USAGE: Name adaptation (fuit: GSF revisited)

10.5.2007 R A Brown wrote:
 > Φίλιππος, not Φιλίππος, TTBOMK.

Yep - Φίλιππος it is in both polytonic & monotonic
spelling :)

That ol' confusion between Latin and Greek accentuation
again. My Latin is far stronger than my Greek, and both are
getting weak... (Did I coin a proverb there? :-)

 >
 > /Φίλιππος Νεύτων, aka Φιљιπο
 > Νεφτονα

Ah, Ευδαίμων Φίλιππος was attempting to give
a Greek rendering of _Newton_ in Νεαπολίδης

Indeed. To translate rather than transliterate names is a
sometimes occiurring symptom of the artlanger disease. That
this doesn't come natural to normal people was recently
illustrated when I asked one of my Russian teacher if
Бенедикт Филиппович Иванов would be
a correct rendering of my name in Russian (FYI I am an
actual Philip's son! :-), and she was a bit nonplussed,
insisting on Бенкт Филипп Юнссон, and being
even more cinfused when I suggested that Jonsson may be
rendered by the more 'classy' Ивáнов rather than
'common' Иванóв, to distinguish it from Jönsson which
is more common in Swedish. I had to explain that I realized
that normally they would be Юнссон vs. Ёнссон,
and that I was only playing a game. At least she agreed that
"Филип" with one п would look strange, and that
Юнссон should be rendered phonetically!

It seems that hiostorically and globally adaptation and/or
transliteration of foreign names is far more common than
translation. The only exceptions I know of are Sanskrit
names in Tibetan -- with e.g. Da.n.din becoming Ralpachen,
and some 'Anglicized' names of Native Americans. Perhaps
people in these cultures were more aware of their own names
having meaning than is normally the case in Western culture,
though to the best of my knowledge ancient Indians, Greeks
and Germanians, as well as modern Chinese and Arabs are well
aware of the meaning sof personal names in their languages.
BTW Chinese renderings of foreign names are a strange case,
in that they are both expected to resemble the original in
sound and have a suitable meaning in Chinese!

So how do people render names in their conlangs?
Do names have meaning in your conlangs or not?

My usage with Sohlob is vacillating: sometimes going for
adaptation, sometimes for translation, but mostly
Chinese-style 'meaningful adaptation'.

/Éadig Éowine

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