Conworld random thread

[hwhatting]

Readers can be put off by difficult names. Fred and George are I think a little easier than Hunahpu or Ixbalanque. Maybe my concern is a bit outdated and people are more used to it. But I don't know. People have trouble with Russian names in Dostoevsky which suggests the tolerance level isn't too high.

Easy to remember doesn't have to mean familiar - Aragorn or Bilbo weren't exactly English household names when Tolkien coined them, even if they now have become familiar due to his books. It's enough that names are short and easily pronounceable. What throws a lot of people off with Russian names is both insecurity on how to pronounce them and the unfamiliar conventions on name use - last names vs. first name plus patronymic vs. hypocoristic forms, so if you don't want to drive away the average reader, probably better avoid naming conventions where people are addressed with different names and titles depending on situation and relationship, and long names with intimidating orthography. If your conculture has that, better keep it in the background. (OTOH, it may be actually good for immersion and for giving your concultures their own feel to go into a bit of aliennes here; if your writing is good and your story is compelling, readers will go along, as the continuing appeal of the great Russian novels shows.)

[foxcatdog]

The real success of a novel is determined if people use its character names to name their children

[Moose-tache]

Readers can be put off by difficult names. Fred and George are I think a little easier than Hunahpu or Ixbalanque. Maybe my concern is a bit outdated and people are more used to it. But I don't know. People have trouble with Russian names in Dostoevsky which suggests the tolerance level isn't too high.

Easy to remember doesn't have to mean familiar - Aragorn or Bilbo weren't exactly English household names when Tolkien coined them, even if they now have become familiar due to his books. It's enough that names are short and easily pronounceable. What throws a lot of people off with Russian names is both insecurity on how to pronounce them and the unfamiliar conventions on name use - last names vs. first name plus patronymic vs. hypocoristic forms, so if you don't want to drive away the average reader, probably better avoid naming conventions where people are addressed with different names and titles depending on situation and relationship, and long names with intimidating orthography. If your conculture has that, better keep it in the background. (OTOH, it may be actually good for immersion and for giving your concultures their own feel to go into a bit of aliennes here; if your writing is good and your story is compelling, readers will go along, as the continuing appeal of the great Russian novels shows.)

It sounds like you both agree: names should be easy to pronounce. When reading a text, I think the "difficulty" Ares refers to is exactly the ambiguity you mention. "Ixbalanque" is disconcerting because you don't know how it's supposed to be parsed. And you will hand that ambiguity on to the next person when you repeat it in a fan fiction or online book club or whatever.

[jal]

Easy to remember doesn't have to mean familiar - Aragorn or Bilbo weren't exactly English household names when Tolkien coined them

He did, however, coin them like that exactly because he wanted to avoid difficult to pronounce names, as "Aragorn" and "Bilbo" (and all the other hobbit and human names, many place names, names of inns etc.) were translations, more or less, of common speech names. Which is a good solution if you don't want to bother your readers with Xctqlbs.


JAL

[hwhatting]

He did, however, coin them like that exactly because he wanted to avoid difficult to pronounce names, as "Aragorn" and "Bilbo" (and all the other hobbit and human names, many place names, names of inns etc.) were translations, more or less, of common speech names. Which is a good solution if you don't want to bother your readers with Xctqlbs.

Yes, that's why I wrote

so if you don't want to drive away the average reader, probably better avoid naming conventions where people are addressed with different names and titles depending on situation and relationship, and long names with intimidating orthography.

[jal]

Yes, that's why I wrote

so if you don't want to drive away the average reader, probably better avoid naming conventions where people are addressed with different names and titles depending on situation and relationship, and long names with intimidating orthography.

I agree this is best, but what I meant is you could, like Tolkien, use "regular" names, and have actual names for readers who would be interested.


JAL

[bradrn]

Easy to remember doesn't have to mean familiar - Aragorn or Bilbo weren't exactly English household names when Tolkien coined them

He did, however, coin them like that exactly because he wanted to avoid difficult to pronounce names, as "Aragorn" and "Bilbo" (and all the other hobbit and human names, many place names, names of inns etc.) were translations, more or less, of common speech names. Which is a good solution if you don't want to bother your readers with Xctqlbs.

In fact, note that Bilbo and Frodo are English names, in that Tolkien composed them of English roots: according to Wikipedia, the Icelandic cognate Fróði is still in current use (and even Latinised as Frodo). Tolkien even stated that so-called ‘Frodo Baggins’ was actually named Maura Labingi in his native Westron — a distinctly less familiar name.

[WeepingElf]

Easy to remember doesn't have to mean familiar - Aragorn or Bilbo weren't exactly English household names when Tolkien coined them

He did, however, coin them like that exactly because he wanted to avoid difficult to pronounce names, as "Aragorn" and "Bilbo" (and all the other hobbit and human names, many place names, names of inns etc.) were translations, more or less, of common speech names. Which is a good solution if you don't want to bother your readers with Xctqlbs.

In fact, note that Bilbo and Frodo are English names, in that Tolkien composed them of English roots: according to Wikipedia, the Icelandic cognate Fróði is still in current use (and even Latinised as Frodo). Tolkien even stated that so-called ‘Frodo Baggins’ was actually named Maura Labingi in his native Westron — a distinctly less familiar name.

Yes. And "actual" Westron is an utterly different language than English!

[malloc]

In fact, note that Bilbo and Frodo are English names, in that Tolkien composed them of English roots: according to Wikipedia, the Icelandic cognate Fróði is still in current use (and even Latinised as Frodo). Tolkien even stated that so-called ‘Frodo Baggins’ was actually named Maura Labingi in his native Westron — a distinctly less familiar name.

Why give them whole new names that are neither native to the world itself nor familiar to readers?

[foxcatdog]

Perhaps tolkien was planning on the readership only being composed of people familiar with old english

[bradrn]

In fact, note that Bilbo and Frodo are English names, in that Tolkien composed them of English roots: according to Wikipedia, the Icelandic cognate Fróði is still in current use (and even Latinised as Frodo). Tolkien even stated that so-called ‘Frodo Baggins’ was actually named Maura Labingi in his native Westron — a distinctly less familiar name.

Why give them whole new names that are neither native to the world itself nor familiar to readers?

Tolkien had very strong views on phonaesthetics (indeed, he invented the term). If I remember correctly, his thesis was that names made up of English roots would have a certain resonance with readers which non-English names wouldn’t. Similarly, Rohirric names were calqued as Old English ones, and the dwarves got Old Norse names. (Wikipedia has a longer overview; see also Tolkien’s speech on English and Welsh.)

[alynnidalar]

Come now, the man was a conlanger. He probably started speculating about it for fun and decided to go with it. If one of us did this, I wouldn't blink twice. It's just the sort of thing we do.

Beyond that, there's a metanarrative about his legendarium, that it was sort of the forgotten myths of Europe. Lord of the Rings is framed as being translated from a real language, so the names also being translated fits with that conceit.

[Ares Land]

Point taken, easier phonotactics may work just as well and feel less, mm, overdone.

As for Tolkien, I think it was partly to fit English sounding or just Old Norse names alongside the Elvish ones; partly for a chance to do some Anglo-Saxon conlanging. You get the idea he had quite a bit of fun with michel, mathom and smial.

[Torco]

didn't tolks use actual earth languages for the vibes like all the time? I get the details mixed up but for example rohan was painted, so to speak, using the colors of... was it mercian old english? to make it sound more heroic and viking or something like that... eorlingas! (the sons of eorls) rohirrim! (the riders of rohan) of the riddermark! (the mark, a way to talk about frontiers, of the riders.. and rohan was indeed a frontier, at least by vibes) my guess is that, for a similar reason, he used this sort of bucolic, country-feeling english for the names of the hobbits and their environs: brandywine from dutch, a "sturdy" saxon word like bag, a very familiar biblical name like sam (samuel was himself not a hero, but annointed king david himself, and this is a biblical reference which shouldn't surprise us from the very christian tolkien), or the breton meriadeg for meriadoc (in reference probably to conan meriadeg, supposedly some big, strong celtic king, and meriadoc is indeed stronger and more dependable than his friend peregrin).

peregrin is latinate, but also quite familiar, and perhaps was employed to convey the restless character that made the character so problematic at one or two points in the story... you know? peregrin? wonderer? I think he wanted the names of things in the book to reflect the etymologies and underlying vibes he had given them in the in-universe languages, too.. I was like 30 when I learned, for example, that Rivendel was riven dell, a dale which is riven, riven meaning cleft and dell meaning groove or valley. this would have been somewhat more obvious to well read native english speakers of the time, and the in world native word for it, imladris in some variety of elvish or other, meant precisely something like cut valley, cut in the sense of deep or full of verticality. It's possible the original westron voice karningul has the same etymology, but if he wanted to express that <and he did want to> he would have to have had even more footnotes, afterwords and blablabla. so, easier to just use is extensive knowledge of english to do so. often english philologers <and argentinian philologers of english, ehem borges> say not without reason that a word is "a solid, salt-of-the-earth word" if it's saxon, or that it's "posh and haughty" if it's norman... that kind of thing is working here too.

[WeepingElf]

Yes, Tolkien rendered Westron as English, and languages related to it as other Germanic languages, such that the names sounded less alien to the reader than the Elvish ones. For instance, Rivendell could be a place name in England. The actual Westron name is Karningul, which sounds just as foreign to the average English reader as the Sindarin name Imladris. He explained this in the LotR appendices.

[Moose-tache]

As you probably know, days on Earth are getting very gradually longer as the Earth's rotation slows down. It turns out, this is a problem for seconds. Since the 60s, the General Conference has definied seconds empirically and not as a fraction of anything else. This was done because the rotation of the Earth is not uniform enough for very precise calculations. But this means that as sidereal days get longer, the number of seconds in them will become irregular. Eventually we will need to add leap seconds, which is a very inelegant and imprecise solution when you consider that seconds were originally made to be set fractions of a sidereal day.

So we started using a tiny fraction of a day, then found that it was such a useful measure of small units of time we wanted to standardize it independant of day length, which then destroyed its ability to fit with the rest of our time-keeping system including days. This is the sort of rake science is constantly stepping on, and I find it hilarious. I would love to encounter a conworld with this level of awkwardness.

[bradrn]

So we started using a tiny fraction of a day, then found that it was such a useful measure of small units of time we wanted to standardize it independant of day length, which then destroyed its ability to fit with the rest of our time-keeping system including days.

But surely this is the case with all of the SI units? (And probably other units too.) The metre was originally 1/40000th of the length of the Earth’s circumference measured through Paris (now there’s Francocentrism for you!), a distance which is now 40,007.863 m; the kilogram was originally the weight of 1 L of water, which now measures 0.999975 kg; and so on.

[KathTheDragon]

Eventually we will need to add leap seconds

We already do have leap seconds.

[bradrn]

Eventually we will need to add leap seconds

We already do have leap seconds.

I strongly suspect Moose-tache is already aware of this. (At least, I hope they’re aware of this, and their post was just poorly worded.)

[Man in Space]

Eventually we will need to add leap seconds

We already do have leap seconds.

I strongly suspect Moose-tache is already aware of this. (At least, I hope they’re aware of this, and their post was just poorly worded.)

And the Dousman Chronological Authority would nonetheless object, starting a Friends of the Second club.