Naming Rules

[aldersprig]

'kay.

I'm just about ready to start constructing a language, but I want to figure out what's going on with my names first.

I have a hopefully-complete list of names from my Reiassan stories here: http://reiassan.wikispaces.com/Words#x-Words and Names-People

Using (DR) to mean the time in which Reiassan was discovered & colonization began, the Lyuda timeline is about 200 DR, the Rin timeline about 500, 550 DR, and the Steam!Callanthe timeline ~1000DR. So there can be name shift in that time.

The proto!Callenian I'm making is, for ease of timelines, ~1000 years B-DR and ~500 years B-DR.

Rule One in naming:
Royals and those with royal ancestry begin their name with a vowel.
The vowels come from words meaning the untouchable things: sky, stars, moon, sun, small-moon. (Am I missing any?) So a prefix of a- or e-, etc. connects them to the untouchable.

Problem: It's often a syllable of vowel-consonant following another syllable starting with a consonant. How do the consonants figure in there?
(Problem solved; it's not)

Rule Two: I seem to have female names ending in a or I, men in a consonant.
Exception: Rin, Zaide.

...I may be blathering...

So far I seem relatively consistent in my naming, albeit accidentally for much of it. But now I get to figure this in to proto!Callenian language, and that might be trickier.

Example:
I was thinking of having a "soft" beginning consonant denote a "non-useful" gendered word, but that means, I think, that Lyuda's parents decided she was a non-useful child.

This is hard. O_O

Comments

[anke]

My first thought on the line titled "Example" is: How would that interact with the shortened name forms a lot of people seem to use?

[aldersprig]

I don't know... Ideas?

[anke]

You couild always have exceptions? I mean, in German you can't generally tell from the last letter or whatever what gender a noun is, and ehile most nouns ending in -e are feminine, it doesn't take much to find a few that aren't.

[aldersprig]

I like exceptions!

[clare_dragonfly]

Rin isn't really an exception since that's a nickname...

Maybe Lyuda's parents did think she was non-useful! That would be some interesting backstory. Or... maybe her name comes from a word for a non-useful thing that they like. Such as beauty or something like that.

So "untouchable" is separate from useful/non-useful? Or is that part of "useful"?

[inventrix]

(admittedly this is not my language, but)

I think the "untouchable" is a corruption/evolved form of an association with the heavens/celestial objects, and not a specific grammatical form. At least the comment that it comes from the words for sky, star etc. leads me to that conclusion.

[aldersprig]

Yes, that.

[clare_dragonfly]

Hmm, if it is, then surely the words for those things fall into the grammatical useful/unuseful distinction...

[aldersprig]

Mmn. That is a point, but they could also be the exception - since most languages have exceptions. A third, very tiny, gender?

[clare_dragonfly]

Hmm, I don't know of any languages that really have exceptions to their genders, but it could certainly be a tiny gender. And just because I don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

[aldersprig]

Well, I have Gods too. So Useful, Un-useful, and Above Use/Super-useful.

[clare_dragonfly]

Yay!

[aldersprig]

Good question! Nouns starting in a vowel seem to be their own class... since it's just those things. I think?

[inventrix]

"I was thinking of having a "soft" beginning consonant denote a "non-useful" gendered word, but that means, I think, that Lyuda's parents decided she was a non-useful child."

Was she a firstborn during a patriarchal period? (I can't recall.) Because that would make it make perfect sense. You know how patriarchal societies feel about daughters. /cue eyeroll

How about male names tend to end in consonants, and female in vowels? Rin's nickname would then be entertainingly and ICly somewhat masculine, as well as decidedly not royal.

Another observation I've noted, which may be due to skewed sample data, is that your royalty seem to have longer names than your commoners. That could be an angle to look at and see how/if you want to run with it.

[aldersprig]

Hee, yes. The royals do have longers, more convoluted names. I think this started from naming kids things like "Long meadow" vs. "The moonlight on the water on the coldest day;" i.e., the royals have always been a little excessive.

I'm liking Lyuda just being not-useful to her parents, yes. :-)

And she could have been.

And yes, Male names=consonant endings, females = vowels. And that doesn't seem to fit my language ideas in any specific way, but that's okay. It can have evolved.