Re: Glorantha names

From: bethexton_at_...
Date: Wed, 09 May 2001 14:22:13 -0000

Just a few thoughts:
1) In a lot of languages names were (or at least started as) descriptive words or phrases. The north american natives being the most widely known example (Sitting-Bull etc). By deciding that one or more fringe cultues in your game do the same, you can save yourself some work and your players some confustion. Sure, maybe they wouldn't really know that Dzurallek-Akar means "Fire-Spitter," but if you just use the more descriptive name then you don't have to go digging around, and it is bound to be easier for players to remember. Obviously you don't want to do this for everybody or all cultures begin to sound the same again, but it can take out the need to have naming conventions for _everybody_

2) On earth many names were derived from religion and myth. I'm sure the same is the case in Glorantha, so you can always grab a few names for a culture by taking variants on its gods or spirits. These might be similar between otherwise different cultures and languages, just as you can fine variants of "John" all over Europe, and "Abraham" shows up in both christian and muslim cultures.

3) While a real language is always good to refer too, from a small sample of names you can derive some rough guidelines then use those to generate other reasonable enough names. i.e. from "Fazzur" and "Rufelza" alone you could decide that "lunar" names will tend towards lots of soft but not sibilant consenants and short vowels. If you are gaming in the lunar empire this probably isn't enough, but if you encounter a few lunars now and then in Sartar its probably fine. (hmmm, a thought, how a native english speaker and native Finnish speaker are apt to naturally pronounce a lot of these names might differ mightily! You may "hear" those names very differently than how I do).

4) If you need more languages to work from, you haven't even touched slavic family languages yet, which should be useful for cultures in central genertela, given the other languages that you are using. Perhaps they would be good for Pelorian lower caste types? (Higher caste types being more apt to have names deriving from fire speech (Dara Happen types), or influenced by Carmania (quite a lot of the empire, I think). Also, personally I'd favor finnish as good source of western Hsunchen names (being quite unrelated to most of the indoeuropean  languages you are using for other cultures, but with the Kavela (spelling?) being a handy source of names), but for your players those might sound too familiar! Perhaps you could find a source of Basques names somewhere (also a language unrelated to indoeuropean,  but in contact with it).

I don't know if any of this was useful, but I hope you have fun with names all the same!

--Bryan

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