Re: Character name advice wanted.

On Sep 17, 12:11 pm, Ric Locke <warrick.lo...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:43:02 -0400, Michelle Bottorff wrote:
Shawn Wilson <ikonoql...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A story needs to be rooted in a "culture".

And the culture is pretty much ours. These people aren't strange and
alien, that's the point.

I think its pretty amusing that you assume we're all from the same
culture here.

If you use Jacey's list, you are using *only* English names.  A list of
my ancestors' names would look different from Jacey's list. (...LeBaron,
Andersson, Stringam, Piepgrass...)  A list of Alma's ancestors' names
would look *very* different from that.

If you are assuming these people are from a mixed heritage country like
North America, then you have a very wide range of  name choices for each
of your characters as individuals, but you DON'T want to limit yourself
to the names on Jacey's list.  It's far too homogenous.

If you DO limit yourself to Jacey's list, then you are saying these
people are NOT from an ethnically diverse culture.

What names you choose *is* going to make a difference... not to the
individuals in question, necessarily, but, as Alma says, to the culture
as a whole.  (Which you clearly haven't thought much about, or you
wouldn't be going around saying things as inane and impossible as 'the
culture is pretty much ours'. )

...

Yes everyone, you can close those gaping jaws,  I really am agreeing
with Alma.

It's true that more than half my minor characters are called ???? in my
first drafts, but that's because when I *do* go to name them, I put more
effort into it than just assigning them a random jumble of syllables.  

(Well, except on Racciman's World, where human names mostly *are* a
random jumble of syllables --due largely to Racciman's linguistic
meddling.  But even then, I try to give each region its own set of
favored syllables, and sometimes even a locally flavoured approach to
assigning and arranging.)

Endorsed on all levels.

My own novel (which I have given up on and posted on my blog:http://warlocketx.wordpress.com/fiction/temporary-duty/(readers
wanted)) begins in the United States of 2052. The human characters are
mainly American whitebread British-descended -- the protagonists are
"John Peters" and "Kevin Todd" -- but there's a sprinkling of Germanic,
Eastern European, Hispanic, and Portuguese, with a few Vietnamese and
one Indonesian. I thought it a fair mix for roughly 200 American sailors
of the near future.

Alien names were actually easier. I invented a system for constructing
names, and it worked throughout, including an innovation suggested by
one of the protags. Assuming you have the patience to sort through the
whole thing, you might deduce the naming rules from the text.

I have two major ethnic groups in my fantasy WiP. One is an isolated
mountain people who are part of a much larger empire. They have little
or nothing else in common with the people of Armenia in the real
world. However, I wanted them to have names that sounded like names.
Also, I wanted them to have names that sounded plausibly like names
that would "go together" in a smallish mountain polity. So I got a
list of Armenian names, both modern and pre-modern and assigned them
all but two characters in that community. One, a young woman whose
looks are somewhat "exotic" for the community, I gave a name from a
different mountain people, one of the Caucasian languages, from near
Armenia. Another retains her name, so far, from when I first gave them
madeup names. She likes her name and wants to keep it.

The other group is the Imperial race, except that they are rather
multi-ethnic beneath a veneer of unanimaty. Their names go by rules,
involving the number of syllables, some meaningful prefixes and
characteristic phonemes.

The three people who are reading this draft have all commented on the
"Ayomme" names. They also noticed that two of the characters have
"odd" names, although they don't think it detracts. One of them thinks
the Imperial names seem vaguely Chinese, which they are. Vaguely. The
rule is "three total syllables shared between two names" is very
common in Han Chinese names. the fact that the phonemes I use are
completely different didn't keep one of my readers from noticing
this.

--
Will in New Haven

.

Relevant Pages

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