Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Indonesian names

There are many students from Indonesia here. Its fun to meet them and talk to them. But their names are difficult to remember. They don't have Arabic names like us Pakistanis, rather some strange ones. For example, one of them is named Yo Yo. The other is Yudi. And third one has the name Apri. When asked where does that come from, he replied that he was named this way since he was born in the month of April!!! He said that its not common practice but is done sometimes there.

Like us, they are much more comfortable with English language rather than German. Arabs, on the other hand, seldom know English and thus can speak better German. This seems to be the phenomena here. People who know English don't learn much German as they always end up speaking English in the university. People who don't know English, have to learn German to survive here.

There is an event coming up in a couple of weeks called 'Global Village' in the univeristy. In this event, people set stalls to represent culture of their countries. We also plan to do so. Let's see what happens.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think most of names have origin in Chinese / Japanese ( like we have few names from India ).

Yasir Niaz Khan said...

hmmmm, i don't think we have names from India. All of our names come from Arabic. Don't they?

Anonymous said...

we have Naik, Aneel (& perhaps Kunwar) from Indian origin BUT YES,these are v.v. few, interestingly too few to mention (My previous statement was not so noticed one btw) . However, a Persian/Turkish influence is comparatively more prominent interestingly. & ofcourse Arabic is the major influence/source. & again Persian & Turkish also has an Arabic impact too!

suleman