Names, Alphabets, and Language

Been to a few blogs recently where the topic of names was mentioned. There's a wide variety of ways in which Authors determine names, be they names of characters or places.

Naming people has never been a big problem for me - save when I undertook the task of naming all 6,770 characters in the Swords of Fire Archive Database. That took months. However, I mostly took the easy way out. What I frequently did was derive names from parents. For instance: In the 69th year of the founding of the Compound, Ablura married Phaschin and she had a son. He was given the name Phaschlur. "Phasch" from his father and "lur" from his mother. Easy enough, albeit time consuming.

I didn't always take that approach, however. Shulo was born in the 35th year. His mother was Ableena and his father was Raigur. I just happened to like the name Shulo.

Since I am not keen on using "normal" names (names from my own culture), this makes name finding easier for me, perhaps, than for others. There are cultures from which I find I often "steal" names. That is, I take a real name and modify it slightly. Japanese for male names. Indian and Arabic names for female. Whenever I do this, I ALWAYS paid heed to the name's meaning. Name meanings are very important to me, and whenever I need to use a "real" name I look up names with appropriate meanings before making a selection. I have actually rejected names because the meaning was wrong.

Village naming is not that big of a deal, although I often am not happy with my first choices. There are 29 villages/stops in the family lands of Swords of Fire. Some of these were named after actual characters from previous generations: Gahrem Village and Urabbi Village being the most prominent. This resulted from the practice of naming houses after the senior male living in them. Gahrem and Urabbi were instrumental in establishing the mining villages which were later named after them.

Sometimes the village names are quite simply - and stupid. North Village. South Village. That took a lot of creative thinking. But it seemed to fit the way the family approached things. Black Ore Village and Red Ore Village were obviously named for the mining operations. Deep Forest got its name because it was located in, well, the deep forest.

My thinking on village names has usually been to keep them simple.

Street and road names I find hard for some reason. Someone else wrote on their blog that they have absolutely no problem picking street names. They trouble me for some reason and I am never happy with my choices.

I hate the name for the road which goes all the way around Fire Mountain. It's called Circle Road. Oh, how brilliant and descriptive. The main road leading toward the nearby Kingdom of Azua has changed names so many times I think it is actually called by more than one name in the book. I left it that way because that happens in real life.

World naming can be hard. Often I go with phonetics. I begin to rummage through various sounds until I find one - or a combination of two or three - which suits me. These are not written in stone and often change. Surprisingly, Azua has remained Azua from as long as I can remember. I like the sound of it. The world itself has changed, as have the political structures within it. But the name is the same.

Maybe that's one of the reason I like writing fantasy. There is so much more freedom in using names like Kiahva, Amice, Sayla, Mishua. They sound so much better in my head than Bill, Jane, Mary, Fred. Not that there's anything wrong with those names. I just like the sounds of the others.

Take Mishua. It means, "gently flowing river". Khirsha means, "firestorm." And this is where my need to have meanings for names come in. I worked for weeks on developing a phonetic system in which various sounds became words. It was a nightmare trying to keep it all straight and it soon got out of hand and I put it on hold. But here are the breakdowns for Khirhsa and Mishua (the two main characters for Book II: The Prophecies of Madatar).

First, this is how the characters in the book would see the names written compared to English. Just coming up with a logical character set was hard. There are forty alpha characters and eight numeric.

Determining specific word means for phonetic sounds was worse than hard, and it's why, after several weeks' effort, I never finished the task. This is very hard. For me, anyway.

Khirsha's name breaks down as follows: kh eer shah
The "kh" sound means strong
The "eer" sound means fire
The "shah" sound means falling

The name is further complicated by the fact that "shue" means water. Put together, the name literally translates to: strong fire falling water. It is translated to mean, "Thunderstorm" or, more accurately, "Firestorm".

Mishua's name is harder to break down. It does not occur in Book I (Traitor), and so was not part of the list of names I used as examples.

Basically, Mishua's name breaks down as follows: mih shue ah
The "mih" sound means gentle flow
The "shue" sound means water
The "ah" sound is a superlative

The literal translation of Mishua's name is: gentle flow water. With the superlative the translation becomes: "gentle flowing river".

You have now had a basic lesson in the nightmare I created for myself when I endeavored to undertake creating a language for my book.

Do you want to know something incredible? It is my goal to one day write the Swords of Fire Saga in the language I create using the character set I have created.

That would be completely awesome!