Me, a Name I Call Myself

In addition to trying to learn something of Russian etiquette and culture, I am also trying to revive the smattering of Russian I was able to learn at Columbia.

So far (only one lesson into my Teach Yourself Russian book), this is proving easier than I had anticipated. I find that the alphabet is coming back to me readily, though it will take some practice to remember that the equivalent of a lower-case "p" in Russian handwriting looks not like a pi sign (as do the printed versions of the letter "p"), but like an English lower-case "n". Similarly, it hasn't taken long to get expressions like kak dyela ("how are you doing"), da svedanya (goodbye), or pozhalyusta ("please") back in my consciousness.

Like most language course, my Teach Yourself Russian course moves pretty swiftly into introductions. Now, here is an interesting subject for linguistic investigation: in Russian, you introduce yourself by saying menya zovoot [name]", which translates literally as "Me is called [name]." In French, it's je m'appelle--"I call myself". And in English, we prefer "My name is" or "I'm....".

So, just among these three languages (chosen largely because they're the three in which I've been exposed to and can remember this information), we have four possible ways of saying your name:

1) Name as something you are ("I'm So and So")

2) Name as something you have or possess ("My name's")

3) Name as something you use of yourself ("I call myself")

4) Name as something others use for you or give to you ("Me is called")

So here's my question: why we we all--not just we Anglophones, but Francophones, Russophones, and the rest of humanity--get into such narrow preferences about this? The equivalents of these forms can be made in any of the above languages (though somewhat trickier in Russian, as I'm not sure Russian has a word for a name in general that is used of persons, as opposed to first name, patronymic, or last name). All of these forms would be comprehensible to a speaker of any of these languages. And yet speakers of all of these languages would think less of someone who used the wrong form for that language.

These kinds of questions about language interest me more and more.