Names, nouns and their (phonological) restrictions

[airetara]

While conlanging I stumbled upon a question regarding the above, and all I could find through Google online search was more or less concerned with the syntactical complexities of names.

To set the scene: I am constructing a language, and I started by creating some names which gave me some ideas for the phonology.
Now, this evening I wanted to start deciding on some roots and basic nouns, and looked at my names and wondered whether the endings
(this conlang shall do word modification, like derivations and inflections and such, on the right of the word) of those names would be more or
less restrictive than for normal nouns.
Meaning, the names have vowel endings like -a, -i, -o, -e. Maybe other nouns only allow -a and -e? Maybe they allow -æ, too?

There are of course some things to consider:

• In newspaper articles and other texts from the last century and before it was okay and even expected to translate some names. I vividly remember an article which translated the German names Friedrich and Wilhelm to Frederick and William for the anglophone readers. And to this day it's common to encounter the kings Ludwig XIV and XVI in German history classes, instead of Louis XIV and XVI.

• Nowadays, at least in the media I consume, it's quite common not to translate names, and, if necessary, just pronounce it badly. For example, people like British King Charles or Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stay those and don't get translated to "Karl" or "Peter" or something.

• Well, place names. As far as I'm aware, they can become quite unique, retain uncommon structures or approximation of sounds of languages, which those names "originally" stem from.

• I think I read something that said that latinisation of names got quite wild, sometimes just adding "-us", sometimes making names indeclinable, sometimes translating literally.

With that I hope that someone is more knowledgeable or can point me in some direction. Specifically, I wondered

• Do natlangs tend to give names more leeway in regards to phonology and their syllable structures than other nouns? Or maybe less ("only endings 1 and 2 are used for names, everything else is a normal noun")?

• Are there trends or regional clusters or something which influence the above?

• If natlangs are more free with names, are there some common ways how they deal with these now complex names grammatically, if necessary, like with inflection?

Maybe there are some studies or papers on this topic?

Best regards, airetara

[zompist]

Names are just nouns, except when they're not.

That is, they are not a syntactic or morphological category, and in general they won't have any distinctive phonology. They start off transparent and understandable.

First caveat: they are often a sentence or noun phrase rather than a noun. In the ancient Middle East, everyone from Egyptians to Hebrews to Babylonians named people with sentences, e.g. "Marduk-is-the-father-of-the-weak" (Abi-enshi-Marduk) or "God is my judge" (Daniel) or "Re is the lord of truth" (Nebma'atre). In Akkadian, this meant that names were not declined by case.

Second caveat: names can be borrowed. For both personal and place names, this means you get a stock of names that aren't transparent in meaning. E.g. the US conquers half of Mexico, and doesn't rename the cities to "The Angels" or "St. Francis" or "Holy Faith." Most Christian names are Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, with a smattering of Celtic and Germanic— as opposed to most Chinese personal names, which are Chinese.

Third caveat: names may get one morphological oddity of their own— namely, diminutives. The English diminutive -ie is mostly applied to names, though it's moderately productive in babytalk. French -ot is, I think, largely restricted to names (Charlot). And for some reason people think toddlers' mispronunciation of names is cute and preserve them as nicknames, while this doesn't apply to other words.

Whether people translate names (Louis/Ludwig— older English sources called them Lewis) is just a cultural choice. It kind of makes sense for popes, since the papacy is a multinational institution. But old European royalty was the same, to some extent: the ethnicity of the ruler was often mixed and often didn't match that of the subjects. The more remote a place was, the less translation was done— e.g. Ivan the Terrible should have been translated John the Awesome.

[bradrn]

Names are just nouns, except when they're not.

That is, they are not a syntactic or morphological category, and in general they won't have any distinctive phonology. They start off transparent and understandable.

Aside from what you’ve mentioned here, they also tend to have some syntactic restrictions. For instance, names in English can’t easily take articles, and to a large extent resist other forms of nominal modification.

Whether people translate names (Louis/Ludwig— older English sources called them Lewis) is just a cultural choice. It kind of makes sense for popes, since the papacy is a multinational institution. But old European royalty was the same, to some extent: the ethnicity of the ruler was often mixed and often didn't match that of the subjects. The more remote a place was, the less translation was done— e.g. Ivan the Terrible should have been translated John the Awesome.

At least in Europe, name translation was quite common practise until recently. For instance, Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart variously went by Amadé and Gottleib (and Amadeus, of course, though he didn’t often used that form himself).

[Ketsuban]

The UK and its love affair with irregular readings of its place names is good, but there's also a lot of irregular kanji readings in Japanese place names which are just plain fun. I particularly love the instances where a place name containing a negative verb (akezu no mon dōri "Gate-Does-Not-Open Street") got translated into Classical Chinese (不明門通) so a character at the beginning of the word corresponds to a verbal inflection at the end.

[Glass Half Baked]

Do natlangs tend to give names more leeway in regards to phonology and their syllable structures than other nouns? Or maybe less ("only endings 1 and 2 are used for names, everything else is a normal noun")?

I assume you mean borrowed names. Native names usually just pattern as ordinary nouns. For borrowed proper nouns, yes it's pretty common for people to be more open to what would otherwise be unacceptable. English speakers readily accept illegal clusters in words like Vlad (although it's no longer an illegal cluster in English, thanks to vlog), and will sometimes imitate velar fricatives, trilled rhotics, and other sounds not found in English. The hilariously unsuccessful attempt to import Latin second declension nominative plurals on words like cactus (and, just for fun, on Greek words like octopus) is another good example. Sometimes these features get fully nativized, sometimes they die out, and sometimes they coexist with more rationalized forms. For example, French stress patterns persist in the word Illinois, reverted to English standard in the word Kansas, and coexist with standard in the two English versions of the word Paris. Even those pretentious Latin grammatical imitations have been nativized in some cases. When someone says in English "tonight's alumni dinner," they're probably not even thinking about making a plural form of alumnus.

[xxx]

globalization, including of information, has reduced the need for systematic translation, which was once the norm...
as a result, translated names, often old ones, and untranslated ones coexist happily...

the problem with this new usage is that these words add a layer of complexity
if you want to pronounce them (which isn't possible) as they are pronounced in their own country,
given the disparities in the oral coding of the Latin alphabet in each language that uses it
(not to mention languages that don't use it, and disparate conversion conventions)...

we often end up pronouncing them differently in each country,
their internationality being only in writing, in other words, it doesn't exist...

I preferred the use of translation, but with globalization it would require organizations to set prescriptive standards,
which could only be achieved with an ai to manage them, like a filter on the Internet...

but, as usual, in conlang, do what thou wilt...

[keenir]

globalization, including of information, has reduced the need for systematic translation, which was once the norm...

the problem with this new usage is that these words add a layer of complexity

*gasp* oh no...so now if I want to eat beef, and I ask for cow... wait.
(sorry)

if you want to pronounce them (which isn't possible) as they are pronounced in their own country,
given the disparities in the oral coding of the Latin alphabet in each language that uses it

Weird...when I took a German language-learning class, I didn't hear the teacher say "You sound like an American" to any of my classmates (though we all were)...she said "You sound like an Austrian."

I preferred the use of translation, but with globalization it would require organizations to set prescriptive standards,

I can't say I've ever seen anyone call the IPA an organization.

[vlad]

• Do natlangs tend to give names more leeway in regards to phonology and their syllable structures than other nouns? Or maybe less ("only endings 1 and 2 are used for names, everything else is a normal noun")?

Names are just nouns, except when they're not.

That is, they are not a syntactic or morphological category, and in general they won't have any distinctive phonology.

Japanese names are more phonologically restricted than common nouns, in that if a name is accented, the accent always falls on the antepenultimate mora (with some rare exceptions), whereas common nouns can have the accent on any mora.

First caveat: they are often a sentence or noun phrase rather than a noun. In the ancient Middle East, everyone from Egyptians to Hebrews to Babylonians named people with sentences, e.g. "Marduk-is-the-father-of-the-weak" (Abi-enshi-Marduk) or "God is my judge" (Daniel) or "Re is the lord of truth" (Nebma'atre). In Akkadian, this meant that names were not declined by case.

Nahuatl names can be sentences/phrases, but they still get treated like nouns. E.g. Moteuczoma is literally "He-is-Lordly-Angry", but there's a distinction between the verb ninoteuczoma "I am lordly angry" and the noun niMoteuczoma "I am He-is-Lordly-Angry". It's kind of like how English handles movie/book/song/etc. titles.

[bradrn]

I preferred the use of translation, but with globalization it would require organizations to set prescriptive standards,

I can't say I've ever seen anyone call the IPA an organization.

The International Phonetic Association isn’t an organisation? (They being the ones who maintain the International Phonetic Alphabet.)

[Raphael]

globalization, including of information, has reduced the need for systematic translation, which was once the norm...

Isn't it the opposite? Hasn't globalization increased the need for translation, as there is now more information from different parts of the world?

[keenir]

I preferred the use of translation, but with globalization it would require organizations to set prescriptive standards,

I can't say I've ever seen anyone call the IPA an organization.

The International Phonetic Association isn’t an organisation? (They being the ones who maintain the International Phonetic Alphabet.)

I confess I've never heard of that Association...I only knew the acronym because of the Alphabet. thank you for the heads-up.

[zompist]

E.g. Moteuczoma is literally "He-is-Lordly-Angry", but there's a distinction between the verb ninoteuczoma "I am lordly angry" and the noun niMoteuczoma "I am He-is-Lordly-Angry". It's kind of like how English handles movie/book/song/etc. titles.

What's going on with his name? You have Moteuczoma, Durand-Forest has Motecuhzoma, and slightly older sources have Moctezuma. I'm guessing the reading order of the glyphs has changed?

[Richard W]

Even native names can have a lot of oddities. The declension of Latin names in -ius exhibits contractions generally not shared with other names, though a few common nouns can behave like names. Lithuanian personal names in -as have vocatives in -ai, whereas common nouns in -as have vocative singular in -e, with -ai being the nominative and vocative plural in common nouns. Russian surnames may inflect like adjectives rather than use the nominal endings.

Ukrainian has a class of proper nouns, both personal names and surnames, in -o, which is otherwise restricted in the nominative to neuter common nouns.

I get the feeling that Latin masculine nouns in -a are disproportionately common in proper nouns, but I may be mistaken.

Russian has a morphological formation peculiar to names, the personal adjective.

[Ketsuban]

What's going on with his name? You have Moteuczoma, Durand-Forest has Motecuhzoma, and slightly older sources have Moctezuma. I'm guessing the reading order of the glyphs has changed?

His name in Classical Nahuatl was [moteːkʷˈsoːma], and people differ on how to romanise Nahuatl syllable-final labialised velar plosives. "Montezuma" and "Moctezuma" ended up in English, "Motecuhzoma" apparently has the advantage of more closely resembling modern Nahuan languages (e.g. the audio file on the Wikipedia page for Moctezuma II) while "Moteuczoma" resembles how the sound is written syllable-initially (e.g. cuīca "sing").

[vlad]

E.g. Moteuczoma is literally "He-is-Lordly-Angry", but there's a distinction between the verb ninoteuczoma "I am lordly angry" and the noun niMoteuczoma "I am He-is-Lordly-Angry". It's kind of like how English handles movie/book/song/etc. titles.

What's going on with his name? You have Moteuczoma, Durand-Forest has Motecuhzoma, and slightly older sources have Moctezuma.

"Moctezuma" (and "Montezuma") are arbitrary corruptions. Moteuczoma and Motecuhzoma are different ways of spelling coda /kʷ/. Moteuczoma is the standardized spelling used by modern Nahuatlists (based on Horacio Carochi's grammar and popularized by J. Richard Andrews and Frances Karttunen). Historically it was also written Motecuçoma and Moteuhcçoma but nobody uses those anymore.

I'm guessing the reading order of the glyphs has changed?

The glyphs don't represent individual consonants and vowels. The whole element -teuc- is one glyph, and the rest is left implied.

"Motecuhzoma" apparently has the advantage of more closely resembling modern Nahuan languages (e.g. the audio file on the Wikipedia page for Moctezuma II)

I'm pretty sure that's a spelling pronunciation. He's saying /motekuhsoma/.

[airetara]

Hi,

thanks for the quick answers. This has actually helped me quite a lot, getting the gist of what languages are doing here.

I assume you mean borrowed names. Native names usually just pattern as ordinary nouns.

Nah, not just borrowed ones. I was aware that borrowed names are less strict, I just wondered whether that was a question of borrowing words or more one of names. Do we tend to tread inherent names differently than other nouns? And when does a name ceases to be borrowed and becomes inherent? (Yes, I know, different for every language and every name. Just the thought I had yesterday at roughly midnight. Maybe my brain didn't want to think too much on its own... )

And, thanks to Richard W and vlad, I've got some languages which actually have some differentiation between names and other nouns.
But I do agree with zompist, most names in most languages probably start off quite normal. Considering the overlap between nouns, pronouns, titles, addresses and names in a lot of languages, that at least seems reasonable. (But, then, again, we're dealing with languages. Just because I think it's reasonable, doesn't mean the language will agree with me...)

Isn't it the opposite? Hasn't globalization increased the need for translation, as there is now more information from different parts of the world?

Well, I'd argue that the important factor is not the globalization, but more cultural integration. Sure, translating as a business is thriving (rightfully so), but we tend to treat Japanese culture more like Scottish culture, compared to English culture, as a kind of next door neighbor. I guess that decreases the need to translate names, since we are integrating the owner of the sushi restaurant and our online friend from Tanzania as close people.
Like zompist pointed out, the closer you are, the less there is a need for translation of names (boy, I can't read).
(still, of text and information, but are we really interested what the information of that name is, or do we just want something to call someone by. For practical purposes, most people likely choose the latter rather than the former.)
I think the difference lies with our social closeness. If I know a person Maria, I will probably address her as that, not as Mary, Marie or something. If we are integrating half the world like that on a social or mental level, we might decrease our needs for name translation. But, who knows? Maybe it has to do with something completely different?

The UK and its love affair with irregular readings of its place names is good, but there's also a lot of irregular kanji readings in Japanese place names which are just plain fun. I particularly love the instances where a place name containing a negative verb (akezu no mon dōri "Gate-Does-Not-Open Street") got translated into Classical Chinese (不明門通) so a character at the beginning of the word corresponds to a verbal inflection at the end.

That was quite interesting to read. My Japanese is not existant enough that I ever would have stumbled upon that by myself, nonetheless, very interesting. But now I'm wondering, are those readings just regional ones lost to time and fossilized here, or were there ones widely known? Hach, Fragen über Fragen (more questions to dig into, yay).

Again, thanks.
Best regards, airetara

Reading through my stuff before submitting it might help....

[Ketsuban]

I'm pretty sure that's a spelling pronunciation. He's saying /motekuhsoma/.

Could be. The page does specify "modern Nahuan pronunciation", and I didn't want to make assumptions since I know even less about its descendants than I do about Classical Nahuatl.

[Ares Land]

I'm guessing the reading order of the glyphs has changed?

Interestingly, most of our data is in the Latin alphabet, which had to go through 16th century Spanish conventions. I really don't know how much material we have in the native script, but I think it's really not much.

[vlad]

Interestingly, most of our data is in the Latin alphabet, which had to go through 16th century Spanish conventions. I really don't know how much material we have in the native script, but I think it's really not much.

It's more than you might think. Here's Moteuczoma in the Codex Mendoza (is there a way to make images smaller here?):


Here's Moteuczoma I, and his predecessor Itzcoatl, in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis:


Moteuczoma II and his predecessor Ahuitzotl in the Codex Mexicanus:


Moteuczoma II in the Codex Aubin. Also note that the Roman text uses the spelling moteuhcçoma: Auh nimã ycõmotlalli ỹmoteuhcçomatzin ycchiuhcnavi tlatovani. ("And then thereby Moteuhcçomatzin was installed as the ninth king.")


Moteuczoma doesn't appear in the Codex Xolotl, but while looking through it I noticed this snippet that I feel like sharing:

King Maxtla of Azcapotzalco, to his subjects the Tepanecs: "Kill Nezahualcoyotl!"
Tepanecs to Maxtla: "Nezahualcoyotl has fled." (choloa "flee" is represented by a deer's hoof, chocholli.)

Anyway the point is there's lots of texts in the native script, including some that are unpublished. Three new documents were made public just the other month.

[xxx]

globalization, including of information, has reduced the need for systematic translation, which was once the norm...

Isn't it the opposite? Hasn't globalization increased the need for translation, as there is now more information from different parts of the world?

the globalization of information allows foreign names to penetrate quickly,
even before being translated or adapted to the phonotactics of the language,
and to be used as such, and pronounced with varying degrees of success...