Thanks for the info! I knew there had to be some diminutives--it seems like it would be impossible for a name in Russian not to have them. I just remember somebody somewhere saying it was a little different--maybe just in the way those forms were originally arrived at or something.
Interesting! Can you expand on what you mean by this?
Mostly I was just thinking about how in English a nickname tends to be more about the person than the name itself. A person named Robert isn't automatically called Rob or Bob in certain situations. It's more usually that the person just "is" a Bob or a Bobby or a Robert. I find it hard to think of my brother as his "real" name, or even the most common nickname for his real name because I've never called him either; he once told someone they had a wrong number because they asked for my real name. That sort of thing.
So I could see even in a culture where most people went by first names/shortened first names or nicknames Gregory might become known as Gregory and nothing else. Like in The Wire there's a lot of characters with nicknames--Cheese, Bodie, Poot, Stringer. But then there's characters known by their real first names like Omar where the real name carries so much respect it becomes a street name in itself, if that makes sense.
But again with Elizabeth I can imagine her just by default being slow to use any American nicknames. She says Stan because nobody uses anything else but she might prefer full names in general. Heh. She might even privately for a long time have considered American nicknames kind of stupid and weak.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-08-04 02:48 pm (UTC)Interesting! Can you expand on what you mean by this?
Mostly I was just thinking about how in English a nickname tends to be more about the person than the name itself. A person named Robert isn't automatically called Rob or Bob in certain situations. It's more usually that the person just "is" a Bob or a Bobby or a Robert. I find it hard to think of my brother as his "real" name, or even the most common nickname for his real name because I've never called him either; he once told someone they had a wrong number because they asked for my real name. That sort of thing.
So I could see even in a culture where most people went by first names/shortened first names or nicknames Gregory might become known as Gregory and nothing else. Like in The Wire there's a lot of characters with nicknames--Cheese, Bodie, Poot, Stringer. But then there's characters known by their real first names like Omar where the real name carries so much respect it becomes a street name in itself, if that makes sense.
But again with Elizabeth I can imagine her just by default being slow to use any American nicknames. She says Stan because nobody uses anything else but she might prefer full names in general. Heh. She might even privately for a long time have considered American nicknames kind of stupid and weak.