Personal Names

[Miatato]

This is probably jumping the gun, as they say, but I thought I'd throw this out here for discussion. Names are an interest of mine and I don't think I am the only... ah... onomastically inclined... person out there. I think we might discover something about the thoughts, beliefs, and priorities of our imaginary society in the process of working some of this out.

Should we look at given names and surnames at the same time?

It seems most people that have expressed an opinion are at least warm to the idea that these might be people living among us, all over the world, either secretly or at least outside of common knowledge. Does it seem likely (or at least pleasing to us) that they might have a public name and a native name?

It seems likely to me that they might have native adaptations of names from the local majority culture (i.e. adapted to the phonology), and also names specific to their language/culture.

[kadani]

I guess so, yeah. They will probably also have ways to transform other names into their phonological system since they have probably developped a certain purism and xenophobia concerning their language.

Edit: Such a rule could be a simple mapping to similar phonemes (rejistanian maps /g/ to /k/ and the various vowels in English and German to just /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/) and a rule how to break up too big or incorrect consonant clusters. For example: /mECthIlt/ this could for example mean that the first pass changes it to /meStjilt/ and the second one could work via insertion (/meSetejilte/) or deletion (/mesjil/).

[Matthew Turnbull]

Names make examples much easier! I think that they would definitely have ways of pronouncing foreign names. I think that a very important thing to think about before coming up with names is what do they think about death? Is there a taboo on mentioning a dead persons name? is it a strong taboo? If it is it would hardly make sense to name some one "water", because you know that when they die, the word "water" will die with them. Some cultures, or so I've heard, solve this by giving people trivial names that wouldn't come up in conversation like "bee's knee" or "twig sunk in the mud" or whatever, others by loaning in a new word for whatever when the person who had that name dies, which worked for them because they were in an area where all the languages were related, so it was easy to borrow.

[kadani]

I think the name taboo is simply impossible in case of the unitiated. If one person called Markus dies, would that mean other people who share that name no longer could be named?

[Matthew Turnbull]

[kadani]

This is a good idea, now that I thought a bit longer about it.

[Uh-Oh]

[Matthew Turnbull]

[PeteBleackley]

Maybe each name goes to a different person - maybe Menuax, being the older name, goes to an older candidate than Oluda.

[Matthew Turnbull]