The Doctor: What's in a Name?

[fajrdrako]

Doctor Who in some ways this season reminds me of the Guy Gavriel Kay novel Tigana.

Now, if you haven't read it, I would highly recommend it. This is a fantasy novel about a group of freedom-fighters, but even more, it's about the power of a name. It's the Rumpelstiltskin theme: the power that comes from saying a name, or taking away the power to say a name, or the power of invoking a name.

The Doctor, of course, doesn't use a name. He's just... the Doctor. As in the wonderful exchange with Rose in "The Empty Child":

Rose: What was I supposed to say, you don't have a name! Don't you ever get tired of 'Doctor'? Doctor who?
Doctor: Nine centuries in, I'm coping.

So they tease us with his name, or the absence of his name, and we get nicknames like Theta (or so I'm told) but no clues as to his original name. I was rather hoping he didn't have a real name; that Gallifreyans didn't have to have names, that they could just be The Master or The Doctor or Whatever. No, Romana wouldn't fit that pattern. Or perhaps the fun of it is that the pattern is that there is no pattern. A free for all for names.

Rose called the Doctor 'Spock' in the scene I quoted. I was disappointed, back when I was an ardent Star Trek fan, to learn that Spock had an unpronounceable last name. Why did he need a last name at all? For aliens to have the Indo-European pattern of first name and last name seems absurd to me. I don't even know why we need that pattern, but don't get me started on that....

So now it seems the Doctor has a name, and would use it in one one situation.

There's an interesting parallel here to Captain Jack Harkness, another man with no known name, using a stolen one as an accidental tribute to the man he stole it from.

So they've raised the mystery: what was Jack's name, before he was Captain Jack Harkness? Does Captain John known? Grey would know, but Grey is in a frozen coma. Toshiko asked Jack directly in "Captain Jack Harkness", and he didn't answer. What was the Doctor's name, and why is it such a secret?

Having raised the question as a tease and a mystery, will they feel compelled to answer it? Part of the game in the new series of Doctor Who was that the Doctor never said the name of Gallifrey - not until "The Runaway Bride". But that's different. We already knew the name of Gallifrey.

The bottom line: I don't want to know the name Captain Jack's parents called him by. He is Captain Jack Harkness and that's enough for me.

I don't want to know the Doctor's name. I don't ever want to know. I love the scenes in which the question is raised, but dread any hints or clues. What name could be good enough for either of them, except the names we know?

Comments

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

Good question(s) about names.

Even among Indo-Europeans, the "first-name+last-name" pattern is not universal. The Romans, for example, had "first-name" [praenomen] + "last/clan-name" [nomen] + "clan-sept-name" [cognomen]. Examples of that include "Gaius Julius Caesar" and "Publius Cornelius Scipio". The Roman Senate also had the authority to tack on extra names to a person as a reward; Scipio became known as "Scipio Africanus" after defeating the Carthaginians in the second Punic War [IIRC].

I believe that the Spanish and all Latin Americans [including Mexicans] *still* use the three-name Roman pattern, which often gives Anglo-oriented customer-related programs the fits. :-)

Then there's the habit of putting the last [family or clan] name first, which died out in most of Europe a long time ago. The only Europeans still doing this (and they don't speak an Indo-European language) are the Hungarians or "Magyar." In much of Asia, especially the Far East, putting the last name first is still common, however. For example, in "Jiang Jieshi" [Pinyin], better known as Chiang Kai-shek, the "Jiang" is the family name.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Even among Indo-Europeans, the "first-name+last-name" pattern is not universal.

No. I was trying to find a cultural group that tends to use it, but even that is partial. Go back even a few hundred years, and you'll see Atilla the Hun and William the Bastard didn't use that pattern. They were a little more... descriptive.

So why assume aliens would use that pattern, or take their father's name? It seems to me like a failure of imagination.

[cionaudha.livejournal.com]

There are also the naming practices of the Scandinavians and Gaels which only recently were mandated to conform to the firstname+lastname pattern.

Wherein my ancestor Mikkel Jensen (son of Jens), had a daughter Kirsten Mikkelsdatter (daughter of Mikkel).

And Ianto Jones, had he been born a couple hundred years earlier, would have been "John, the son of John".

They still use this in Iceland. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I like that pattern! - All of them. I like different patterns of nomenclature.

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