The following list of names, which recently appeared in Harper’s, caught my eye because I’ve come across similar names in my own travels in Mongolia. “Khunbish”, for example, which means “not human”, was once a popular given name, since it was thought the evil spirits would ignore a baby if they didn’t know it was human. Mongolians are so superstitious about making babies seem unattractive the spirit world that it’s actually polite to say “yamar … Read more »