eh, also I just made a new character and its name is 'a male avian' :\ that can't be right...any suggestions? Basically what it seems to be doing is using short descriptions instead of names.
No doubt Kalahn will explain it better, but I believe in DoT you don't see the names of things until they are introduced.
For example, if you were walking down the street you would think "there comes a young female human", not "there comes Mary Brown" unless you already knew her.
DoT is similar. However as an admin I think you can turn on "holyname" which lets you see the name of everything.
The reason you're seeing short descriptions is exactly as Nick said. The Dawn of Time Mud had a heavy roleplaying atmosphere, hence the short descriptions being shown. There is an introduction system in place, where a player can introduce themselves to another person, and from that time on, they will see their name.
If this still doesn't suit your needs, there's another venue for you, fear not, the feature heavy DoT codebase is there for you :) Assuming you're an IMP, you'll have access to the gameedit command. Simply type "gameedit confirm". You're now in the game editor which handles a lot of global mud options. Now type "flag noshort" and everyone will see each other by their name.
Hope this helps :)
Kerenos
PS - You will be told to save the game setting once you type 'done' to exit the game editor, the command to do this is savegameset. I know it prompts you to do it, just thought I'd make doubly sure you save your settings, hehe.