At long last, I sat down and figured out what the first few characters appearing in my tale should be called. I was quite happy with the list... until just now, when I read the article on the Law of Alien Names.
Here they are: Ghorha, Gewhaern, Ganhenheel, Ghanee, Gesh, Ganhesh, and Ghozhu.
Pronunciation guide (unusual features bolded): "h" always works as a modifier of the preceding consonant, not as a letter in its own right, as in English "S" and "SH". Specifically, "Gh" is the "HY-" sound in "hue", or the one in German "iCH"; "rh" is a hard "R"; "G" is hard, as in "Gap"; "wh" takes the place of the "H" sound itself, as in "WHo"; "nh" is the "M" sound; "sh" as in "SHe", "zh" as in "treaSure".
The vowels "o", "u", "a", "e" are the continental ones, not those English acquired in the Great Shift
, and can be either short or long. "ae" as in "bAd", "ee" as in "bEEf" or short as in "bIt".
I'm aware of the maxim that important characters shouldn't have the same initial, but there are three extenuating circumstances for my deliberately breaking it:
- Firstly, most of them get killed before page 100, so they're not protagonists in the usual sense of the word.
- Secondly, they are all close kin to each other (cf many of Tolkien's siblings, such as Eomer and Eowyn): Ghorha is the sister of two of the others and the mother of the rest. In Altling culture, children do not get proper names until they come of age, but are instead called by the equivalent of "Peterson the Older", that is to say, the name of a parent and a way to disambiguate between them. Or, rather, by a shortened form of that. Thus:
- Gesh is short for Ge'sho'whaern, meaning "The first (child) of Gewhaern", which in turn means that Gesh is the biological son of the sister of Gewhaern, because sons are primarily raised by and named after one of their uncles, not by biological fathers.
- Ganhesh is short for Ganhe'sho'nheel, with the equivalent meaning.
- Ghozhu is short for Gho'zhus'rha, meaning "The second (child) of Ghorha", because daughters are named after their mothers directly. Ghanee, the first daughter, was called a shortened form of Gho'sho'rha before she came of age, but now does have an original name.
- Thirdly, the initial letter of a name marks one's belonging to a particular vocation (see the thread on "Social structure" linked in the OP for details). All male Gatherers have names starting with a "G", and their female counterparts have names starting with a "Gh". Hence, the initial fulfills the role of a title like "MD" in English, and an Altling meeting a little girl called Ghozhu immediately knows several things about her family, such as that she must have an older sister and that her mother is a Gatherer (Gathereress?).
So, lots in a name, in this case. But after all that, I find that several of these names pretty much exactly match some of the patterns on the Alien Names page, which are generally described as "boring" and "formulaic". Should I be worried about that - in addition to being worried about their being perhaps too hard to tell apart, I mean? There is actually a rational basis for some of the described patterns, and I added a paragraph to that effect to the trope page (second from the bottom). As long as one wants the names to remain not just pronouncable in theory but somewhat mellifluous, that is. Any opinions?
edited 11th Nov '12 11:49:35 AM by kassyopeia
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.
Hellooo forum!
After three years of (for the most part sporadic but lately increasingly focussed) worldbuilding, I'm about to start to write a novel now, so I'm migrating from that board to this one. The rough plot has been sitting mostly complete in my mind for most of that time, in detail for the first third and in outline for the other two thirds. I tried turning it into actual prose at an earlier point, but gave up after less than a page because the setting turned out to be more ambitious than I had expected. It's another planet, and while the broad strokes are mostly Earth-like, per the convention, none of the details are supposed to be. Which made a description of "ordinary village life, as seen through the eyes of a villager", which is what that first page would have been largely concerned with, impossible without first figuring out all of the little details that make up said village life and the viewpoint character's place in it. But I think I have that now, so here's to round two.
The Title is, for now, "The Hexicon", which supposedly means "The Book of Hexico", which in turn supposedly means "The Book of the World of Six". Six, because that number is omnipresent in the setting's natural world, or at least it appears that way to its intelligent humanoid inhabitants. For example, there are six cardinal directions (counting up and down as numbers five and six), the stuff that grows everywhere one looks is six-leaved clover instead of grass, and the humanoids themselves are six-fingered. "-co" is an actual locative suffix
in Nahuatl, so the allusory coinages aren't entirely nonsensical.
The Genre, I've taken to calling "Planetary Romance/non-Tolkien'esque Fantasy" - because it has pretty much all the ingredients of the former except for the actually-human protagonist who somehow gets transported to the alien planet, and because it is fantasy rather than science-fiction, but without the magic, without anything specifically associated with the Middle Ages, and without most of the Tolkien-codified creature tropes, at least in their conventional formats. (And because Noaqiyeum failed to come up with anything better
, the flake. 
)
The Translation Convention is a bit tricky. Altling, the language spoken by my protagonists, supposedly derives from two roots, namely the language of their hunter-gatherer ancestors, Aerish, and Ulteri, the language of a precursor
culture which conquered those ancestors long ago and taught them everything from alphabet to ziggurat. The structure of Altling is that of Aerish, and most common terms have Aerish roots, while most things cultural or religious have Ulteri roots. Fortunately, this maps very well to English with its variously Germanic and Latin/Greek/Romance roots. It does, however, mean that I have to pay attention to etymology when naming things, because every now and then the etymology of a term might actually be plot-relevant.
As I haven't actually started writing, I'm of course not yet actually capable of being writer-blocked, but I thought I'd post this as an introduction and to say hellooo (check). And to post a link-list to that part of my worldbuilding which I've done in the dedicated forum here, which is the biggest chunk though nowhere near all of it. As much for my own as for general reference...
Planet
Fauna
Flora
Culture
edited 7th Dec '12 1:35:47 AM by kassyopeia
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.