People with names

A few days ago now, prompted by reference 3, I turned up my copy of reference 2, while yesterday I got to thinking about names, as noticed in reference 1. With author of refence 2 and the subject of reference 3, one Claude Lévi-Strauss, perhaps being at the peak of his fame around the time I was at university, around fifty years ago now. A chap who was keen on dressing  up his thoughts about mankind in mathematical clothes. And died at the grand old age of 100, a little over ten years ago. While I had guessed a year or so.

Some thoughts on names, on waking this morning, follow.

Figure 1

We have a tribe of humans somewhere, sometime, who organise their world on the simple lines suggested above. Live members of the tribe are real people, with names. Dead members of the tribe were real people who used to have names. Most dead people gradually fade away as those near them forget, and as their deeds and works fade and are forgotten too. Anyone else is an alien, and there is no need to give aliens names at all.

There is a caste of priests in the tribe, who look after the rules which follow.

So what is in a name? Where here we mean a proper name, a name for an individual which is unique in some sense. We return to this important matter after a few more preliminaries.

Our tribe have language and they have lots of common nouns, used to classify the things in the world around them, with the important ones being organised as is suggested in the figure that follows. Note that while there is no suggestion that flowers are better than trees, or vice-versa, there is a suggestion that the five classes of vertebrates are ordered, with mammals having the highest status and amphibians the lowest. Note that a taxonomist might quibble both with the term ‘class’ and my choice of classes; all of which being something of a moveable feast.

Our tribe is organised into families. A family consists of at most one husband, at most one wife and zero, one or more unmarried children. Children leave their natal family on marriage, by that act forming a new family. The life of any particular family runs from the time of marriage until the death of the last surviving partner, the death or marriage of the last unmarried child, whichever is the later. The priests might well keep records.

Our tribe is quite advanced, does understand about private property and some families have possessions. In life, a family may give possessions to some other family, possibly a family containing one of their own children. But any possessions there may be at the death of the family revert to the tribe. Something else for the priests to look after.

Three part names

Figure 2

The figure above shows the repertoire of common nouns available to the tribe for the building of proper nouns, that is to say the names of its members. Proper names are not invented words, in the way of those hopefully catchy brand names invented by Californian advertising agencies, for example the name ‘Panagon’ for a document management system around at the turn of the last century. Such names are, I believe, also known as empty vessels. They have no baggage.

Flowers are things you find in fields of grass or on the edge of woods, while trees have substantial woody trunks, with bark. The two categories are exclusive. The five categories, the five classes of vertebrates are also exclusive. Things which attempt to span categories are regarded as unclean or the work of the Devil and are shunned or worse. Alternatively, some freaks are worshipped as special works of the Lord, as, for example, white elephants are still worshipped in parts of south east Asia.

Figure 3

Everybody has a totem and a lineage.

Everybody in the same family has the same totem.

Figure 4

Men and women of the same totem or of the same lineage are not allowed to marry. Added to which, some combinations of totem are not allowed in marriage.

There is a function totem × totem → totem which assigns a new totem to a couple on marriage. This function is not necessarily symmetric. But there may be some regularities: it might be the case, for example, that the marriage of a couple, both of whom are carnivores, always results in a herbivore. The top right hand corner of an example of the sort of thing we have in mind is given above. Note the inclusion of both water mammals and flying mammals – which might, in a real tribe, be excluded. Land mammals only.

A mathematician might start making graph theory flavoured rules about how such a matrix might be constructed, perhaps rules intended to promote good mixing, or, contrariwise, perhaps to restrict the mixing of upper classes with lower classes. No dilution of blue blood with the other sort, thank you.

A mathematician might also explore exploitation of the further possibilities of Figure 2 above, with my only have scratched the surface here.

At birth, a child takes the totem of the parents and the lineage of the father. A child is also given a given name, that is to say a bird for a male child or a flower for a female child. The given name must be chosen so that the combination of given name, lineage and totem is unique, at least among the living. This combination is called the three part name. One might have a rule that a three part name cannot be re-used until any previous holder has been dead for at least seven moons, with this being something else for the priests to manage.

Within the family, a given name will necessarily be unique. Within the immediate vicinity of the dwelling, this might still be true. But as one gets further away, it is going to be necessary to add either or both of totem and lineage name to avoid ambiguity.

From time to time, lineages will die out, will become extinct. This will happen when the last male member dies. A lineage which has been extinct for twelve moons may be re-used. Re-use of a lineage takes the form of the male children of a couple all being assigned to new lineages. An assignation perhaps marked by a feast followed by a dance. Perhaps involving recreational substances. One more rule for the priests to manage – but they need to be careful not to overreach themselves, prompting a reaction against them from the population at large – and I recall reading once that as a general rule, in the olden days, priestly castes managed to grab about a third of what was going.

Origins

This sort of thing only works if we have a named population to start with. We can move such a population forward as it members marry and have children.

But we say nothing about how such a named population came to be in the first place. This is the stuff of myths of origin, such as that to be found at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, and with such myths being found in many, not to say most, cultures across the world.

Overreach

There might be a  different sort of overreach, in that if there are too many rules, not enough people will be able to marry and have children and the tribe will die out. A little modelling is indicated.

Numeracy

People who have number, people who can count, have the option of using numbers for or with names, at least for people who have a natural order. So the French ran to 18 kings called Louis, Louis I through to Louis XVIII, not quite one after the other. Some peoples number the children within a family. An option taken to extravagant lengths in computers where many things are named, are located by saying they are the n-th thing after something else, a something else which already has already been located, somehow or other. In computer speak, perhaps the n-th element of an array.

Conclusions

We have offered a fantasy, a set of rules according to which a tribe might organise itself. We note that the master, Claude Lévi-Strauss, certainly when he first started out on this sort of thing, did not believe that all these rules were driven by a dimly perceived need to avoid incest and the degeneration which was apt to follow. He was much keener on the need to classify and to be organised per se. For itself, not for anything.

But no conclusions so far. We have not yet moved beyond well-informed fantasy.

Maybe the next step is to look at how the caste of priests might be integrated, worked into totems, lineages and families. Or perhaps one ought to look at property?

References

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/brick-scene.html.

Reference 2: The Elementary Structures of Kinship – Claude Lévi-Strauss – 1947.

Reference 3: The Key to All Mythologies - Kwame Anthony Appiah – 2020. February 13, number of the NYRB.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Slavic_naming_customs.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_given_name.