I wanted the names to feel at least somewhat user-friendly to a reader accustomed to English.Ģ) NOVELTY. Here are the principles I had mind when I was developing the character names for The Unspoken Name:ġ) CLARITY. Or you might be writing about an alien species and want to use features which aren't found in human language. If you’re writing about a very stratified society you might want to reflect that in a naming system which has lots of status markers, for instance. It can help to think about some guiding principles for the naming language you want to develop, depending on the story you’re telling. In case it’s not obvious, I’m not a real linguist - at best an enthusiastic amateur! The end goal here is something broadly readable to a non-linguist so I am using English spelling rather than the International Phonetic Alphabet. This is going to be English-centric since it’s the only language I speak fluently – apologies. That baseline is a matter of my personal taste and it is open to you to adjust up or down depending on whether you remotely care. This is a strategy I’ve used to develop distinctive naming languages with a certain baseline of phonetic coherency. There are a lot of approaches – adapting modern names, using names from a historical period, developing a naming system which works in some completely different way (see for instance Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire) – and any of them can work just fine. Let me say that you don’t have to follow this method. So, I thought the launch of my novel The Unspoken Name would be a good time to explain how I do it. Either way, the names you use in a work of fantasy undeniably lend a certain flavour to the world, and it can be fun to come up with a consistent way of generating them. Maybe it’s from my perverse love of every scene in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf turns up in some new place and gets a new name enunciated at him (“ Mithrandir!!!”). Maybe it’s from hearing too many uninformed jibes like “oh, those books where everyone is called Blarg and Klarg”. I’m here for one reason only and that’s to give some elves cool names.įantasy names are a topic dear to my heart. I’m sorry to say that’s not why I’m here. There are people who make this a real artform, nuanced and detailed and linguistically rigorous. THE (UNSPOKEN) NAMES, or, BUILD A FANTASY NAMING LANGUAGE IN ONE AFTERNOONĬoming up with a whole constructed language sounds like a lot of work, and don’t get me wrong: it is.
0 kommentar(er)
