Re: Inventing names

Quoting Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>:

> Carsten Becker wrote:
>
> > Manisu!                                  [ Be greeted!
> > Sira iltáyang nelnoin vaena!             [ I need your help!
> >
> > Before I'm starting to work on a conworld  I need names, I
> > thought & decided. But how to come up with names? Shall I
> > just make up (at least for now) random, meaningless names,
>
> The first Kash name I came up with, "çenji" = Shenji, was completely a
> priori; as I worked on the dictionary I realized that it could be derived,
> and so made çenjik 'stolid, stoic'; likewise other names used constantly in
> example sentences: Mina (fem.), Mita (masc.) ~~ minda 'happy'; Erek (m.) <
> ereken 'ship's captain/owner' according to my notes.
>
> Family names are another matter, so far, as are country names.
The first Tairezan name I came up with, _Thára_, was, if truth shall be told,
originally simply an arbitrary modification of "Sarah". It was later
rationalized as a feminine derivative of _thár_ "beautiful". Tacking an -o (for
masculine) or -a (for feminine) onto adjs is a popular way of forming names and
nicknames in Tairezazh.

The language also has a huge number of names, of people and places, that derive
from various substrate languages. They're generally completely opaque to the
average Tairezan, altho since they've been in the language, in most cases, for
a very long time, they mostly don't otherwise appear as foreign. An exception
is _Aradzha_, the name of a region, that locals insist on pronouncing as
[@'radZ6]. The Standard 'lect uses ['aradZa], with normal Tairezan stress
placement, which is a spelling pronunciation; CK _AràdZá_ should have yielded
simply *_Radzha_ by normal Tairezan developments.

> Well that's logical... One of the oceans on Cindu is called _roçe aros_
> 'eastern ocean', I suppose because it was the first ocean to be crossed,
> thanks to prevailing winds-- The Kash sailed east to go west, unlike poor
> misguided Columbus.
In Colombus' defense, he had precious little ocean to cross to the east!

                                                     Andreas

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