By IANS
Madrid : People known as Fredesvinda, Clodoaldo and Baraquisio can still be found in Spain, above all in rural areas, and one village wants the Guinness Book of Records to recognize it as the place with the largest number of inhabitants with uncommon first names.
A glance at the census or newspaper obituary pages of Huerta de Rey, located in the central Spanish autonomous community of Castile and Leon, is sufficient to find individuals with the aforementioned names as well as others such as Orencia, Sincletica, Tenebrina, Rudesindo, Onesiforo and Floripes.
Such names “link us with warriors and also with the gods of the cultures of our ancestors, with the Greek, Celtic and Roman gods (rather than) with the Christian saints”, philologist Hermogenes Perdiguero told the Spanish news agency EFE.
Perdiguero is a native of Huerta de Rey, a town of 900 inhabitants where extremely unconventional names abound and where the First International Gathering of Odd Names is to be held in August of next year.
Burgondofor, Filogonio, Canuta, Hieronides and Arandilla are among an extensive list of names that Huerta de Rey’s municipal government has posted on a page of its web site to prove the point that it is home to the “strangest names in Spain”.
A specialist in place names, Perdiguero has conducted research in the field of onomastics to determine the origin and meaning of these personal names.
It’s a complicated task, he said, because many of them “come from (Germanic languages) that are extinct or that have given rise to several languages at present”.
Even though “the invasion of (Roman) Hispania by the Visigoths in the 6th century left many Germanic names here, the meaning of the roots or original components of some of them is still not well known”, the philologist said.
He was, however, able to provide the meaning of some of the Germanic names found in Huerta de Rey, such as Arnulfo: eagle and wolf; Sindulfo: way of the wolf; and Heriberto: good army.
From the Visigoths’ cousins, the Franks, came: Clodoaldo: fame and government; Clodoveo: fame and struggle; and Clotilde: fame and battle. And from the Anglo-Saxons came Edeltrudis: noble and faithful, loyal; and Etelvina: noble and friend.
Others have their origins in Mediterranean languages and have the following meanings: Acisclo (Latin): little axe; Antimo (Greek): flowery, flower; Baraquisio (Hebrew): ray, lightning.
Although Perdiguero acknowledged, “they don’t sound good to the ear,” he pointed to the beauty of their meanings and joked “with these first names, no surnames are needed”.