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HelpRe: Why are many Thai names rated so badly?
in reply to a message by kingdom_of_daydreams
I love Ratree ...
My theory of why people make the connections
When the larger part of someone's experience with names, is with names that are recognizable as names in their native language - they have only occasionally had to learn a brand-new foreign name of someone they meet - and they encounter a word that is said to be a name, online, but unattached to any people .... they mainly feel motivated to associate the name with whatever seems mentally nearby. It feels like an effort for them, to think of it as a name for a person, because their conditioned expectation of ever meeting someone named it, is very low.
When the larger part, or a very large part, of someone's experience meeting new people has meant learning new, foreign names .... that person would tend to develop an internal motivation to learn any new name *as a name,* and assign the idea "name for a person" to it. Rather than associating things from their own language.
I suspect you are in that category, if you are fairly young and urban in the US. I'm more in the other category - older, and when I was growing up, a minority of people I met had non-English names. if I meet a real person named Porntip, I'm highly incentivized to mentally class it as a name and think it's fine; but if I see the text "Porntip" online and am asked to rate it as a name, it's a fair bit of mental effort to picture someone named it, and the association with the word "porn" dominates my response to it. You might not feel that way because, say, a large plurality of the times you've met new people, you had to learn a new foreign name... so maybe you would have been more conditioned to mentally exclude English associations from any new word that you learn as a name. It would be advantageous.
People rating the names are probably those who are more like me, conditioning-wise. Also they just want to judge things. Humans get gratification from passing judgment on things. That's why people ever fill out the ratings.
Also - it's legit to not like a name because of a word-association. That's not the same thing as saying the name is bad. People doing ratings are probably indicating whether they personally feel they like the name (like, would they put it on a list of names they like) - they aren't trying to evaluate whether or not the name is OK for someone to be named.
I don't like Philip, Knox, Ryder, Felix, Theodore, or Oliver because I associate them with English words. That's not the same as saying I think they're bad names. But if I rated them, I'd rate them low.
Then again, Rose sounds just like rows, and Eileen sounds just like I lean, but I keep those as mentally separate as homophones meat/meet or flew/flu, and I like the names. So it's just individual.
I don't think it has anything to do with which language someone is most familiar with.
- mirfak
My theory of why people make the connections
When the larger part of someone's experience with names, is with names that are recognizable as names in their native language - they have only occasionally had to learn a brand-new foreign name of someone they meet - and they encounter a word that is said to be a name, online, but unattached to any people .... they mainly feel motivated to associate the name with whatever seems mentally nearby. It feels like an effort for them, to think of it as a name for a person, because their conditioned expectation of ever meeting someone named it, is very low.
When the larger part, or a very large part, of someone's experience meeting new people has meant learning new, foreign names .... that person would tend to develop an internal motivation to learn any new name *as a name,* and assign the idea "name for a person" to it. Rather than associating things from their own language.
I suspect you are in that category, if you are fairly young and urban in the US. I'm more in the other category - older, and when I was growing up, a minority of people I met had non-English names. if I meet a real person named Porntip, I'm highly incentivized to mentally class it as a name and think it's fine; but if I see the text "Porntip" online and am asked to rate it as a name, it's a fair bit of mental effort to picture someone named it, and the association with the word "porn" dominates my response to it. You might not feel that way because, say, a large plurality of the times you've met new people, you had to learn a new foreign name... so maybe you would have been more conditioned to mentally exclude English associations from any new word that you learn as a name. It would be advantageous.
People rating the names are probably those who are more like me, conditioning-wise. Also they just want to judge things. Humans get gratification from passing judgment on things. That's why people ever fill out the ratings.
Also - it's legit to not like a name because of a word-association. That's not the same thing as saying the name is bad. People doing ratings are probably indicating whether they personally feel they like the name (like, would they put it on a list of names they like) - they aren't trying to evaluate whether or not the name is OK for someone to be named.
I don't like Philip, Knox, Ryder, Felix, Theodore, or Oliver because I associate them with English words. That's not the same as saying I think they're bad names. But if I rated them, I'd rate them low.
Then again, Rose sounds just like rows, and Eileen sounds just like I lean, but I keep those as mentally separate as homophones meat/meet or flew/flu, and I like the names. So it's just individual.
I don't think it has anything to do with which language someone is most familiar with.
- mirfak
