On 4-9-2009 0:45, Darren New wrote:
>
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/6128905/Germany-angered-over-legal-ruling-to-allow-Islamist-to-name-son-Jihad.html

> 
> 
> Can any germans here explain why the government would give a crap about 
> what the kid is named?

The Netherlands have sort of the same rules. Including following the 
rules in the country of origin of the parents.

There is a debate here about the Moroccan rules. They only accept Arabic 
names (not even traditional names from non-arabic endemic tribes to 
suppress local culture). Moroccan parents get a list of names acceptable 
by the Moroccan government to choose from from the Dutch civil servants, 
even if they have the Dutch nationality. The problem is that if you have 
the Moroccan nationality you can't get rid of it. All Dutch citizens 
with a Moroccan ancestry have a double nationality. Also their children 
become Moroccan citizens if they want to or not. Taken all together it 
means that for generation to come, the naming of a lot of Dutch people 
is restricted by Morocco. Some people here can get very upset by such 
things. BTW if you think it is not a big deal, not following this rule 
will make it impossible for the child ever to enter Morocco and possibly 
even the parent may face prosecution if the enter the country.

About our own rules and conventions, they got more relaxed. It used to 
be that only names that were already in use were allowed. A friend of 
mine was named Jur, which is sort of an abbreviation of Jurriaan. His 
parents had to prove that this name was in use before it was accepted by 
our government. (Which incidently shows that those that complain about 
the Moroccan government have not so good a memory). These rules were 
sort of circumvented later if the parents wanted to be 'unique' by taken 
names from other countries. So we have a lot of 'Bjorn's and 'Kjelt's 
and other scandinavian names, but also more extreme ones, starting from 
about the eighties.

Now it is almost completely free, quite a lot of people have ridiculous 
names and even the traditional ones are seldom spelt they way you would 
expect.

Male/female: I have two nieces Robin and Charlie, both female to 
everyone's surprise, both names are boy names here. I assume that if 
they had a brother it would be called Alan or something like that. I do 
have a cousin with that name, perfectly English name of course, except 
that it is extremely uncommon here. Very common, however, is 'Ellen' 
which is a girls only name that happens to be pronounced exactly the same.

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