Casual Shinji said:
I wouldn't change anything about it, I like my name. There's certainly cooler sounding names out there, but this is the name I've went by for 31 years now, and it is imbued with my history and personality. Whenever someone calls it out they're not just calling my name, they're calling me. And no other name will ever have that same effect.
Same for me. I have no reason for complaining about my first name, so I never thought about it. I'm named after the Christian patron saint of travelers and after Alexander the Great, and I value the meaning, its reference to the two perhaps most important roots of western culture with Christianity and Ancient Greece, and the weight of some 2000 years of history behind those names. Even though I'm agnostic and I'm fully aware that Alexander is an ambiguous figure. I used to like the fact that I share my first name with (the German spelling of) Christopher Columbus too, but after learning that, on top of not only discovering America just by accident and not even being the first European to do so, not by ~500 years, he also treated the native American population awfully, I can't bring myself to like this association anymore.
My family name doesn't have a very pleasant sound to it, and I don't feel too attached to my father's branch of the family either, but to reject this part of my heritage, my roots, my identity? No. Besides, I've got no better idea anyway. I used to think that I might adopt the name of my future wife (who I have yet to meet) if it's a really nice one, but when it comes down to it in the end... Since I would never ask the same of her, for the very same reasons, I'm not sure if I'd be really that open to this idea when it comes down to it.
Eamar said:
I'll go first: my real name is Emma, and I've never particularly liked or felt connected to it. That could be because it's an insanely common name for women my age in the UK, but it's just never really felt like it's 'mine,' so I've always loved the idea of making up my own name, which is why I'd choose Eämar (pronounced AY-a-mar). It's a Quenya name I made up for myself many years ago, and I've grown very fond of it. It goes without saying that I'm a total Tolkien freak and completely in love with the Elvish languages, and that Tolkien is very important to me. The name was an attempt to create a sort of Elvish equivalent to my real name - it looks and sounds a little like Emma, and is a combination of the words eär (sea) and amar (earth). Because Emma means 'whole' or 'universal,' I thought combining those two words would be a decent way of getting the same sort of idea across.
In my head, I actually kind of think of Eämar as my 'real' name nowadays, though I never use it IRL. I certainly feel more connected to it than to Emma.
I want to ask you an honest, non-judgmental question: Do you, as a human being, genuinely feel more connected to a fictional name that is not human, decidedly not human, than to your actual human name?
I was a big Tolkien fan as teenager, and while wouldn't call me that anymore, I still have a profound fondness for Middle Earth, for shallower (e.g. swords are cool) and deeper reasons (e.g. what Tolkien tells about the human condition). And I am asking you this question with precisely this deeper reason in brackets in mind:
Tolkien's narrative is, among other things, so profoundly about the place of humans, of us, in his and our world, of our shortcomings, our longings, our ambitions, our past and future and, centrally, our mortality. Sure, the elves are pretty cool, but being immortal, their experience of live is so fundamentally different from ours, which certainly is one of the main reasons they were created in the first place: to contrast, to highlight our own mortality. So when I pictured myself, as a boy, as some hero in Middle-Earth in my daydreams, I have always been a human. I wanted to be a hero, sure, but I wanted to be a hero of, and for, my people. I didn't want to live forever, but do the best with the time that was given to me (and realizing that spending hours in a forum debating about how someone I don't know names his child is hardly the best use of this precious time is not a happy feeling). Now I'm a bit older and am not doing that anymore, but intellectually, I would still have a hard time connecting, identifying with elves, perhaps I just experienced the stories, thought about them, in a different way.
From that perspective, to get back to the thread that inspired yours for a second, I'd say it is at least more fitting to give your child a Quarian name instead of, uhm, Liara T'Soni, as the story of the Quarians is a deeply human one, and could be, for all intents and purposes, pretty much told with humans instead as well, whereas the Asari experience is distinctively not human.
Anyway, I think Emma is a beautiful name. It has a nice sound, it's short, you won't have to explain the spelling to anyone, and nobody will ever have any troubles with it, not even abroad.