LogFAQs > #904596281

Zeus posted...

Do you know whether that's a universal tendency or is it just common among certain ethnic groups?

It's pretty universal - most names for people and places in every culture stem from some meaning, either in that culture's native language, or some previous language that has since become obscure. There's the occasional name that crops up that seems like someone just smashed sounds together to make a name (though even then, it might just be a case of not knowing the original derivation), but most names we can sort of puzzle out if we try.

But we've just going so used to hearing names AS names, we've kind of divorced them from meanings.



Zeus posted...

The York thing I'd never even heard of. I had assumed it just came from a landholder's name at some point.

New York was named after York in England. Which was a Norman/English corruption of Jorvik, which was the Scandinavian corruption of Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic, which was a corruption of the Latin Eboracum, which was based on the Celtic place name that meant "place of yew trees".

That sort of evolution isn't really unique to York - lots of places that endured over time through cultural changes and conquest would often change names through slow drift (like Cadiz changing from Gadir to Gadeira to Gades to Qadis to Cadiz, or Marseille starting out as Massalia and going through a few changes). And that's not getting into stuff like Istanbul/Constantinople (which was also called Byzantium and Nova Roma, though the song doesn't mention those).



Zeus posted...

Especially because fantasy novels go out of their way to be more complex with things whereas the actual historic people would both go pretty basic (other than variant spellings -- when the names were written at all -- due to a non-standardized language) and fairly common.

Well, that can also be a cultural thing - sure, medieval British people were named stuff like Bob or George or Harry or whatever, but then you go back to Sumeria where people had names like En-men-gal-ana or Barsal-nuna or Mesh-ki-ang-gasher. Or Egypt, where you've got Semerkhet or Neferkasokar or Hotepsekhemwy.

Granted, it's usually a case where the nobility goes out of their way to have more grandiose or meaningful names than the peasants who might have shorter names, but there's certainly historical evidence for longer and fancy names for "interesting" people, while most of the shorter, simpler names are sort of reserved for the shitty NPCs like the dung-shoveler or the random farmer serf.

The real problem is that a lot of fantasy novels are trying to ape Tolkien, where all of his characters had weird fantasy names. The difference is, Tolkien was insane about language, and literally every name every character in every story he's ever written has is based on a language he came up with. So Aragorn means "noble warrior" and Galadriel is "crowned maiden" and Gandalf is "man with staff", and so on. But shittier hack fantasy writers who try to copy his aesthetic without understanding it or caring about those sorts of things just use elaborate fancy names that sound similar, but don't really mean anything.


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