D-D-A-D. In Spanish it’s Herrera,
H-E-R-R-E-R-A. In Italian it’s Ferraro, F-E-R-R-A-R-O. And in German it’s Schmidt, spelled S-C-H-M-I-D-T. All these names mean names may tell us something about someone’s family
history, you need to keep in mind that they may not tell us much at all about the present. For
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example, there’s usually not much connection between the origin of the name and the
person who has it now. Take the name Cook, for instance. A person named Cook today
probably doesn’t cook for a living. Also, many people change their names for various reasons.
Lots of people who have moved to the United States have changed their names to sound
more happens less now than in the past, but people still do it. People also use pen names or
stage names to give themselves a professional advantage. For example, the writer Samuel
Clemens used the pen name Mark Twain, and Thomas Mapother IV uses the stage name Tom ,
let’s recap now. In today’s lesson, we looked at how parents choose English first names.
We also looked at some common origins of family names. In the next class, we’ll look at how
names are given in Korea and in Japan. This is covered in the next section of the book. That’s
all for today.
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