Name(s) of the Day

[muckefuck]

Today I found out about something called "Ogasawara Mixed Language", which is a mash-up of English and Japanese spoken on what we call the Bonin Islands (from an earlier reading of Japanese 無人 "no people") and which are locally known as the Ogasawara Archipelago (小笠原群島). The sociolinguistic history of the islands is fascinating, it being one of the few places where an English-based creole has been subjected to sustained superstratal influence from a non-European language and the only officially Japanese-speaking part of the world where the majority of the population speak a non-Japonic language. That leads to interesting situations like this:

In many cases, a single individual has possessed four legal names in the span of his or her life. A case in point is Able Savory. He was born Sēborē Ēburu (in katakana セーボレーエーブル), was forced to change his name to Sebori Eichi (in kanji, 瀬堀栄一) at the start of the war, and used Able Savory (in the Roman alphabet) during the Navy Era. After the 1968 reversion, he reverted to his wartime kanji family name, but used the katakana "first name" given to him at birth, resulting in the name Sebori Ēburu [瀬堀エーブル]. In the 1980s, when some of the Savory clan changed their surname back to the katakana Sēborē, he decided four names in one lifetime were enough and retained the kanji surname.

The source is Daniel Long's English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands (Durham, 2007) and it expect it to yield plenty more curious tidbits before I'm done with it.