What's in a Name: Act III

I was once at a workshop where the speaker talked about how it can be difficult to pick out names for your characters. "I know people who have taken longer to name their characters than their kids!" he proclaimed. There was a lot of laughter and understanding nods.

I have done a lot of name research in my life. I own two name etymology books. Each longer story that I'm working on has lists and index cards full of name research - meanings, root words, etc. So now that it has come time for Jason and me to choose a name for our baby girl, I already have a lot in my mind as to what I like, what I don't like, meanings, and connotations.

When you're writing fiction, the sound and symbolism of a name can be important, but you can also get away with more in fiction that you can in real life:

https://www.iveyink.com/blog/2018/4/15/whats-in-a-name

https://www.iveyink.com/blog/2017/7/16/whats-in-the-spelling-of-a-name

Like an old Celtic name that no one can spell? Books often come with a pronunciation guide; your child's kindergarten class doesn't. Authors take care not to name to many of their characters Jon or Rob (unless they're George R R Martin); Jason and I both have been in many classes or work settings where we have been one of two or more people with the same name. Think a name sounds really bad-ass? Well that's all well and good, but if you name your kid Leonidas, he's gonna end up dying in a battle. (One of my university's founders, General Leonidas Polk, died at the Battle of Kennesaw.)

It's a lot to think about. Unlike naming a character, where if you decide later that it's not working, you just change it before publication, there comes a point where you're out of time on deciding on a name. (It may come as a surprise, but unless you're Nora Roberts or James Patterson, the amount of time between sitting down to begin a story and having said book published in much longer than pregnancy.) Plus, usually, you're the only one naming the character in your book. Most people naming a child are working with another person to choose a name (it's fortunate the Jason and I have similar tastes).

May Project Update

How is it that tomorrow is June 1st?  It seems like yesterday was May 1st...

I've spent this month wrapped up in name research.  As some of you may recall, my current project, The Wolf and the Sheath, is a novel I started writing during NaNoWriMo, lo, these many years ago.  When you're trying to squeeze 50,000 words into 30 days, you don't take time to do name research - you throw down a place holder and move on.  

But now here we are, coming up on 9 years in, and I still have place holder names for most of my characters.  And some of these are acceptable names; probably no one but me cares that Finn, Konstantin, and Markus aren't from the right linguistic background for these characters.  But I can't keep calling the antagonist "Whatshisname."

So after how satisfying it felt to pin down names for the major locations, I decided to completely change gears and focus solely on name research and replacement.  Now because this is a quasi-fantasy/quasi-historical piece, you would think I could just make stuff up.  But for me, I like to ground characters' names in real-world languages.  And because I'm... well... me, these names have to mean something or have some significance.  And as I've said it previous posts, they also have to be something that the audience will find relatively easy to remember, pronounce, and spell.  (Though I have actually given one character a name that is somewhat awkward intentionally, to put the reader slightly off balance with him.  But he's had his name for a while...)

Could I not do that?  Could I just slap Bob, Jim, and Steve on these characters and move on? Well, no, actually, I couldn't.  They don't suit the characters or the world.  Could I do this if I were writing a modern piece?  Well, actually, no on that one, too : )  Even the modern pieces (what few I have written) have some symbolism in the names.  Not as much research goes into it, but I do think about the meanings of names even in modern settings.  

So what did I do in June?  I sorted through a mind-numbing amount of research for names.  But I also named the main character's brothers and father, the most important secondary character, decided on how all these people say "mom" and "dad," and am very close to choosing the name of another major place.

And I'm not saying that every character is getting this level or research; the cook who gets referenced once is not going to be given the name of an obscure Serbian goddess of baking that it takes me hours to sort out.  The cook could be Hilda.  Except that I already have a Hilda.

Sh!

I really love language and linguistics.  If were more disciplined about learning languages, I could have been a linguist.  How languages evolve - how vowels shift, how a letter that is written or sounds one way in one language mutates into others in related languages as time goes - on fascinates me.

I've been thinking about this recently because I work in the registrar's office at a small liberal arts university and I was one of the first people outside of the humanities department to find out that we are going to be offering beginning Mandarin next fall.  The professor who told me about this is the head of the language department.  She specializes in Spanish and we often say "gracias" to each other in emails.  I was thinking about how I could start saying thank you in Mandarin.

I've known how to say "thank you" in Mandarin since I was really little; my parents always encouraged us to say thank you in the languages of the Chinese and Mexican restaurants we frequented.  Thank you in Mandarin is pronounced "shay-shay" (as best my European-language-familiar self can transliterate).  I also took ballet from a young age and knew that in French the "sh" sound is written with "ch," so I always pictured the Chinese thank you spelled as "che-che."  I was really thrown for a loop to find that it is usually written as "xie-xie" when using Latin letters.  

Where did the X come from?  It seems really random to me, of all the possible letters to make that "sh" sound, so why X?  (I just went to google it - it's a long complicated explanation.)

Thinking about the "'shay-shay' is really 'xie-xie'" conundrum got me started thinking about all the ways you can write the "sh" sound in various languages.  In some languages it has its own letter or character (Russian, Hebrew*).  In others it's made with a combination of letters - "sh" in  English of course, "ch" in French, "si" or "se" in Irish Gaelic (as in "sidhe"** and Sean), and "sch" in German.

*Oddly enough, the characters look similar enough that I wonder if that's where the Russian character came from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_(letter) 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha_(Cyrillic)

**Pronounced "shee," but that's another post.

What does this have to do with writing?  If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that one of my conundrums is the decision between writing foreign names and words truly to their language (and therefor possibly having to provide a pronunciation guide) or writing them how they sound.  Of course, right now, none of my novels with "foreign" names takes place in the real world: the one with the Welsh and Latin inspired names and the one with the German and Italian inspired names both tale place in fictional worlds.  So I guess I can make up my own language rules : )