Between Languages and Cultures : an Exploratory Comparative Study of usage of Lithuanian and Brazilian masculine anthroponyms

The article aims at better understanding the usage of Lithuanian and Brazilian masculine first names by means of an exploratory comparative study based on statistical sources from national institutional websites of Lithuania and Brazil. Even though the two countries are rather different in terms of geography, number of population and official languages, there are some overlapping points along their history which suggest that the repertoire of names, particularly masculine ones, may have some similarities. The research results have confirmed the existence of equivalent names in both countries. These names are Christian names and their usage is influenced by Catholicism, a dominating religion in both countries. However, there is no evidence that names in different languages, that are equivalent in form and origin, should also have equivalent connotations.


Introduction
The aim of this article is to better understand the usage of Lithuanian and Brazilian masculine names by means of an exploratory comparative study based on statistical sources from national institutional websites of Lithuania and Brazil.It is known that masculine anthroponymy tends to be more conservative, has a smaller repertoire of names, and is more related to traditional naming practices (LÓPEZ-FRANCO, 2011, p. 214).Due to these facts, masculine anthroponymy is a good starting point to initial comparative anthroponymic studies.
To avoid any confusion, the terms anthroponomastics, anthroponym and anthroponomy are being used as advised by the International Council of Onomastic Sciences: anthroponomastics -branch of onomastics scholarly studying anthroponyms (authors note: Sometimes also called anthroponymy which is not recommended in this sense.)anthroponym -proper name of a person or a group of persons anthroponymy -the set of anthroponyms within a specific territory/ region, language, period of time etc. (NOTE: Sometimes also used for a branch of onomastics scholarly studying anthroponyms which is not recommended.).(ICOS, s/d).
In Linguistics, a comparative point of view allows to obtain results not only about the origin and development of languages, but also about their features that might be seen either as universal or as peculiar to each language and culture.In a similar manner, contrasting different social norms concerning people's first names can lead to a better comprehension of common and distinct features of names and their usage across languages and cultures.
The object of the study is first names which are assigned to the category of proper nouns.Proper nouns differ from common nouns in designating individual referents rather than generic ones.According to Lithuanian grammar Proper nouns are names of individual phenomena singled out from a class.All proper nouns are written with an initial capital letter (…).Semantically proper nouns can be divided into two groups: those denoting living beings, and those denoting inanimate things (AMBRAZAS, 1997, p. 95).
The definition of proper nouns is very similar to the one found in Brazilian grammars (CUNHA;CINTRA, 1985, p. 172) as this lexical class or linguistic word category exists in both languages.The same is true for personal proper names (anthroponyms) and their categorization in a rough way.Both Lithuanian and Brazilian official names consist of two major components, i.e. first name(s) or given name(s) and surname(s) or family name(s) which are recorded in the registry of natural persons.Unofficial names, such as nicknames and hypocoristics (affective abridged version of an anthroponym), are also common in both cultures.
This study focuses on the Lithuanian language, one of the two survivor Baltic languages, and Brazilian Portuguese, one of the Romance languages.The first is an inflectional language, while the second is analytic.Thus in the Portuguese language, syntactic function is mainly related to word order, and, in the Lithuanian language, it is shown by word declension.As distinct from Lithuanian, word endings carry information only about grammatical gender and number in Portuguese.The glosses below contain grammatical information about these languages which serves the purpose of this article: ( In Portuguese, the function of the noun is indicated by word order.If the noun is before the verb, it serves as the subject.If the noun follows the verb, it serves as the object.Thus O Pedro 1 in example (4) and Eu in example (6) are subjects, and me in example (4) and o Pedro in example (6) are objects.In Lithuanian equivalent sentences ( 5) and (7), this grammatical information is carried by the inflections -as and -ą on the proper name.While the inflection -as shows that the word is in the nominative singular masculine, the ending -ą is a feature of the accusative singular masculine.The nominative case is typically used for the subject of the verb as Petras in example (5), while the accusative case of the noun takes the syntactic function of the direct object as Petrą in example (6).
In the Lithuanian language, the nominative singular form is initial.Consequently, all the proper names listed on the Lithuanian institutional website used as the data source are in the nominative singular.The most common endings of masculine nouns in the nominative singular are highlighted in bold in the following examples: darbas (work), jaunimas (youth), lietuvis (Lithuanian), arklys (horse), lietus (rain), skaičius (number) (AMBRAZAS, 1997, p. 99-100).
1 In literary texts or for an emphasis, it is usual to change word order in Brazilian Portuguese.In those cases a comma is needed to show the more common word order is not followed.,e.g.Maria, eu a vi ontem, 'Mary I saw her yesterday '.  2 This ending should not be confused with the ending -ão that came from Latin -ionis and indicates that a verb was derived from a verb as in the world ação, "action" which is a feminine noun. 3There are cases in which one masculine or feminine noun indicates both masculine and feminine referents such as borboleta, fem.noun meaning "butterfly", tigre, masculine noun meaning "tiger", criança, fem.noun meaning children.In other cases just the article points if reference is done to a male or female person.For example, the word estudante that means student.If there is a fem.article before the noun, reference is made to a woman: a estudante.On the contrary, if there is a masc.article, reference is made to a man: o estudante.There are also a few masculine words that ends in "a" as in poema, "poem" and some masculine nouns that ends in "i " as in jabuti, a Brazilian kind of turtle.
Generally speaking, nouns which entered the languages by means of lexical borrowing and which share the same etymological stem and meaning differ only by their masculine endings: bankas -banco (bank), euras -euro (euro), telefonas -telephone (telephone), klubas -clube (club).
Besides the existence of the shared lexicon, there are also some overlapping points between these countries from a historical perspective.The first point is related to the influence of the Jesuits in both countries.In 1549, the first Jesuits arrived to Brazil under the leadership of Manuel da Nobrega.Jesuit missions had an abrupt end in 1759 when the law obliging them to leave the country was adopted.This period had two phases: the 16 th century was known for the adaptation, conversion and catechizing of indigenous people to Catholicism and Portuguese culture, while the 17 th and 18 th centuries were the era of consolidation of the education system that had started to be implemented during the previous phase (SHIGUNOV NETO;MACIEL, 2008).Meanwhile, the Jesuits arrived in Lithuania in 1569 and for over two hundred years promoted their education by establishing schools, colleges, seminaries and a university until the Society of Jesus was suppressed in 1773.As informed by Bumblauskas, The appearance of the Society of Jesus in Lithuania in 1569 may be deemed the symbolic beginning of this Baroque Age.The Jesuits brought with them a renewed Catholicism to Lithuania.With the help of the state, they were able to raise the level of secondary education in the country significantly by establishing a network of colleges, at the pinnacle of which was Vilnius University (founded in 1579) (BUMBLAUSKAS, 2015, p. 74).
The next overlapping point between the two countries is migration of Lithuanians to Brazil which took place in two waves.After World War I, emigration was influenced by social and economic factors.The majority of Lithuanians fled to Brazil in the years 1926-1930.The second wave started in 1940, with the beginning of World War II, when Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union and people were forced to leave the country as Displaced Persons (KASPERAVIČIUTĖ, 2010;ZEN, 2012).
However, from 1940 to 1990 Brazil and Lithuania took different routes.The former was under the right wing politics of Getúlio Vargas from 1930 to 1945 and under a military coup from 1964 to 1985.In the meantime, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union until the restoration of Lithuania's independence in 1990.
Differently from Brazil, where there was no religious persecution, in Lithuania, the increase of atheistic propaganda in the post-Stalin years played a significant role in the growing interest in alternative religiosity and non-Christian forms of spirituality.From the late 1950s onwards, the Communist Party started to promote so-called "new traditions", customs and rituals with pre-Christian roots, combining traditional elements with new Soviet inventions.Thus the midsummer solstice festival, the harvest celebration, and traditional village wedding rites were revived in the late 1950s, while their Christian forms became prohibited.At approximately the same time, alternatives for other Christian holidays were introduced.Thus, the spring feast (pavasario šventė) replaced Easter, new year (naujieji metai) appeared instead of Christmas, and the winter farewell (žiemos išvarymo šventė) was celebrated instead of the traditional carnival (užgavėnės).Scheduled for the same days as the Christian holidays, these new holidays were supposed to distract the population from the Church.(RUDLING, 2017, p. 90).
On the one hand, Jesuit tradition and predominance of Catholicism in both countries can be viewed as the common background, on the other hand, different economic, social and cultural policies, mainly during the second half of the 20 th century, suggest that cultural backgrounds in both countries are rather different.In addition, the accession of Lithuania to the European Union in 2004 could induce other changes in Lithuanian society which could be either convergent or divergent to the changes in Brazilian society at the same period.
Having in mind this cultural and historical context, the comparative exploratory study on masculine anthroponomy is based on two corpora, both of which have been created from the data available on two national institutional websites of Lithuania and Brazil.It is believed that results obtained from the corpora can be generalized on the assumption that they represent the main features of usage of masculine anthroponyms in each of the two countries.
The comparative analysis has been made in just one direction, as the Lithuanian corpus was compared to the Brazilian one.This study attempts to investigate if the corpora of the most popular names in Lithuania and Brazil have shared features that can be correlated to common historical and cultural backgrounds, and, on the contrary, if distinct features might be related to different cultural and historical backgrounds in addition to usage of first names which are specific only to one particular country.
To achieve this purpose some research questions have been formulated to establish common and distinct features in anthroponymy of the countries.What are the most popular masculine first names in Lithuania and Brazil?How many of them are the same or equivalent?How many are different?Are the most popular Lithuanian names having equivalents in Portuguese used in a similar way as their Brazilian counterparts?Do they share the same categorization from a semantic point of view?Are there any other linguistic features that are specific only to the Lithuanian corpus?
The research presented in this paper was developed to answer these questions.The paper is organized in the following way.First, there is a section of Literature Review that summarizes recent research in the field of Comparative Anthroponomastics and highlights contributions of some studies to this research.Secondly, there is a section describing theoretical background of the research with a special emphasis on usage of anthroponyms.Then, there is a section that describes the methodological procedures applied to generate and analyse the data collected from institutional websites of each country (LITHUANIA, 2014;BRAZIL, 2010).The results obtained are described and analyzed in three other sections.In the last section, there is a tentative interpretation of the results made on the basis of historical and cultural information collected and processed in the course of the research.

Literature Review
The research presented in this paper is of a comparative nature, i.e. it aims to study the same issue in two different cultural contexts: the most popular masculine first names in Lithuania and Brazil.There are very few studies in this particular field of research.In the review of papers (SEIDE, 2016), 33 papers published in the proceedings of the 24th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS, 2014) have been analyzed, including four articles which are related to this type of investigation: Mutsukawa (2014), Gudurić (2014), Ruiz (2014) and López-Franco (2014).
Gudurić presents a study about how French first names are adapted to the Serbian language morphologically and phonetically in translation practices.Mutsukawa describes and compares phonological and semantic features of masculine and feminine first names in two languages: English and Japanese.The aim is to understand how each language shows whether a personal name is female or male.This study has been motivated by the pedagogical purpose of teaching English to Japanese students and the Japanese language to native speakers of English.(MUTSUKAWA, 2014).
Dealing with semantics of anthroponyms, Ruiz investigates how first names are related to the semantic field of happiness, good luck and abundance.The study involves four different languages: náhuatl, omaya and purépecha (indigenous Mexican language), Greek, Latin and Hebrew and it is based on the etymological analysis.(RUIZ, 2014).
Different research has been carried out by López-Franco.The researcher presents a comparative study of the most frequent first names in two cities: Montepellier in France and Tlalnepantla de Baz in Mexico.The research is conducted on the basis of samples of birth certificates of citizens who were born in 1970 and 1975 in each place.The comparative study focuses on the number of constituents of first names in each corpus.
In the proceedings published two years after the 24th ICOS of 2014, only two papers are related to Comparative Anthroponomastics: Shokhenmaye (2016) and Walkowiak (2016).The first paper is dedicated to the analysis of the one hundred most frequent surnames in four countries: Germany, Russia, France and Britain.The surnames have been analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively.The qualitative analysis is based on the core meaning of the surnames, while the second shows which surnames are more common in those countries.The research results have shown relevant differences in the origins, meaning and development of the names in these countries.The second paper present a discussion about linguistic policies related to polish surnames at Lithuania and how they are translated to Lithuanian language, shows differences between the rules postulated but the linguistic policy and the forms really used In order to find out if there are any studies on Comparative Anthroponomastics in Brazil, an internet search was conducted on the 9 th April 2016 on Google Scholar, and it covered the period from 2011 to 2016.The keyword anthroponyms was used to select papers in Portuguese.The analysis of the first twenty pages of results showed that none of the articles was in this field of study.A similar electronic search was done regarding the Lithuanian part of the research on the 14 th September 2017, and similar results were obtained.It follows that there is a lack of anthroponymic comparative research in both countries.
However, the lack of a comparative aspect in the relevant field does not mean that research into anthroponomastics or anthroponyms is neglected at all.The pioneer of Lithuanian anthroponomastics was Būga who "investigated a large number of old two-stem personal names and established the authentic forms of Lithuanian dukes' names which have reached us only in non-Lithuanian written documents" (ZINKEVIČIUS, 1979, p. 93).
As for research into proper names during the recent decades, there are many papers of Lithuanian authors presenting descriptive and/ or prescriptive studies.There are some articles which explain how foreign personal names are/should be translated/rendered into the Lithuanian language (JUZELĖNIENĖ et al., 2016;BUTKUVIENĖ, PETRULIONĖ;2010), including the one published in the ICOS proceedings of 2014 where translation of Latvian fictional names in a fairytale were described (KVAŠYTĖ, 2014).There are also articles which address nicknames: a dialectology and etymological study of nicknames collected on geolinguistic expedition to two Lithuanian counties (MICKIENĖ; BARANAUSKIENĖ, 2012) and usage of nicknames in Lithuania (BUTKUS, 1999).It is also worth to mention a study which deals with the issues of language planning and naming in Lithuania with the particular focus on the use and standardisation of personal names (RAMONIENĖ, 2009).
Among the scarce papers on the topic under analysis, three of them contributed to the design of this comparative exploratory study: López-Franco (2014), Shokhenmayer (2016), andWalkowiak (2016).Two corpora have been compared like in the research by López-Franco (2014), statistics curves have been compared to show similarities and differences between the most popular names of Lithuanians and Brazilians similarly to Shokhenmayer's (2016) analysis, and the data have been analyzed in a sociological context, i.e. taking into consideration social, cultural and historical backgrounds following Walkowiak's (2016) ideas.After this brief literature review, the following sections describe theoretical foundations and methodological procedures used in the research.

Theoretical background
This article focuses on the first name of official anthroponyms.Differently from other anthroponyms, except for surnames, first names have a core meaning which correlates to their etymological meaning.In case a proper name originates from a common noun, the core meaning of the latter correlates to the core meaning of the proper name.From the point of view of name-givers and name-bearers, there can be a great variety of perceptions and attitudes towards first names.Some namegivers select the name due to its etymology, while others choose the name for other reasons, not knowing or being interested in its etymology.Name-bearers can also be aware of or ignore the etymology of his or her name.
Like other proper names, as Dick (1992) argues, anthroponym is an onomastic sign that shares some properties with toponyms.Both are motivated as they are conscientiously chosen by name-givers for some reason.Common nouns, on the contrary, are not motivated (except for neologisms) since they pre-exist language users.Proper names are culturally depended in two senses -their choice reflects values of the language community where the name is chosen, and they are in accordance with how the community conceptualizes the world.
From this point of view, if two language communities have a common cultural and/or historical background, there are more chances to observe an overlapping anthroponymic field.This is particularly the case when names share the same etymology or have cognates in both languages.An evident example of this phenomenon is the quantity of first names sharing a Christian core meaning in Romance and other Indo-European languages; for example, the name Paul has equivalent names in many languages, including Pavlos (Greek), Pau and Pol (Catalan), Paolo (Italian), Pablo (Spanish), Pauls (Latvian), Paulius (Lithuanian) and Paulo (Portuguese).
These resemblances point to the interaction between proper names as a part of language and society.Van Langendonk claims that such a relation is paradoxical.On the one hand, proper nouns have a marginal position in the linguistic system as they do not render functional distinction as common nouns do.On the other hand, due to their position, "the impact of social clustering on the name system has been known to be more considerable.This impact seems to be a sensitive barometer for the measurement of social development" (LANGENDONK, 2007, p. 307).In other words, proper nouns have a socio-onomastic value.In the specific case of anthroponym, the socio-onomastic value also lies in the fact that onomasticon is constantly renewed: new names originate with new individuals.Hence much more than the appellative lexicon and system, the personal name inventories and structures can and do reflect new developments in society fairly quickly (....) (LANGENDONK, 2007, p. 308).
As far as antroponymic usage is concerned, the distinction among the language, norm and system proposed by Coseriu (1987) seems to be useful, although it is not clear whether the proper noun has distinctive functional proprieties.As Obrocea explains, the "system appears as a system of possibilities, of freedoms, requiring only conformity with the functional conditions of the linguistic instrument, while the norm represents a system of obligatory and traditional actualization" (OBROCEA, 2016, p. 91).Nevertheless, "the speakers perform speech acts according to previous models <<which they include and exceed>>" (COSERIU, 1993, p. 59;OBROCEA, 2016, p. 91 ).In this context, as speech acts can go further than the norm, linguistic change "can be defined as rebellion against norm, allowed by the system" (COSERIU, 1993, p. 59;OBROCEA, 2016, p. 91).
One important feature of the proper noun is that this class in univocal in the sense that proper nouns are used to indicate a unique individual.As far as a proper name of a person is concerned, in most societies, parents choose a name for their child consciously.This process of name giving takes place on the speech level described by Coseriu.However, it is not only an individual isolated act, it is also a pattern of social behaviour which is related to the norm level.Moreover, when a "new" anthroponym is chosen by parents, it changes the norm level which corresponds to the collective usage of a community.
In the linguistic system and culture of the name-giver, there is a repertoire of names from which a name can be selected.However, this repertoire is not a closed system, but an open one, as at any time a new name can be added, while some other names can fall in disuse.It can be claimed that on a very abstract level, the total amount of existing first names in a language corresponds to its anthroponymic system.On a more concrete and pragmatic level, for a certain period of time, there is a smaller repertoire of names corresponding to the collective usage of this community.This collective usage is dynamic in two senses.First, new names and unused names periodically change the stock of names; secondly, changing values and believes of the society can also influence parents' choice of names.In addition, depending on traditional or innovative tendencies of the community, the stock of names can change in a more quick or slow way.
It has to be considered that the collective usage is a variable phenomenon which depends on the limits, nature and tendencies of a given community.It is also important to emphasize that there can be many usages existing in one single system.It is the case of Brazilian Portuguese where in addition to the national norm, regional norms also exist.
The norm, in its essence, is a system of forced realizations, social and cultural impositions, and it varies depending on the community.Within the same national linguistic community and within the same functional system it is possible to prove that there are several distinct norms (familiar language, popular language, literary language, erudite language, vulgar language, etc.), especially when vocabulary is concerned.(COSERIU, 1987, p. 74-75) 4   On the basis of the notion of collective usage (or norm in Coseriu's terminology), the research presented in this paper aims to compare two anthroponymic collective usages, specifically Lithuanian and Brazilian.It is assumed that each culture has a repertoire of anthroponyms at parents' disposal for a given period of time.In each locality, a name can be either selected from this stock or not (if the name is not part of it yet).While the first choice signals traditional behaviour, the second evidences the wish to choose a different, new and unique name for a child.
To discover if and how Lithuanian usage resembles Brazilian, two corpora of names have been compared.Characteristics of each corpus and methodological procedures used in the research are described in the following section.

Methodological procedures
To find out what the most popular names in each country are, the data available on two national institutional websites has been collected: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) -Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (BRAZIL, 2010) and Valstybinė lietuvių kalbos komisija (VLKK) -State Commission of the Lithuanian Language.On IBGE website, the data is obtained from the list of the most popular names in Brazil according to IBGE census of 2010 published in Nomes IBGE 2010 -IBGE Names 2010 site.On VLKK website, the data is obtained from the list of the most popular Lithuanian names available on the site Asmenvardžiai -Personal names (the corresponding sites are cited on the footnotes seven and eight).
Differences in the data required the application of extra procedures aiming to render them comparable.On the Brazilian website, there are lists of the most popular names by decade (from 1930 to 2000 or 8 decades in total) according to a calculation made on the basis of a statistic filter (names which have less than 20 occurrences for a decade of birth are not shown).On the Lithuanian website, there are lists of the most popular first names by two semesters of each year based on all the certificates of birth entered to Residents' Register.In total, there were 20 lists of names covering the period from 2006 to 2017. 5o make the data comparable, Lithuanian names mentioned in these lists have been summed up thus assembling a list of the most popular names of the decade.This list constitutes the Lithuanian Corpus (LC).Since there are 17 names in LC, the Brazilian Corpus (BL) has been made by including only the 17 most popular names provided in IBGE. 6Since there are no complete static curves available for the years 2000 in IBGE, the 1990s have been chosen, because this is the nearest decade represented by complete static curves.
To verify if the names in the corpora are equivalent or not, two criteria have been used: the form and the origin of the name.The linguistic analysis of the nominal forms has been made according to features of each language, while the analysis of the origin of the names has been made based on two sources: Brazilian etymological dictionary of names and surnames (GUÉRIOS, 1981), and Lietuvių vardų kilmės žodynas -Dictionary of the origin of Lithuanian names (KUZAVINIS;SAVUKYNAS, 2003).In the cases of divergent information or lack of information, the following online sources have been used: the website Behind the Name created by Mike Campbell in 1996 (CAMPBELL, s.d.), and Lithuanian subsite of VLKK Vardai -Names developed in 2006-2015 by Daiva Sinkevičiūtė's research group from Vilnius University, Lithuania.
The semantic analysis of the lists of the most popular names has considered the core meaning of the names using information available in the four sources mentioned above.The names have been classified into three categories: Christian names, non-Christian names and others.Then the data has been calculated in percentage in each corpus, and, finally, the percentages have been compared.
To check if usage of the most popular Lithuanian names having equivalents in Portuguese has any resemblance with static curves reflecting usage of these names in Brazil, the data available on each website has been compared.This part of research considers 8 decades (from 1930 to 2000) since this data is available on both websites.The following parameters have been considered: peak year, duration of the peak, if and when the name stopped to be used, and if it started to be used after some decades.Further linguistic analysis was conducted to cover usage of hypocoristical names as official first names in Lithuanian corpus.Finally, in the conclusions section, a tentative contextual analysis of the results is presented, which is based on historical and cultural information provided in the introduction of this paper.

The top 17 masculine first names in LC and LB
Application of the procedures described in the previous section has resulted in two lists of the top 17 names.As can be seen in Table 1, there are four names which can be considered as equivalent if only their form is taken into account.In the LC column, the number of citations during the period under analysis (from the second semester of 2006 to the first semester of 2017) is given in parenthesis; for example, the name Kajus was mentioned seven times as one of the most popular names during the period, but it was less popular than Dominykas, which was cited 10 times in LC.In the IBGE sample, the names are presented in the order of occurrences.As mentioned previously, there are four names closely resembling in form: Lukas, Matas, Danielius and Gabrielius, which are the equivalents of Lucas, Mateus (and its spelling variant Matheus), Daniel and Gabriel.In addition, they share the same origins, confirming that they are the same names in different languages, that is, they are cognates.While Lukas and Lucas are of Latin origin (GUÉRIOS, 1981, p.165, KUZAVINIS;SAVUKYNAS, 2003, p. 222,), the other names originated from Hebrew (GUÉRIOS, 1981, p. 173, p. 100, p. 127;KUZAVINIS;SAVUKYNAS, 2003, p. 244, p. 89, p. 134).
As for the name Joris, it hardly has an equivalent in Portuguese.The Dictionary of the Origin of Lithuanian Names explains that it originated from the name of the God of Spring Greenness of the old Lithuanians (KUZAVINIS; SAVUKYNAS, 2003, p. 179).On the subsite Vardai, two ethymologies are provided: (1) an appellative personal name of Baltic origin, a mythological name, and (2) a shortened version of a Baltic name.However, in the Behind the name website, the name is explained as a Dutch and Frisian form of George.Despite the latter assumption, this particular name could not be classified either as equivalent or as non-equivalent to the Portuguese name Joris that was registered in the IBGE database in the 1960s and 1970s.
The other masculine names, Benas, Domantas and Domas (the latter name is of a hypocoristic nature coming from Domantas), have not been recorded either in GUÉRIOS (1981) nor in the IBGE database.In the Dictionary of the Origin of Lithuanian Names they are described as having Baltic origins (KUZAVINIS; SAVUKYNAS, 2003, p. 73, p. 102, p. 102).These can be considered as names specific only to Lithuanians.The use of hypocoristics Domas and Benas as first names is relatively recent, as, according to the data retrieved from VLKK database, they both became popular only in the 1980s.
Summarizing the results obtained, it can be claimed that while just four names are shared among the most popular ones in each country, there are no equivalent names in the Portuguese language for only three Lithuanian names: Domantas, Domas and Benas.From the semantic point of view, regardless of being different names, almost all of them fall into the same category, since 74% of the BC names and more than 82.35% of the LC names are related to Christianity.
To verify if the names in the LT corpus are names that also exist in the Brazilian anthroponymical repertoire, and if the names have or had similar usage in terms of frequency, the usage of each item has been taken into account considering the static curves of usage available on the IBGE and VLKK websites.The results are described and analysed in the following section.

Usage of shared first names in both countries
In an article about usage of first names in a corpus, Seide (in press) two tendencies in the way a name is used have been notedtraditional and fashionable.If a name is used in a traditional way, its usage is variable but continuous.It may fall into disuse for one or two decades, but it is always expected that the name will start to be used again by the following generations.On the contrary, if a name is used in a fashionable way, it stops to be used for a longer period time or, after entering a repertoire of names and gaining short-term popularity (from one to three decades), i.e. after one or more peaks of usage, the name stops to be used at all.Dynamic usage of names follows certain cycles of usage, in which some names have fashion peaks while others are used continuously in a traditional way; some were rarely used in the past, but regain their popularity after some time.
Having these possibilities in mind, the static curves available have been compared.It has been verified if each name is in use during the given period and how frequently it is used over time.The time period under consideration for the most popular names was 2006-2017 for LC and1990-2000 for BL.However, all periods available on IBGE were checked to find out if the equivalent names were used in Brazil in the past.A curve on IBGE related to a name that was used earlier, was compared to a corresponding curve of LC.
The comparison of static curves reflecting usage of Matas and Mateus shows that they have similar design in terms of fashion -there is one peak for Mateus and two for Matas.At the beginning of the periods (2006 for Matas and 1990 for Mateus), the name was already popular and its usage had the highest peak in 2008 in Lithuania and in 2000 in Brazil.The variant form Matheus has the same statistic curve of usage as Mateus.Gabrielius and Gabriel also demonstrate similar statistical behaviour.In both corpora, at the beginning of the period, the name was continuously getting greater popularity during the period of twenty years in both corpora.While in LC it happened in 1992-2013, in BC it occurred between 1980and 2000.Thus it is possible to state that these names are popular and fashionable in both countries.
Popularity of fashionable names Lukas and Lucas are of different duration.While the usage of Lukas was increasing from 1992 to 2005, the popularity of Lucas started to grow in 1980 with the peak from 1990 to 2000.So while popularity of Lukas continued for ten years, Lucas' popularity was twice longer.Thus it can be claimed that Lucas is more popular than Lukas.
Among these names, the most different curves are those related to Danielius and Daniel.In 1990, when Daniel was in the middle of an exceptional three decades peak, which started in 1980 and continued till 2000, the popularity of Danielius was just starting to increase.The first peak is observed in 1995 and the major one was reached in 1999.Since then usage of the name has been increasing in Lithuania.At the end of the period covered by VLKK statistics (2013), it reaches the highest usage rate.In this case, Daniel is more popular than Danielius and its usage in Brazil is also more traditional.Regardless of these differences, IBGE data of the previous decade shows that the name Daniel actually started to be used more between 1960 and 1970.According to the VLKK data, Danielius is scarcely used during the same period.The tendency was changed only in the year of 1995, and this is the evidence that the usage of Danielius is fashionable.In the following section, usage of other popular Lithuanian names that have equivalents in the Portuguese language is compared.

Popular names in Lithuania having equivalent names in Portuguese
In the LC, there are twelve names that have equivalent forms in Portuguese, but they are not represented in the BC, i.e. they were not among the17 most popular names in 1990s.To compare usage of these names in Brazilian and Lithuanian databases, two procedures have been applied.First, on the IBGE website, each name was checked to find out when it was used more often and for how long.Then, each name was checked on the VLKK website for the same period, i.e. when the name was used more often in the IBGE database.The criterion applied to identify when a name was used most, was the change on the percentile to a higher one.On the contrary, when the name is on the lowest percentile of the graphic, the name was considered as rarely used.The data presented in Table 2 shows a gradient of resemblance in usage that varies from total coincidence of usage to none.In the first case, there are the pairs Augusto -Augustas and Caio -Kajus whose usage coincides in 1990s both in Brazil and Lithuania, and Dovydas and Davi most used in 1980s.In the middle of the spectrum there is the name Jonas, which was used in both countries, but with very different peaks.In Lithuania, it was mostly used in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, while in Brazil there was a peak in the 1990s, when the name was already rarely used by Lithuanians.The majority of the names has very different usage, since names most used in Brazil in the first half of the 20 th century were rare at that same time in Lithuania.Total discrepancy was found in the pair Nojus -Noé.It was used mainly in the 1950s and 1960s by Brazilians, while was not used at all until 1993 by Lithuanians.

Conclusions and final remarks
The discrepancies in usage of names in Lithuania and Brazil suggest that there might be different associations related to these names in each country.Certain names are often used by Lithuanian name-givers nowadays and, thereby, can be connected with young people; in Brazil, on the contrary, Brazilians can relate the same names to elderly people, because they were used decades ago but their popularity has recently decreased.It means that the existence of equivalent names does not guarantee that these names have equivalent connotations.
When popularity and periods of usage are not considered, there are more similarities between Lithuanian and Brazilian first names, as just three Lithuanian names (Benas, Domas, Domantas) have no counterparts in the Portuguese language.It means that there is a shared repertoire of names on the system level.Since this stock of names is made of Christian names, these results can be explained by the fact that Catholicism and Jesuit educational tradition are common cultural features of both countries.
When the period of usage is taken into account, Christian popular names of the last decade in Lithuania were rarely used fifty years ago, except for Jonas.In Brazil, on the contrary, most of them were popular in 1950s and 1960s.In Lithuania, the period when usage of Christian names decreased coincides with the soviet period, while their usage started increasing in the year of restoration of Lithuania's independence in 1990.The exception of Jonas confirms the general results of the research, as it was the unique name that was popular in Lithuania during the soviet period, while in Brazil it was used during the same period, but with the mayor peak just in 1990.
These results correlate with the soviet propaganda and elimination of religion from social and cultural life, which have never taken place in Brazil.This historical fact might have contributed to a greater differentiation between usage of anthroponyms during that period.
When Lithuania regained its independence, patterns of usage of equivalent names became more similar.This can be related to the fact that modernization and westernization of the post-soviet country induced extensive changes in the cultural sphere, including the ones characteristic of Brazilian culture.Despite the increased similarities in the choice of first names in both cultures, the Lithuanian repertoire of names contains first names which are specific only to the Lithuanian culture: three out of the 17 most popular masculine names of the LC belong to this category of names.This phenomenon can be connected to the national revival movement which preceded as well as followed the restoration of Lithuania's independence.
Summing up the results obtained, it can be stated that usage of masculine first names in Lithuania has some common features with the usage in Brazil, especially in recent years.This exploratory study has helped to get a better understanding of whether and how usage of Lithuanian masculine anthroponyms can be compared to Brazilian ones.Even though the two countries are rather different in terms of geography, number of population and official languages, it is possible to make some correlations between the data and some historical events.However, in order to get more conclusive results, further research is required.
Many names shared by Lithuanians and Brazilians have a Christian core meaning, but there is no guarantee that parents have chosen these names having their religious connotation in mind.The current study has not aimed to find out if the choice of a name having a religious meaning has been inspired by religious motives.In order to learn it, the parents should be questioned first.The same is true for the names which are specific only to Lithuanians.It cannot be claimed that these choices have been solely motivated by nationalistic ideas.It was not possible to come to final and definite conclusions since the study was based on a documentary analysis.These research limitations suggest that a contextual analysis is required, so that the questions would be answered and explanations provided.

TABLE 1 -
Top 17 masculine first names

TABLE 2 -
Compative results of translatable names from the LC