Real and unreal names

[swan_tower]

Rambling thoughts, as I try to name a character.

Lots of fantasy and science fiction feature made-up names. Some of them look more made-up than others — but there are ways and ways of looking made-up, aren’t there? When The Tropic of Serpents came out, I recall reading a review where the person complained about having difficulty with the made-up fantasy names in that book . . . in a way that strongly suggested they had no trouble with Dagmira, Vystrana, Drustanev, or any of the other equally invented names from the first book. But of course those are all recognizably European in style, while names like Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori are meant to look African instead. I don’t recall anymore what Smithsonian article I was reading at the time, therefore can’t look up the place name I came across in it, but it was something from a Pacific Northwestern Native American language, and it looked like the kind of thing beginning fantasy writers get told to avoid at all costs: a mash of “unpronounceable” consonants and apostrophes. But it isn’t unpronounceable, of course; it only looks that way to your average Anglophone reader, who isn’t used to dealing with phonemes in that configuration. Result: a name of that sort often looks fake and made-up, even when it isn’t.

And then there’s the other direction — what I’ve mentally dubbed Babar names. CVCVC, consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant. There are a LOT of these in fantasy, because apparently when an Anglophone brain is fumbling for letters and trying to arrange them into a name, this is the pattern it’s most likely to default to? Or else strong influence from somebody in the genre, but I don’t know who; Tolkien was not very prone to Babar names at all. (Rohan, sure, but you can’t say it was a dominant pattern with him. He was too much of a linguist for that.) These can be perfectly real too, of course, in a variety of different languages. But they’ve started to look fake to me in fantasy novels simply because I’ve seen so many of them. There are so many other ways to put phonemes together! This character I’m trying to name, he was originally Khimos and now he’s Ilan and I’m not happy with either of those in part because they’re just one step away from a Babar name, CCVCVC and VCVC. There’s someone else in that story whose name comes from the same language and she’s Vranatzin Iskovri. That looks like a real name to me. It has internal logic, even if I’m the only one who knows what it is. And yeah, it’s more difficult to pronounce, but if I only stay within the zone of what’s familiar and easy to an Anglophone reader, I’m ignoring a whole swath of possibility. I just wrote a series where people have names like Iljish and Yeyuama and Heali’i and Nour and Thu Phim Lat. I intend to keep that kind of variety going.

I just need this guy to cooperate. You’re important to this story, dude; you need a name I’m going to be happy with, something that will look real to me. Aadet took forever and a day to accept a name, but even he had one by the time I got to him in the story. You? I’ve got a complete first draft and I still don’t like yours. C’mon. We can do better than this.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[sovay]

This character I'm trying to name, he was originally Khimos and now he's Ilan and I'm not happy with either of those in part because they're just one step away from a Babar name, CCVCVC and VCVC.

Their other problem, if you want to identify it as such, is that Ilan is a real Hebrew name and Khimos isn't a real Greek name as far as I know, but it looks like one (something to do with goats or winter, I keep trying to read it), and if you don't want to recall languages of our world in this story, you need something else.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I don't sweat that kind of thing too much, because when you get down to it, it's damn near impossible to come up with something that won't turn out to be a word in some language. I'd only worry about it if everything else around that name was also supposed to look Hebrew or Greek -- or, conversely, if everything around it was supposed to look Japanese or Irish or something, because then it doesn't fit.

[alessandriana.livejournal.com]

Kind of an interesting note from the other side-- Imzy (a social network site currently in closed beta) is sending out invite codes, all of which conform to CVCVCV. And we are apparently so hardwired for whatever reason to read that pattern as 'fantasy names' that several people have said they've stolen a code or two to use in their writing...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Hah! I didn't pay attention to the code for my own invite -- now I'm wondering what it was . . . .

Names

[bob orr (from livejournal.com)]

I think as readers, we will morph the names into something pronounceable and memorable - as in recall -

One of the more challenging in recent readings came from Elizabeth moon in her Deeds of Paksanarrion trilogy where all the names had Finnish roots - a language unlike any other.

Bob Orr

Re: Names

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

a language unlike any other.

Well, it's a lot like Estonian. :-) And actually sort of like Tolkien's elvish languages; he drew inspiration from Finnish, along with other things.

But yes, it can be difficult to cope with a bunch of names from a language or language style that's very unfamiliar to you. I find Japanese names easy, because I speak enough Japanese to see them as more than just a random collection of syllables, but my husband (to pick one example) has a lot more trouble with them.

[marycatelli]

Virtually all the names I use are real. I choose eras that I want to suggest and go by them. (Invented names for all like in "Jewel of the Tiger" or none like -- all the rest of my published works.)

Meanwhile I'm stymied on an outline and I'm blaming the fact that I can't name a character. It's not a cure.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I do that for some things, but when it's suppose to be really a secondary world, instead of world-and-a-half like the Memoirs, I try to shake things up more.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

The advantage of pseudo historical fantasy is that most of the names I use are real ones, though I have a fondness for borrowing them from old French pulp books (the number of characters in House of Shattered Wings that are named from Arsène Lupin books is rather alarmingly high). It can be a different kind of headache though, because of class & race markers (that additionally change over time)...

I have replaced names during late rounds of revisions though! A bit weird but I got used to the new ones.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's really hard for me to adjust to name changes. It's why I'm especially unhappy with Khimos changing to Ilan changing to I dunno I'll figure something out -- it leaves the character weirdly unsettled in my mind.

[marycatelli]

The real nightmare is that sometimes they slip through through muscle memory after you're done the search and replace.