natural

I attended a US naturalization ceremony this morning. Naturalization procedure invites new citizens to make the name changes on the day of naturalization because it avoids a subsequent rigmarole and because newly admitted citizens often do want to regularize name spelling, repair mangled name forms imposed by immigration agencies, and the like.

Five of the thirty or so name changes I saw this morning consisted of augmenting an existing name with Islam or a phonetically close variant. The only other pattern discernible in the name changes were six augmentations of of an otherwise Asian name with a Western familiar name ('Jimmy' came up three times).