THE DEPARTMENT’S YOUNGEST MEMBER

On Thursday morning Pranav Anand and Nikki Vamosi became the parents of a new baby boy, named Ashim. Mother and son are doing very well and brother Samar is very excited by his baby brother. A true linguist, Pranav relates that Ashim’s name is a near synonym of Samar’s, down to morphemes:

a + sima
lacking + boundary
‘unlimited/endless/eternal’

saa + mar
without + death
‘undying/immortal’

Pranav writes, Admittedly, sima has a much broader sense distribution (Patanjali uses it in terms expressing morpheme and word boundaries), and perhaps a+sima itself could be thus argued to correspond to that most impressive of linguistic devices: the unbounded dependencies created by movement. But, at least as far as names go, they are remarkably close in meaning.