I think it’s also good to be mindful of the mental image a name invokes in speakers of a language. While it’s no longer very common, Wolf is nonetheless an established given name in German and speakers of German are therefore unlikely to think of the actual animal when addressing or meeting someone whose name is Wolf.
The same applies to the name Robin in English. It’s an established name, which is why people don’t pause and think of the reddish songbird when someone introduces themselves as Robin.
As others said previously, the same doesn’t apply to 狼 in Japanese, with おおかみ as its reading. It’s quite literally just the word for an animal, which could cause people to pause or find the name strange or comical. Similar to the way an English speaker would react if you chose an animal as your name that isn’t commonly used as one, e.g. Deer. That doesn’t disqualify it, and there’s no negative connotation, but you should be aware of it.
Makes sense. Thanks for elaborating; I didn’t know it sounded like Deity or would directly mean “the animal wolf”. I had a suspicion it would be comical to keep it in kanji but had no idea it would be that bad lol. ウォルフ it is. Thanks all
Is that so? Wolfgang is a common German name, yes, but I’ve never heard just Wolf as a name. I’d definitely make a comment about how cool the name is because of the animal…
It’s definitely fallen out of use more recently and isn’t nearly as common as Wolfgang, but I wouldn’t consider it an “odd” name by any means.
Off the top of my head I can think of two Germans in the public eye called Wolf: Wolf Biermann, a musician who is known for having his GDR citizenship stripped because the politburo considered his music Western propaganda, and Wolf von Lojewski, who was a ZDF newscaster for a long time.
Oh interesting, I’ve never heard about them before. I guess it’s really a bit of a generational or maybe even regional thing then.
(Though it might also be that my memory is just particularly bad…)
As can be seen in the Wikipedia entry, the name was more common ~50 years ago. Currently in the US at least, the most famous Wolf I can think of is Wolf Blitzer of CNN.
