I came across a particularly unusual name while reading a story about the English Championship, which is the official (if misleading) name for English soccer’s second division.

He plays as a winger for Wolverhampton Wanderers, and his name?

Rajiv van La Parra.

Think about that for a moment.

If, like me, you find it to be an interesting/odd collection of names … well, I think we are on solid ground.

Let’s take it apart.

Rajiv? Indian name, through and through. A man’s name. Not uncommon.

Van? Clearly Dutch. Meaning “of” or “from” and found in many Dutch names. Rembrandt van Rijn. Marco van Basten. Louis van Gaal.

La? The feminine “the” in Spanish. (Oscar De La Hoya.) And French, too.  “La Fayette, Alabama.”

And Parra? A fairly common surname of Spanish origin.

So, how did this one person come to have such a curious collection of names?

Especially when he was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands? And is of Surinamese extraction?

The Rajiv bit is easiest to explain. The soccer player was born not long after Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister of India, was assassinated, in 1991. Thus, his given name was a tribute to the politician.

La Parra is not that difficult, either, though it cannot be common in The Netherlands.

But the “van La Parra” construction is strange. It contains linking words from two languages, Dutch and Spanish. It may be the Dutch tweaking a La Parra in their midst — and Spain ruled Netherlands/Belgium for much of the 16th century. The locals tacking on a “van” when the “la” already served as a signifier.

If wikipedia is any guide, Van La Parra is a rare name (the soccer player is the only one I see), and putting the Rajiv in front of it … well, there’s no doubting who we are talking about, is there?

I mentioned this in the office, this interesting name … and an Indian colleague responded by citing a friend of his.

The friend’s name is along the lines of Thomas Mahmoud Krishnan. The point being that his first name is a Christian name, the second is Muslim, the third Hindu.

“And,” my colleague said, “he is an atheist.”