Spanish Names

People come and go through my little work bubble, as projects shift and resources flow.

The software team is divided up somewhat by specialty (as are us board designers) so people can gain a useful level of expertise. The workforce is pretty diverse and polyglot, but there can be ethnic clumping. Half my team is Vietnamese, for example (so's the manager). Turns out the guys developing camera software for Android are mostly from Mexico. Not Mexican-Americans, which is too bad, because I hate seeing the non-white native American groups (Native-Americans, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans) get left behind despite the success of immigrant populations. Just guys from Mexico, probably Guadalajara, where we have a plant.

I worked today with a guy named Omar (stress on the second syllable) and I got to thinking that it was kind of neat that a Hebrew name that is popular amongst Arabs wound up a part of Spanish culture, obviously by being left behind while the Moors were expelled from Al-Andalus in the Fifteenth Century. There are of course many other cultural remnants.

This in turn made me think of the name Humberto, of course. Why wouldn't it? The name Humbert was brought to Spain by English refugees of the Norman Conquest, and over time it passed into general usage.

Spain is a fascinating country with an amazing and complex history. I didn't used to think so. I think people often get interested in the histories within their own heritage at the expense of looking outward. So as a lad I was all into pre-Norman England as well as Vikings and tried to concoct story ideas inspired by Conan. Of course that went nowhere but the point was that Spain and Italy and even France were uninteresting to me. Strangely enough this is not uncommon. There's a lot of literature out there that romanticizes the Celts one way or another. Why not other peoples? How come there's no literary history around great Basque warrior-minstrels? Or maybe there is.