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WriteOn: Naming Stuff (part 2) [1]

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Date: 2023-03-30

The Belgariad is a five book series, light fantasy, by David (and Leigh) Eddings. The world-building is adequate to hold up the story (and a sequel series). That’s not the point, but the way he constructed character and place names is.

Here’s a list of names:Nyissa, Sthiss Tor, Issa, Salmissra, Adiss, Essia, Illessa, Issa, Issus, Sadi, Sariss, Y'diss

And here’s another one: Belgarath, Belgarion, Beldin, Belkira, Beltira, Belmakor, Belsambor, Belzedar, Polgara, Poledra

And one last one: Xantha, Xera, X’bel, X’Vanne, X’Nedra

All three lists are glaringly obviously related.

While this is not the only example, this was the first series I read where it was glaringly obvious that some effort had gone into it.

I once read a piece of writing advice to the effect of “don’t start any character names with the same letter”, as a way to avoid confusion. This glaringly violates that idea (and, honestly, any novel or series with a decent sized cast can’t possibly adhere to that). But my take on the rule is it’s intended to help avoid reader confusion.

The obvious relation between each group of names conveys immediate information. Their name starts with Bel- or Pol-? They’re one of the sorcerers. X? Dryad. Sounds like a hiss? Nyissan.

The latter is a good starting point, since it’s not one repeated initial letter or sound.

What stands out to me is the -iss (or -ess) construction, combined with a limited set of consonants. (And even Sadi could be Adiss with the final -ss moved to the beginning.) The vowels are all fairly close together in sound, at least in my reading.

Here’s a handy IPA chart, for anyone who wants to dig further. (Also, wikipedia’s article for IPA consonants and IPA vowels. IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet, in this case, and not a beer. Sorry.) There’s also a nice, brief discussion at the Language Construction Kit, and the end of that has a grid just for American English, which I’m screencapping here since it doesn’t have a nice HTML anchor to link directly to:

English consonant grid (zompist.com/...)

If you compare that to the full IPA consonant chart, you can see many missing consonants. That’s what gives a language its sound, what’s missing, and what’s kept.

When I finally realized I’d wasted far too many writing days (and at the time that was largely an in-person, once a week, meetup) inventing a full naming language and being highly dissatisfied with the results, I took the consonant chart I had built and instead just made some syllables from it. I’d decided to allow b, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, r, and th for inital sounds, short a, e, i, and long o, long u for vowels. I settled on two syllables plus -a for female names, and two syllables ending on a consonant for male names.

So, starting with, say, R[vowel]th, and playing around, I ended up with a list of potential names: (male) Rethak, Rethos, Rathos, Rathak, Rathan, Rithan, Ruthan, (female) Rathina, Rethana, Rithana, and some more. I picked a couple that didn’t overlap (Rethak became Relthak for reasons, and Rithana carried forward), and started with other syllables. And soon I had a pair of decent lists to pull from as I needed character names:

(male) Marak, Renak, Relthak, Kirthan, Theros, Kathos, Herath, Kelthar, Feruth; (female) Rithana, Kalitha, Nethira, Dethana, Themira, Hirala, Thalira, Faritha.

Handily, since they will eventually interact with a cousin culture, there are some obvious spots for linguistic drift. For instance, Th- becomes T-, so Thalira would become Talira.

If you see someone wander into a scene, and his name is Likavo or her name is Mezina, it’s glaringly obvious “they ain’t from ‘round here”.

And, as a bonus, one can use the same syllables to build up town names. In my case, I’d add a syllable or two, so a city might be Koranos, Karithos, Modithar, or Thalusar. Plus the accidental choice of -os suggests that names ending with -os might be “person from”, e.g. Theros might be from the city of Theronos, or Rethos suggests a city named Rethanos — or Karithos suggests Karos as a name. And if you put most of the -ar cities to the north, and -os cities to the south, that implies a handy geographic division, history, and possibly old rivalries.

Anyway, that’s my shortcut that skips a naming language, and sometimes you get those happy accidents.

Happy writing! And naming!

Exercise/challenge: Choose three vowel sounds and six consonants, and create at least ten names from them. Then write a short scene using those names (characters, places, plants, diseases, planets, etc.).

To help readers who don’t work in secondary world fantasy, I want to highlight a suggestion from last week’s comments. Perusing the credits of movies that are period and location appropriate can provide a great source of inspiration.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/30/2159400/-WriteOn-Naming-Stuff-part-2

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