I like names, but this is a very euro-centric. My ideal "let's talk about names" article would cover a lot more different societies and be a bit more universal in its outlook. There's a world of fun stuff with names in Arabic or Japanese, and how various states try to control what people name their kids.

(Saying this, I understand it's a bit shallow to react primarily to an article's title).

>Moreover, at birth human infants are unable to appropriate names for themselves, consequently, another older person must confer a birth name.

There are groups that don't name babies at or near birth (e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/parents-in-a-remo... leave it for a year, and I can't find a citation but I think I recall some other groups pushing naming even further).

>the nomen, which was a hereditary name (or surname) identifying a person as a member of a distinct gens, i.e., family, tribe, or clan, which constituted an extended Roman family, all members of which shared the same nomen and claimed descent from a common ancestor.

As an aside, if a roman slave was freed, they (at least in some periods) took the praenomen and nomen of their former master. (cf https://latininscriptions.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/resources/resource... . this article also has some details: https://carolashby.com/roman-names/).

Reading the article makes me really want someone to write a "Naming Systems Very Different from Ours" series of articles along the lines of the classic "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours" [ http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo... ].

Before the advent of modern medicine, not all babies in western societies were not officially named at birth either.

I’m guessing baptisms figured in this too, but maybe who knows more about baptisms can chime in.

It was also not uncommon to reuse a name. if a child died that name might be given to the next baby born. It seems creepy but you can see it as the child being reborn and trying again.