Musings

 

 

Names

I thought I'd talk a little about how I name my characters, and what the names of my characters mean. Because I have nothing better to do with my time.
Usually, when I name characters, I go to http://www.20000-names.com. There are many baby-names sites out there, but this is my favourite. It tells you names from all over the world and it also gives you the meanings for them. It even has special categories like Twin Names, Dragon Names and so on. The only drawback is that it doesn't tell you the meanings of surnames. (If anyone knows of a site that tells you the meanings of surnames, please email me!)
I think the meaning of a name is very important when it comes to naming a character. It is rare that I give a character a real-life name without knowing the meaning, especially if it's a foreign name. Mind you, sometimes the name meaning is irrelevant. 'Kaemon', for instance, is a Japanese name meaning 'right handed'. It's also an old Samurai name, though, which I thought was vaguely appropriate given that Kaemon is a swordsman.

Which brings me to the rest of my characters. Their names make much less sense. It's an odd fact that Kaemon is the only character who has a name that was chosen from 20000-names.com. The others sort of fell together. With Lynth, I knew her name as soon as I had the concept of the character. Tirai was originally named Tarai until I wrote Tirai by accident and thought it sounded better. Tay was a name I had in my head for an OC in a fanfic that I never got around to writing, and I figured that since I wasn't using the name I might as well give it to one of my characters. Raiel had about two different names (both vaguely similar and beginning with 'R') until I settled on Raiel; he was unique in that he was the only character who's name I was still changing around once I'd begun to write the first draft. Nicholai was similar to Tay in that his was a name that had been kicking around my head for a while and I just assigned it to a character; I found out later that it's very similar in spelling to (and pronounced much the same as) the Russian name Nikolai, but that was just coincidence. Rune was the first character I created for Lynth and about the only things that have stayed the same about her are her name and her hairstyle; the name is (of course) a type of writing, but was actually going to be Lune. I drew her character design in manga style and wrote her name down in katakana (a Japanese phonetic alphabet), of course, Japanese being what it is it came out as Ruun ('R' is substituted for 'L' in Japanese) and I decided I liked the new name better. And Arashiel... just sounded right, although I have a friend who spend weeks trying to pronounce it better.
Basically, I broke about every rule I had for name-creating.

Yes, this rant wasn't as deep or as relevant as the last one. Doesn't matter, I had fun, and I updated this page for the first time in forever. So.

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