The history of the origin of Slavic names is very interesting. Some of them have survived to this day, and some people do not even know what meaning they carried when they first appeared.
The sacred meaning of the name
The concept of the name has changed little since ancient times. Previously, and now too, people believed that the name determines the fate of a person. The name is the essence of a person, it is something sacred. As a rule, a person had two names: one was given at birth, and the other in adolescence. The first name was false, common to all acquaintances, and the second was true, for the closest people. It was a pagan tradition, which partially passed into Christianity among the Slavs, when a second name was given at baptism. The meaning of this custom was to protect a person from evil spirits and evil people. That is why the first name was unsightly, ugly, even evil. The middle name was given in adolescence, when the main character traits were formed.
The main sources of origin of Slavic names
There are several types of Slavic names, they all have different origins. For example, the personified names of animals and plants turned into names were very common among the Slavs: Hare, Pike, Ruff, Wolf, Nut, etc. As already mentioned, it was also customary to use the name to scare away evil spirits, so the following names were common: Malice, Kriv, Nekras.
There were names derived from the participles: Nezhdan, Zhdan, Khoten and others. Sometimes it was customary to call children by the names of the Slavic pagan gods: Yarilo, Veles, Lada and others. If the parents had little imagination, in this case, names were invented in the order of appearance in the family: Pervak, Pervusha, Vtorak, Tretyak and so on. Truncated forms of words denoting human qualities were also used as names: Stoyan, Brave, Dobr and others.
The main group of names is two-base: Ratibor, Svyatoslav, Lyubomir, Tikhomir, Vsevolod, Bogdan, Dobrogneva, Svetozar, Miloneg, Bazhen, Boleslav, Borislav, Zlatotsveta, Izyaslav and others. These names can be deciphered by a modern person. Bogdan - means "given by God", Lubomyr - "love the world", Lyudmila - "dear to people", Boleslav - "glorified, more glorious" and so on.
With the advent of Christianity to Russia, many traditionally Slavic names fell out of use. A whole layer of Greek names took their place. Nevertheless, sometimes names were formed from Slavic roots, which duplicated the Greek ones. Such, for example, are Faith, Hope, Love, their prototypes: Pistis, Elpis, Agape. Of the male names - Leon, the Slavic analogue of the Greek name Leo. The ancient Slavic names have practically fallen out of use by now. Only those worn by the saints canonized in Christianity have survived.
