Naming things
Loopysue
ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
Does anyone know a good site where you can check that the names for the things in your fantasy world aren't words that mean something specific in a different language?
An example I have already come across in my own writing is the name I dreamed up for a king (one that I thought was a really good name). It turned out to be the word for aiming a particular kind of insult at a man, in Polish. I only found this out because I was sitting next to a Polish lady who was talking on the phone in an animated manner, and I heard the name - the name of my king. Once she hung up I asked her what the word meant, and she blushed, but she DID explain (once I explained why I wanted to know).
Nowadays I worry that my books and maps might contain other names that will insult half the planet without my ever realising it.
I know its a bit much expecting there to be a webpage that deals exactly with just that problem, but I never came up for the real meaning of that particular king's name when I googled it beforehand, and I wondered if any of you might know a better way to check than just by googling something.
An example I have already come across in my own writing is the name I dreamed up for a king (one that I thought was a really good name). It turned out to be the word for aiming a particular kind of insult at a man, in Polish. I only found this out because I was sitting next to a Polish lady who was talking on the phone in an animated manner, and I heard the name - the name of my king. Once she hung up I asked her what the word meant, and she blushed, but she DID explain (once I explained why I wanted to know).
Nowadays I worry that my books and maps might contain other names that will insult half the planet without my ever realising it.
I know its a bit much expecting there to be a webpage that deals exactly with just that problem, but I never came up for the real meaning of that particular king's name when I googled it beforehand, and I wondered if any of you might know a better way to check than just by googling something.
Comments
But you probably shouldn't worry too much about it, as even normal English words may be bad words in other languages. From my own country Norway, we have a place named Hell. For you, that is probably a swearword, for me it is a place name. I also remember EA making a cross-platform racing game once, with the chat open up to all nationalities. People were complaining that they had problems having a normal conversation, because there were so many words blocked because everyday words meant something bad in some language, and EA had strict filters in place (I even heard the word Car was blocked, but I haven't confirmed that particular one)
Hell is the name of the place that wrongdoers go in the afterlife, for me, but it probably means all kinds of different things to others. We do use it as a swear word in the UK, but its not by any means the worst kind of swear word, and its not even all that common any more compared to the usual "F" word, which I understand was originally an inoffensive German word meaning the natural act of procreation.
If you want to know the name of the king I devised that was so offensive, so that you don't go and accidentally use it, I think that I'm fairly safe just to use it here as part of the explanation... it was "Codari".
I don't think I'm bold enough to explain it, though.
Personally, the problem I run into a lot is that I use a word or name, thinking I made it up, but then I rediscover later that I pulled it from my subconscious, from another source.
Cheers,
~Dogtag
Seriously, though. I think you are right. I do the same sometimes - especially when I'm tired. I also do it to myself - making up names that I used in other stuff written when I was a teenager.
(Yes, I'm rather old as well, Farrin)
Like... Chul-Gar-Na. Chul-Ara, Chul-Wan. Page after page of them.
Oh, and there is a Hell, Michigan. Claims to be the coldest place in the Lower 48 of the U.S.
I tried to upload it, but I couldn't - probably because its got active macros in it that are triggered by buttons on each sheet that force recalculation when you're fed up with the sheet in front of you.
Don't be sad, though. Its not as great as it sounds. Having taken all that time creating this marvellous pink elephant for myself, I still find that my own imagination can outdo anything a random machine can create! lol. How marvellous is the human brain
I like to use names from mythology or history a lot.
An example is the a famous elf/half-elf/man from mythology named Wayland.
Wayland is now used as the title of Kingship for my Elven realms.
I also use Google Translate to help come up with names.
As an example: I have a culture based on India in my campaign world.
I enter a cool name into the English side like, The Emerald Snakes, and see how that comes out in Hindu, Panna Naagon.
Bang, there you go, my Green colored Naga serpent race are the Panna Naagon! (The Emerald Serpents!).
LoL!
General Zera, I thought, was a completely splendid name. I dreamed it up in 2007 - used it in one of my online excerpts on Writers Circle (now extinct), but just recently I saw it in one of Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle books, and again in one of Rachel Hartman's books. Both of these newer Zeras were generals. Makes you wonder if they heard it being muttered someplace, and it came back to the fore of their own subconscious minds. I bet they each think they made it up themselves. lol.
I once had to scrap an entire plot line, because ten years after I though it up, I sat down to watch a dramatization on TV, and there it was - right in front of me. That was Fay Weldon's "She Devil".
Either telepathy is real, or our minds are not as unique and dissimilar as we like to think they are.
Still, never mind. Now that I have mentioned Ajandrani here, at least I have some proof the name was mine first if it suddenly appears anywhere else! lol
If I am to be hampered by concerns about what people will think of the names I make up, then I will constantly suffer from nervous anxiety. I might never publish anything. so I've decided to carry on using King Codari, because it fits the character I've created to bear that name, and I'm going to hope the reason Google wouldn't translate Codari means that it couldn't be translated because the Polish word isn't spelt that way. I'm also going to carry on using General Zera, since he was mine first, and he is only a minor character in both the published books I mentioned before.
If I am shot down in flames by all those vicious lawyers just waiting to make money out of the little people, then I will metaphorically die in a blaze... and that kind of appeals to me after all the battles I've faced trying to get my scientific family to accept that I am a fantasy writer. After all - I don't really have anything left to loose, having lived on minimum wage for the last 6 years. They will have to wait for me to make some money first before ripping out my throat becomes worth the effort
In Dorset we also have:
Shitterton, Happy Bottom, Scratchy Bottom, Shaggs, Sandy Balls, Droop, Dungy Head, and Tincleton... not to mention; Knacker's Hole and Clapgate...
(I'm going to get thrown out of the community if I carry on, but we have worse than that!)
I think I might add a few slightly less rude names to my own maps among the tinier villages, in the hope of making people chuckle.
AND.... they're really REALLY proud of it.
1.) For names I recommend you pick up a copy of The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook, Second Edition, by Sherrilyn Kenyon.
This book list numerous names and information on naming conventions for numerous languages. You can look up name male and female for a particular language and find out what it means in that language. You can also look up in the idex a particular name too and see what languages use it and if it has a different on what language it is used in.
2.) The exact meaning of a word in a language may have changed and could have been an insult or used to refer to something very unpleasant, but may refer to something that isn't or taking on a reverse association in regards to it being negative or positive now. The reverse also can apply too, a word that wasn't "negative" is now.
Keep this in mind as you may for example, use the word to detonation "affection" in naming a person or place and latter find out that it used to mean "fecal waste" in the past in the same language. (This ia an actual thing I encountered last year when researching the meaning of a particular name. The reason why the change occurred also had some important cultural reasons in regards to cultural behaviors regarding superstitions connection to disease.)
If you doing a historical based game, etc. you want to keep this in mind and be aawre of this if you get one definition in one dictionary and another meaning in another dictionary.
3.) Some words can have both a negative or positive meaning depending on the contex it is used in. The use of the word "bad" in English usage is a good example. In some cases a word can have a very different meaning too. May have the same spelling as another word, but a slight change in pronunciation or emphasis on certain letters can change the meaning to a term of a respect becomes an insult in the way it is said for example. (This is something I was told of years ago when I took a non-credited French class by an instructor.)
At last, a source of some useful information for those of us who use historical or real names. Is there a version of this book for fantasy writers?
I only ask tentatively, because most of the names I dream up don't appear in any of the dictionaries I have on my shelves (like Nanatoc, or Eonat, which are two of the main characters in one of the books I'm working on right now). If I were to stop and check every single language for just one of those two names you might see how impractical it would be for me to do this with the entire cast (there are approximately 500 named characters, plants, beasts and rocks in the book, even if some are only mentioned in passing). I'd never write a thing, which would negate the need to look them up in the first place.
(Note aside: I see that the spellcheck on this forum has no problem with Nanatoc, so now I'm worried that its a word in use, and must check it again!)
The quickest method I've been using, since the advent of the web, is to Google (and Bing) the name I've just thought of to see if I get a page of links to a string of Portuguese hotels (as has happened before), or a page of links to... umm... shall we say; 'questionable sites'. I only use the ones that don't appear in any shape or form on the web, in the hope that since the web is a sort of global dictionary in its own right, given that there is at least one speaker of each and every language actively connected to the web - when you do a search, you are bound to come up with a positive result in one way or another, even if the word has only ever been uttered once in the entire history of the web.
I'm sorry - I really have to go and check Nanatoc again...
I have to assume this, or I might fret myself to an early grave.
How strange, then, that the spellcheck here should be perfectly happy with it?
Please correct me if Nanatoc does actually mean something to someone. It would be an interesting test of the suitability of the name checking system I have devised.
Thanks
Well... not really I suppose. We ARE talking about Micorsoft Edge here, and as far as I'm concerned that's all part and parcel of the Win 10 issue. Is there anything Win 10 doesn't get its sticky fingers into? I suppose that since my language is English I might assume that most of our words were originally Norman (French), Saxon (German), Scandinavian, or Danish... for... obvious reasons :-)
For fantasy the advice is to build upon a real world language or to just create names that have no relationship at all to any Earth names. In the latter case the names often have a particular sound to them to evoke specific images. Example a lyrical sounding names could be used for elves while hard short rough sounding names could be used for dwarves. (It also gives some advice on how not to name things too.)
Given the scope of what your aiming at books, articles, on creating a different language might be something to look into so things have logical flow to them.
One other thing is how many different languages are you going to have in your world and are they based upon any real world one that you can draw names from or build from.
Looking up every name online, in books, etc. that you create is going to be time consuming.
Two other things that I''ll quickly add about the book it has a section that lists the top common 10 male and female names for certain specific years and in various places in the book you get other writers giving paragraph or two about how they selected names for the books the wrote and some tips.
Also, I'll quickly mention that Writer's Digest has several articles on character names and other ones you can read on their website.
http://www.writersdigest.com
I had a heavy day today and got called away in the middle of the conversation.
I will have a look at all the reading matter that you and JimP have suggested here today, but only when I have mostly done with the story and sent it away for proof reading/editing (to a published author who has agreed to do the job for free, and also to a qualified English teacher). The reason for this is that I prefer to delve into my own imagination for (hopefully) original source ideas, and then modify and amend according to the most important of the rules that seem to govern the genre near the end of the work - to gently blend my work with the expectations of the reader. I hope not to disappoint people too much by saying that the story itself is so massively intertwined and complicated (hence 5 volumes that stretch over a time period of nearly 2 million years, involve both space travel and time travel, and sway between sci-fi and fantasy) that I have decided not to manufacture a false language and complicate it still further, but to stick to English for the most part and merely refer to certain factions or characters speaking or whispering aside in their own tongue.
...
Suffice it to say that I wrote a brief synopsis of the background of the book, but my browser crashed just now and I only had time to save the above before I blinked offline for a moment. I can't remember how I worded it - which is a shame, because it was shaping up to be better than the actual book summary. Never mind. Siiiigh... :-(
A sentient terraforming AI, who was forgotten and left behind by the space age 'ancients' of the Earth when they departed en-masse to avoid the apocalypse, has innocently re-created life on Earth after the first storm of said apocalypse. Too late Sar realises that his five new tribes are doomed, for if they cannot overcome their differences and get their medieval selves across the narrow slither of void that separates Ethran (the ruined Earth) from her new sister world (Errispa), all will be lost in the second and final storm of the apocalypse. Add to this the problem that his tribes are all pre-industrial, and that the dominant and very powerful Blucran Sayers of Merelan (a holy warrior caste of the Blucran people) believe that Errispa is the sacred Place of Dreams and refuse to tolerate the sacrilegious/blasphemous intentions of those who wish to leave Ethran for Errispa.
There!
It was they who survived the first storm of the apocalypse - not the rats and the beetles.