Quite accidentally, I stumbled upon this article online and it gave us a good chuckle so thought I'd share it with you.
When I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of the cultural differences to strike me was peoples’ names. The first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that everyone here has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom, we have nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we tend, I am glad to say, to lose them. The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as overbearingly cutesy for anyone over five years old. Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy would probably be harassed at school by pre-adolescent bullies. So would girls with names like Babes, Lovely, Precious, Peachy, or Apples. Here, however, no one bats an eye.
Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or Ning-Ning. Such names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared" symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.
Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming their children. This can be as simple as making them start with the same letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy. More imaginative parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of assonance or rhyme, as in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names get worse the more kids there are -- best to be born early or you could end up being a Baboy). Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts (Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip). The main advantage of such combinations is that they look great painted across your trunk if you're a cab driver. (That's another thing I'd never seen before coming to Manila - taxis with the driver's kids' names on the trunk.)
Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the phenomenon of the "composite" name. This includes names like Jejomar (for Jesus, Joseph and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda (for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao- the three island groups of the Philippines).
There is also a whole separate field of name games -- those where the parents have exhibited a creative sense of humor on purpose. I once had my house in London painted by a Czech decorator by the name of Peter Peter. I could never figure out if his parents had a fantastic sense of humour or no imagination at all -- it had to be one or the other. But here in the Philippines, wonderful imagination and humour is often applied to the naming process. My favourites include Edgar Allan Pe, Jonathan Livingston Sy, Magic Chiongson, Chica Go, and my girlfriend's very own sister, Van Go.
How wonderful to come from a country where imagination and exoticism rule the world of names. Where else in the world could the head of the Church really be called Cardinal Sin? Where else in the world could Angel, Gigi, and Mandy be grown-up men? Where else could you go through adult life unembarrassed and unscathed with a name like Mosquito, or Pepper, or Honey Boy? Where else but the Philippines?!
by Matthew Sunderland