Categorisation of Rongmei Baptist Christian names

Name of Author : Lungjangpou Remei

Abstract: This paper presents a novel attempt to categorise the Rongmei Baptist Christian (RBC) names, and discuss the name categories that emerged in the socio-onomastic study on personal names of the Rongmeis of Imphal district, of the Manipur state. Taking the model of name categorisation from two previous studies: Gulbran Alhaug and Minna Saarelma (2017) on the names of Norwegian-based Finnish families and Finnish-Norwegian families (as pointed out in Joseph 2022, 72), and Smita Joseph (2022) on Telugu Catholic names and Syrian Christian names, the names of the RBCs has been categorised as: 1) Rongmei names 2) Biblical names 3) Other names In the study, it was found that most of the names were aspirational in natur, and tri-syllabic in structure. Biblical names were found to be mostly names from the Old Testament characters of the Bible. Phonological adaptations of Biblical names to the sound system of the Rongmei language were not observed in the spellings of the names in the data. It was observed that intial and final clipping are two common strategies to create pet names.

Keywords : Personal Names, Rongmei Names, Biblical Names, Other Names, Tri-Syllabic, Phonological Adaptation

DOI :