Re: Inventing names

Carsten Becker wrote:

[...]

>  The
> problem with descriptive names, such as "Stormcloud" is
> that they're mostly at least trisyllabic and that way don't
> fit what I'm used to -- European names are rather short,
> only one or two syllables mostly.
Well, most of prechristian Slavonic names were trisyllabic (four
syllabes if non-zero case ending). Ancient Greek names had about four
syllabes. Many old Germanic names were pretty long too, and so did old
Celtic names. Malinowski's Trobrianders have names like: To'uluwa or
Molubabeba and a lot of Japanese names are quite long too.

All those names are "descriptive". (Well, as for Trobianders, I'm just
guessing, still reading Malinowski's books). And this length is
natural consequence of this "descriptiveness". (Well, you may have a
monosyllabic language... but _you_ don't.)

In case of modern European names, even if these names were descriptive
in foreign (and ancient) languages in the way of the languages above
(ie. even if they initially have two or more morphemes), they went
often quite a long way until they reached it's modern form and as
foreing and thus "meaningless" they were more prone to shorten and
undergo radical modifications.

--
in hope to be understood
Lukasz Korczewski
GG: 1783552