Unnamed

 

In earlier times the space in Birth Certificates would be left blank to be filled in when the mother and child are discharged from hospital. If the parents had not decided on a name at the time of the discharge, the space for the child’s name would be filled with the word “unnamed” indicating no name had been chosen at the time of discharge. 

That practise was alright in the past when the use of English was prevalent, but later when English gave way to “Bahasa Melayu”  civil servants not conversant in English, did not comprehend the  term “unnamed” and assumed that that was the name of the child. The poor child was registered with Unnamed (pronounced as Oon Na Med) as its name in schools and had to have it corrected while in school or if not discovered had to add an “alias”to the name “unnamed”. This happened more in vernacular schools where the teachers’ comprehension of the English Language was equally poor and the strange name was assumed to be the real name of the child.   

Besides this, names were distorted when the spelling of the names pronounced the vernacular were spelt wrongly. In the past the Birth certificates used to be filled up by  policemen who were the initial public officers where reports of births and deaths are reported.  An Indian  colleague of mine at the Post Office named Kunjuni had his name spelt as Kong Yong Nee and had a difficult time explaining how he acquired a Chinese name.  

Another common flaw was when the clerk at the Registry of births came across the term name “ not provided”. The clerk who came across this term would conclude that the name was “provided” leaving the child to sort out the problem as they grew up. 

Fortunately problems of this nature became less common over the years, as clerical staff charged with responsibilities to write out birth certificates are now literate and avoid distorting names. Parents are also wiser and to avoid problems they write out the names and pass it to the clerical staff who are charged only with the responsibility of filling out the birth certificates, thus reducing the chances  of distortions in writing names.

All contents (c) Ganapathy Ramasamy, mynameisgana@blogspot.com

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