Why are there so many English first names in Puerto Rico?

Joe   Tue Aug 07, 2007 10:53 pm GMT
A while back, my roommate in Texas was from Puerto Rico (a native, not a Nuyorican) and his name was Jonathan, and he insisted that that was his name from birth. Also, I was reading the real names of a lot of Puerto Rican reggaeton singers and was surprised by the number of them that have English names (ex Don Omar's real first name is William). I'm just wondering why it seems that there are so many English names among Puerto Ricans? I do not find this phenomenon in Mexico, and so am wondering if there is a historical reason for this.
Guest   Tue Aug 07, 2007 10:58 pm GMT
You must be kidding!
Guest   Tue Aug 07, 2007 11:08 pm GMT
Because Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, and Mexico is an independent country.
Gabriel   Tue Aug 07, 2007 11:27 pm GMT
Interestingly, names like Jonathan, Jennifer, Jessica are not entirely uncommon in Uruguay especially in the lower-middle class. You do not want to know some of the spellings they give them though.
Guest   Tue Aug 07, 2007 11:56 pm GMT
Mexicans love to have their own Spanish names, they sound so cool, we don't need to borrow them from other languages.

Antonio, Roberto, Maria, Carla, Alberto, Rodrigo, Hugo, Carlos, Julio, Rosa, Arturo, Cristina, Cristofer, Laura, Viviana, Sebastian, Andres, Manuel, Hernesto, Patricia, Julieta, etc.
Guest   Wed Aug 08, 2007 12:03 am GMT
Just my opinion. Names like Roderick Garcia or William Gonzalez sound a little silly. What's wrong with Rodrigo Garcia or Guillermo Gonzalez? They even have the same Germanic roots like many Spanish names
Guest   Wed Aug 08, 2007 1:00 am GMT
Yes, they do sound silly, I guess that's something you should ask Puerto Ricans themselves.
die Wahrheit   Wed Aug 08, 2007 2:12 am GMT
Hmmm...

There are at least two reasons that I can think of.

The first reason is that Puerto Rico is territory of the United States and is heavily influenced by it....

But the greatest reason I could think of is that the child is the offspring of a US service member and a local.

"Presently, there are twenty five military installations in Puerto Rico.1 The largest of these installations are the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Ceiba, the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station and Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility (AFWTF) on Vieques, the National Guard training facility at Camp Santiago in Salinas, the Naval installation at Sabana Seca, the Army's Fort Buchanan in San Juan, and the Muñoz Air Force base in San Juan.2 The land occupied by the military is some of the most fertile on the island amounting to approximately 13 % of the arable land in Puerto Rico.3 On the island of Vieques, the military controls 76% of the land.2"

http://www.lfsc.org/militar.htm

I saw this in the Philippines also.
die Wahrheit   Wed Aug 08, 2007 2:18 am GMT
Sorry, I forgot to add this to my post above...

I am not trying to start a debate here...but the names mentioned in Guest's post:

"Antonio, Roberto, Maria, Carla, Alberto, Rodrigo, Hugo, Carlos, Julio, Rosa, Arturo, Cristina, Cristofer, Laura, Viviana, Sebastian, Andres, Manuel, Hernesto, Patricia, Julieta, etc..."

Most of these are not really Spanish names. They are Spanish variants of names from other languages such as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

So you cannot make the statement "they sound so cool, we don't need to borrow them from other languages" because they were borrowed from other languages.
Guest   Wed Aug 08, 2007 4:24 am GMT
Why are there so many English first names in Puerto Rico?

Because puerto Rico is fast becoming an English speaking country much like Mexico, Central America, a Gibraltar.
Guest   Wed Aug 08, 2007 10:07 am GMT
"because they were borrowed from other languages."
If they come from
- Latin
- Greek
- old German
- Basque
- Hebrew
- Arab
- old Celtic Languages
- Iberian
- etc. etc. etc.

then, they were not borrowed from other languages because those were the languages the tribes that settled in Spain spoke at one time or another and those were their languages and Spanish resulted from this melting pot.
We took those names from our ancestors and those ancestors were Roman, German, Celts, Arab, Jews, Greeks, etc.
A Spanish guy's name could be Gonzalo not because one of his ancestor though - cool!, let get the kid an old Germanic name - but because one of his ancestors was named Gundisalvo.
die Wahrheit   Wed Aug 08, 2007 5:21 pm GMT
Guest you make an interesting debate...

But as you pointed out, Spanish evolved from this melting pot of languages and cultures...your statement remains that Spanish took from these ancestral languages.

If you look at the origins of the name "Maria" it will not say Spanish. It will say that "Maria" is a derived form of the Hebrew name Maryam. The Greeks and the Romans both used Maria, however, Greeks appear to use this name before the Romans did.

Now I am not saying that Latin is not part of Spanish's story...I am saying that Latin and Spanish are two very different languages. As were all the languages that helped develop the Spanish language. Spanish did not create these names, they took them from another source, so they cannot claim ownership of them.
Guest   Wed Aug 08, 2007 5:53 pm GMT
die Wahrheit,
Well... Spanish is probably as different from Latin as modern German is from old German. Spanish is a direct son of Latin so it makes sense to consider Latin first names as Spanish, at least the ones that are used today or have been used in the past.

The problem here is to define what Spanish is... The romans have been in Spain since the 1st century and are part of the Spanish blood as the rest of the people who settled here (in numbers big enough to leave a mark).

Following your argument we could say that the old Romans couldn't claim ownership of their own names because many come from a previous Indoeuropean language or from the Etruscans.

If we can't claim those names as our own which ones are the really Spanish names? How far do we have to go?

Some Spanish villages still have Roman, Arab and German names. Should be consider them foreigners? In other words what does it mean to be Spanish.
Adolfo   Wed Aug 08, 2007 5:59 pm GMT
In other words what does it mean to be Spanish.--->
Maybe prerroman/basque names could be considered true and pure Spanish: Itziar, Urko, Urraca,...
Guest   Wed Aug 08, 2007 6:08 pm GMT
Adolfo,
Blood in Spain is very very old. The oldest in Western Europe for good reasons (ice). The Basque obviously have been around the Pyrenees for a long time, but don't assume that the peninsula was empty when they came... because if it was empty why do they settled in a relatively poor area when they could have had better lands? Maybe because they were not the first to come.

If you look at this map and the current location of the Basque markers you might have to conclude that the Basque at one time were also outsiders.

I don't want to offend anybody just to point out what I read in this genetic map.
http://www.relativegenetics.com/genomics/images/haploMaps/originals/R1b_large_RG.jpg