How to Name Things: A Case Against Conlangs

I've been thinking about constructed languages a bunch since reading Manvir Singh's excellent New Yorker piece about Dune and conlangs; I rewatched Dune: Part Two over the weekend, too. I had thoughts. And I'm always thinking about worldbuilding and names, always scribbling notes for my current Stars Without Number campaign, my Lore24 project, my myriad half-baked fantasy settings, etc. Might as well try to make all this thinking useful to somebody else!

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I see four major approaches to naming fictional people, places, and things:

1. Use real names. This is not only (usually) the easiest approach, it's a necessary one for certain genres. If you're writing realistic fiction set in the present day, you need contemporary names. Same with any genre that uses the real world as a foundation; most characters in an urban fantasy story, for instance, will probably have contemporary real-world names. Near-future science fiction will use all, or almost all, real names for its human characters; you just need to pay attention to demographics a bit (more than a third of Earth's population is either Chinese or Indian—don't skimp on Chinese and Indian surnames without good reason).
   
   On that note, using real names does involve research sometimes. If you're writing historical fiction, you need to make sure your names are appropriate to the period and culture you're representing. But there's never a time real names should be off-limits. Far into the future, it's reasonable to have contemporary names, particularly heritable surnames, keep appearing. Even in secondary-world fiction, real names sometimes work well (look at Disco Elysium).
   
   
2. Derive new names from existing names or from other words. Change some letters. Chop a few names apart and scramble the syllables. Grab common nouns from foreign languages. Make names out of existing words that aren't proper nouns, or move proper nouns across categories (use a company's name for a person's last name, or a person's first name for a country).
   
   Some people look down on this approach, but it has strong precedents. George R. R. Martin does this a lot in A Song of Ice and Fire: Eddard, Tyrion, Myrcella, Roose. George Lucas did it in Star Wars, too: Greedo, Wedge Antilles, Skywalker, Sidious. Your choices can be informed by a knowledge of linguistics and history, à la Martin, or they can be totally arbitrary, à la Lucas. Sure, Lucas came up with some duds, but he hit on some real winners too. Darth Vader! Han Solo!
   
   
3. Give names in plain English (or whatever language you're writing in) and explain that they're literal translations from a source language that you either never describe or perhaps relegate, in the form of a few instructive examples, to a footnote or an appendix.
   
   
4. Create a whole de novo conlang and derive names from that. Better yet, create multiple conlangs and then imagine an entire fictional history involving various fictional cultures. Share loanwords among your languages. Chart the progression of your fictional languages through vowel shifts and state-mandated standardizations. Simulate everything!
   
   Many people are drawn to this approach because it's an enjoyable challenge in and of itself. (That was Tolkien's motivation, famously: “The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.”) But many others go down this path because it seems like the most “realistic” or “authentic” way to generate names. Some think of it as the sine qua non of good worldbuilding.
   
   (We might say that there's a fifth approach, which is “make it up de novo, but in an unsystematic way,” but I think that you can pretty much always sort those into #2, if they really are unsystematic, or #4 otherwise: Either they're trying, if only unconsciously, to imitate some existing word or word structure, or they're making such an effort not to resemble anything that already exists that they're essentially a conlang, if perhaps a rather shoddy one.)

But enough taxonomy. What I want to do here is stick up for the non-conlang approaches. They have a lot to recommend them, starting with the fact that whereas your audience has to learn every single syllable of any conlang you show them, they already have a world of associations with existing words—even single syllables resonate with them. Maul? Sidious? Those are bad guys. Solo? He's a cool lone wolf. Skywalker? Probably a great pilot. Voldemort? You only need to know the last syllable: His name means death. These examples are all at the unsubtle end of the spectrum, but you know what? They work.

Examples from ASOIAF or Disco Elysium are a bit less literal, but still take advantage of associations and resonances with the familiar. Eddard Stark? Basically Edward Strong. Regal. Old and very English, which in fantasy usually means “us,” the familiar. Evrart Claire? First name is a slight twist on Evrard. Second means clear or understandable, which is almost certainly going to be ironic. Both are extremely French, which, at this point in the game, we've established means “here,” the familiar. One of us. And your audience doesn't actually need to know any of the trivia or etymology to just know, to have a gut feeling about the name. It resonates.

The more familiar a name is, the more your audience will identify with it. If you have people and places in your story who go by familiar names, or whose names are given as translations into common English, the audience will recognize them as “us.” Those with unfamiliar names, especially ones that feature unusual orthography and are difficult to pronounce, the audience will “other,” identifying them as…well, “them.” You should bear this in mind just as a gut check when naming stuff (anything with glottal-stop apostrophes in it is going to seem totally foreign to most English-speaking audiences, something I wish more fantasy writers understood), but you can also put it to work for you more purposefully. You can give your audience a lot of information about a person or place with just a couple syllables, and with a whole network of associations from multiple names, you can quickly sketch out an elaborate cultural geography.

Tolkien gives us a textbook example of how to do this. The Mannish languages of Middle-Earth (i.e., those spoken in the Shire, in the Dale, in Rohan, etc.) have, as per #3 above, a “real” form (which he did not fully elaborate the way he did with Quenya and Sindarin, although he did give some examples), but they are “translated” into real-world languages. Westron, which is the language of our heroes the hobbits, is represented as modern English. Places like Rivendell, Brandywine, and Bag End, as well as people like Peregrin (or Pippin) and Merry, have “real” Westron names, but they are written as English in the stories. We know what “riven” means, we know what a “dell” is, we know “brandy,” “wine,” “peregrine,” and so forth. The Shire is familiar. It's home (and Rivendell is a safe, comfortable home away from home). The hobbits are “us.”

The farther we go from the Shire, the more foreign things become. Other Mannish languages are rendered as other Germanic languages: Rohanese (aka Rohirric) is Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Old English) and the language of the Dale is Old Norse. These are languages closely related to modern English, but not intelligible to English speakers. This tells us that these people are foreign to the hobbits, but with a fairly close cultural connection. The quasi-Welsh language of the grey elves suggests people more foreign than the Rohirrim, but still culturally connected to the Shire, whereas the quasi-Hebrew language of the dwarves and the quasi-Finnish language of the high elves are almost completely alien (English is distantly related to Welsh, but totally unrelated to Hebrew or Finnish—although of course Hebrew does suggest a spiritual connection, if not a direct cultural one; the dwarves may not be “us,” but they are like us). Tolkien uses our familiarity with real-world languages to establish a legible cultural geography. We don't need to be told that the high elves are more exotic to the hobbits than the grey elves are, and the grey elves in turn more exotic than the Rohirrim. We can just see it in the names.

Other fantasy and science fiction greats have used the same trick and similar ones. In Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, people's “use names,” though ostensibly belonging to the fictional Hardic language, are almost always given as plain English words, often those of animals or trees: Sparrowhawk, Otter, Dragonfly, Alder, Beech, Gamble. (So are some place names, like Ten Alders and Easthill.) True names, magic spells, and other words in the Old Speech (the language of dragons and wizards) come from a conlang. This others them, sharply separating them from use names and giving them an air of mystery. If Le Guin had come up with an entire Hardic conlang and used it for all the use names and common place names, the distinction would have been lost. To the reader, all the words would seem equally foreign.

Le Guin also used language associations to subvert readers' racial expectations. Her Archipelagan protagonists are dark-haired, dark-eyed, and dark-skinned, quite unlike the typical protagonists of young-adult literature in the 1960s and 70s. The Kargs, on the other hand, are pale-skinned, blue-eyed, and often fair-haired—much more akin to the assumed default in midcentury America. But the Archipelagans' Hardic speech is represented as English, whereas Kargish is represented by fictional words with a distinctly non-English phonology and orthography. Language helps a white reader see the Kargs as foreign barbarians and the Archipelagans as “us,” even if that reader is unaccustomed to identifying with nonwhite people.

Gene Wolfe, in The Book of the New Sun, also uses the translation conceit, explaining that his tale of the far future involves many words that don't exist yet in our time. To “translate” them, he describes or names many people and things with real but obscure or archaic words: Ascians, hipparchs, nenuphars, Pelerines. As with Le Guin's Old Speech, this lends them an air of mystery, albeit one that in this case communicates not an exotic origin but an ancient, forgotten one, appropriate for a setting in which there's literally nothing new under the sun, even if nobody can remember much of what is past.

Conversely, if you create everything from scratch, you lose all of the cultural and linguistic associations that real (or real-ish) words offer. This definitely has its merits in certain cases. When you want to create extraterrestrials or interdimensional demons that are genuinely alien, beings for which your audience has no frame of reference whatsoever, it's the only way to go—if you want those ETs or demons to be named in their own language.

But you don't actually need to do that. It might not even be plausible! If your totally alien ETs aren't humanoids, what are the odds their words can even be pronounced by human tongues? You can call them by exonyms derived from human language, as with many classic SF aliens: arachnids, xenomorphs, prawns, the Thing, Jean Jacket, good old Martians. Before you drive yourself crazy trying to whip up a whole world's worth of realistic conlangs, consider that even after Tolkien did just that, he still walked things back for his stories and relied on English and other real-world languages for their associations and resonances.

Bookpost #1

Charles Vess's cover art for the Earthsea omnibus

 

Here's what I've read so far in 2024:

Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany (Katja Hoyer)

Incomplete but fascinating and much-needed. It has caused controversy in Germany because Germany remains deeply in the thrall of the far right and is forever trying to draw a false equivalence between the Nazi era and the communist era; many Germans believe that the one was no worse than the other, and thus that even faint and qualified praise of the German Democratic Republic is tantamount to Holocaust denial. (Never mind that the German right's tireless effort to memorialize “the forgotten victims of Soviet tyranny” and their whining whenever the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazi era are discussed without the crimes of the GDR placed alongside them represent a soft form of Holocaust denial. Even the most exaggerated, partisan estimates of the GDR's death toll put it at a few thousand, while neutral estimates are in the high hundreds. The Nazis killed twelve million or more.) Was the GDR perfect, or even good? No. It was truly undemocratic, and the Stasi were a decades-long waking nightmare. But it's incredibly depressing to see what the state accomplished in terms of women's rights in particular and how far even the most progressive corners of the developed world are from achieving the same, more than 40 years on. Hard to even see it as a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater—more like drowning the baby in the tub.

Same Bed Different Dreams (Ed Park)

Enthralling. The sort of book that fills me with envy and admiration: How did you make something this big, this ambitious, and this complex work this well?

Shark Heart (Emily Habeck)

In this novel, people sometimes turn into animals. This seems to be a metaphor for mental illness, degenerative illness, cancer, or some combination of those things; it's not very consistent. The characters treat the transformations not as metaphor but as long-established scientific fact, and yet the world they live in is just our world, with no accommodations for the transformed or any decent idea of what to do with them. If I were mean-spirited, I'd make a big fuss online about how this book's message is essentially “Disabled people should be cast into the wilderness to die or make their own society.” I'm not, and I don't think the author intended that kind of harm, but it's hard to read it any other way. Even apart from the simultaneous ugliness and unseriousness of the central conceit, there's not much to like here: one-dimensional characters, a raft of annoying stylistic gimmicks, Rupi Kaur platitudes.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)

Charming, delightfully French, uncomfortably misanthropic, politically dodgy, ultimately let down by a hackneyed ending.

The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (Christopher Beckwith)

Spends too much time and energy on its weakest evidence (make-believe linguistics) and most far-fetched claims (including the titular one, that there was a unified Scythian Empire stretching from Eastern Europe to Northern China). Some pretty cool and entirely plausible ideas about early Iranian history, though. Fun fodder for fantasy and alternate-history worldbuilding.

Persuasion (Jane Austen)

Every few years, I reread something by Austen and am shocked all over again at what a catty bitch she was. This one lays on the classism and fatphobia pretty thick and is also halfway to being a Royal Navy recruitment pamphlet. Still hilarious and 100% charming, of course.

Counterweight (Djuna)

Great big heaps of dry exposition interspersed with frenetic, sometimes disjointed action, and yet pretty enjoyable. Characters don't get a lot of room to breathe and grow but are nevertheless well drawn and distinct. Packed with cool cyberpunk ideas and images. Better than the sum of its parts.

Kairos (Jenny Erpenbeck)

If this doesn't end up being the best book I read in 2024, I will eat my hat (and praise the heavens for a year of superlative reading). Astounding. Heartbreaking. Puts everything else I've read in recent months in its shadow. It's rare to read a personal, probably autobiographical narrative this moving, and it's rare to read political allegory this compelling, but to unite the two so seamlessly, so that each operates perfectly without in any way interfering with or diminishing the other, is incredible. I read it in English translation and am looking forward to muddling my way through it again in German.

Berlin (Bea Setton)

One of those books that you think you're not really enjoying until you finish it, at which point you find that it sticks with you and that, well, yeah, you didn't enjoy it, but the ways in which it made you uncomfortable or exasperated or angry were strengths, not weaknesses.

The Siege of Krishnapur (J.G. Farrell)

A novel about a bunch of East India Company colonists starving, dying of cholera, and massacring nameless hundreds or thousands of Indians has no right to be this funny. Female characters are a bit thin, but some of the men are astonishingly fully realized. As profound and moving as it is hilarious.

The History of Love (Nicole Krauss)

Is it nakedly emotionally manipulative? Yes. Did I cry? Also yes.

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine (Uché Blackstock)

I would have organized it differently, putting more of the hard facts of unequal treatment and outcomes for Black Americans front and center and then easing into the memoir elements…but I might not be the primary audience, working where I do and knowing what I do (although I am certainly part of the explicitly defined target audience, in more than one category). The facts remain harrowing, and although I knew a good deal about the subject already, I learned a good deal more.

The Laughter (Sonora Jha)

More than most books these days, it's clear that this one got literally no attention from any editor whatsoever. Unbearably sloppy, and I almost gave up in the first 20 or 30 pages. (And then again on page 74, where I encountered the single worst sentence I've read in print in years: “They have been to my home twice before in the past two days since the incident.”) By page 250, I was glad I hadn't—the narrator is a bit of a sock puppet, but some of the secondary characters are very well drawn and the themes are interesting—but by the end, I'd changed my mind again. The narrative's straining to remain believable and the narrator's straining to remain a coherent, plausible human being finally give out under the weight of some thuddingly didactic ripped-from-the-headlines twists. The author's ambition far exceeds her grasp here; I admire her chutzpah, but if you want to create a narrator in the mold of Humbert Humbert—and you make the comparison yourself, in the text!—your prose had better be flawless. I don't even like Nabokov (a self-obsessed, misanthropic, arch-misogynist reactionary who never had anything interesting to say), but credit where it's due: He was one of the greatest prose stylists we've ever had. Come for the king, better not miss, etc.

Tales from Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin)

Tales from the GOAT. Fantasy really doesn't get any better than this. “The Bones of the Earth” is particularly beautiful.

 

Lore24: February

 

"Nausicaa Meets Jedi Temple" by Swang

 

Continuing from where I left off in January. Already starting to sneak back in to revise things.

1. The observable exterior dimensions of riverboats rarely seem to correspond to the size of their interiors. People have been know to part ways upon boarding a riverboat and wander its corridors for a week or longer before reuniting.

2. The Ministry of Memory keeps voluminous records about all the worlds and peoples of the Pale; commissars on their way to a planet, especially one off-River, are briefed at great length by the Ministry’s local offices.

3. For various reasons, some known and some not, the largest moons of Jovian planets were highly prioritized for terraforming. Through the Pale, miniature Earths glitter and glow under the watchful eyes of orbital complexes dense with mirrors, shades, atmosphere processors, and other devices more specialized and arcane.

4. Some riverboats take on human crew, who are then typically tasked with passenger-facing work on board: assisting passengers, managing cargo, performing janitorial duties, and so forth. Some say that human crew members receive their orders from machine terminals, other that they serve under alien officers. Few claim to have ever met a Captain, but it is well known that orders filter down to the lowest crew from such a potentate, at least on some riverboats.

5. Every child and grandchild of the emperor is styled "prince" or "princess," and because the nobility of the empire can live for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, there are an absolutely tremendous number of them. A few, via marriage between the imperial family and the reigning nobility of vassal realms, have found themselves ruling other worlds or haunting other courts, but the vast majority clutter up the imperial court on Aaru, doing very little of any worth.

6. The identifies of the "seven great angels" described in the canonical story of the Fall and the Exodus to the Pale of Sanctuary are hotly debated by theologians and scholars alike. Not only is their nature unknown (some believe them to metaphorically represent seven species of intelligent aliens whom humanity individually subjugated, but who rose up together to overthrow their masters) but Scripture is unclear about whether all of them rebelled, and which did and did not, assuming that some remained loyal to humanity (or the throne of heaven, as it were).

7. The most common method of interstellar travel, for trips that cannot be made on the River, is by clipper (placeholder name). These enormous vessels typically use antimatter-catalyzed proton-boron fusion torchdrives, often assisted by ram scoops, laser-pushed lightsails, or magnetic sails for deceleration, to sustain modest thrust for years at a time. Even with hyper-efficient drives and assistance from scoops, sails, and laser arrays, they must carry an enormous quantity of fuel, far in excess of the mass of all other components combined, and yet the massive shields and radiators they must carry also contribute to a size and mass entirely out of proportion with their small payloads. Incapable of maneuvering easily within a star system, they will usually "park" in a planetary orbit and launch smaller, far nimbler parasite craft.

8. Many imperial and ex-imperial planets have extreme caste hierarchies, with entire categories of labor or realms of human activity relegated to certain oppressed groups. Some in the uppermost castes will not deign to use their hands in public; much more common is a taboo observed even down to the lower middle classes against stooping in public, or indeed touching the ground or taking anything directly from the ground. The notion of an "upright person" is taken very literally.

9. Vessels superficially akin to riverboats pass through the Pale occasionally, charting their own mysterious courses. They usually arrive and set off again unexpectedly and far from any inhabited place, but occasionally they appear close to a settled planet or station and are boarded by the curious or desperate, who, if they don’t get off again quickly enough, disappear forever when these strange craft depart.

10. At the heart of the horizon-spanning sprawl that is the Imperial City, there is a great and rare outcropping of bedrock, creating a table mountain that rises above the sea, the fields, the slums, and even the tops of most of the towers in the various "downtown" clusters that speckle the illimitable city. This is not the oldest part of the city, but it is among the oldest, which makes it very ancient. Here are many palaces, residential and governmental, and here, literally above all, is the Spire of the imperial residence, which reaches even higher into the heavens than the table mountain on which it was founded. The Spire, or simply "Spire," is what people call the entire city, when they do not call it by its other names, and is frequently used as a metonym for the emperor, the imperial court, Aaru, the imperial house, or the entire empire.

11. An old custom still observed in most of the empire and points beyond dictates that one must not pass by an acquaintance or kinsman without engaging in a series of reciprocal greetings and pleasantries. Much of the empire has simplified this series, relieved particular castes of its burdens, or limited the full extent of its use to certain holidays and other auspicious occasions, but in places, the old ways prevail, and a simple walk through a town center might be delayed for hours by the observance of these rituals. To circumvent the inconvenience, those on urgent business (or, on some worlds, nearly all going about their daily affairs) wear masks that nominally anonymize them and relieve those who pass them of the obligation to greet them.

12. Thalatta is a watery world in the union whose population mostly lives on fishing, farming, and herding, but which is also home to a number of prominent universities and research institutes. It is considered one of the most ideologically unreliable worlds in the union, but is also a source of pride and an invaluable asset.

13. Together with the Ministries of Concordance, Memory, and Safety (the Ministries of Coordination), the union's executive council is composed of the heads of the Ministries of Disposition, Information, and Harmony (the Ministries of Concentration).

14. The colors of the empire are stark and bold: red, white, purple, and black. The colors of the union are estival and autumnal: green, gold, and orange. Blue, associated with long-lost Earth, is everywhere a symbol of faith, hope, and forbidden knowledge.

15. Among the Recusant Worlds—many of them—the Rule is weaker, treated as superstition and hidebound tradition, not immanent law. On some worlds it is distorted or barely known. Here, the otherwise-forbidden is often part of daily life: cybernetic modification, genetic tailoring, thinking machines. These worlds, as a general rule, do not long endure.

16. The mainline religious tradition in the empire is the Rite of Redemption, which holds that the emperor is a divinely appointed steward or “custodian” set to govern the Pale while the Incarnate God gathers strength in occultation; on the day of the Restoration, the Incarnate and the emperor will together lead the armies of the righteous to reclaim the throne of heaven. Various heresies and heterodox variants exist, most of them disputing the emperor’s role in the divine plan, sometimes vociferously (the Temple of Universal Redemption, for instance, holds that the “pretender” must be thrown down before the Restoration is possible). Some quibble about the identity of the Incarnate or the conditions of the Restoration, but all agree on the fundamental structure of the universe and the purpose of the Pale.

17. The principal religious tradition, or group of traditions, in opposition to the Rite of Redemption is the Rite of Ascension (sometimes called the Rite of Transcendence, although other sects consider the term gravely blasphemous). These heterogeneous groups maintain that the Pale is a kind of celestial proving ground—whether for individual souls, for groups or clades, or for all of humanity varies according to different teachings. Although the specifics vary a great deal, most Ascendant faiths hold that some figure analogous to the Redeemers’ Incarnate exists, but that it is a demiurge, a false divinity—either an Arbiter set to watch over humanity as they undergo their trials or a hostile entity determined to mislead them.

18. On the edge of the Pale there is an airless world of vast rock-hewn cities of unknown origin, older than human memory. Travelers avoid it.

19. There are rumors, as old as the empire and so numerous and persistent that many assume there must be some truth to them, of powerful beings (angels, demons, machine intelligences, alien gods) lost, hidden, or imprisoned in vaults beneath oceans, glaciers, trackless alien jungles. One of the most enduring rumors tells of an entity of incomprehensible power trapped in some deep underworld bastion, bound by seven ancient seals, that will grant wishes to those who descend to meet it, or perhaps only to those who would free it. Or serve it.

20. Among the Recusant Worlds is a planet of women (mutants, perhaps, or an obscure genetically engineered clade) who reproduce by parthenogenesis.

21. On Belphegor, which has a rotational period longer than Old Earth's year, migratory alien forests creep around the higher latitudes at a steady, plodding pace, staying forever in the light of the sun.

22. Many alien ecosystems were wiped out, or irreversibly altered, by human colonization thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. Even where alien life is gone, however, its leavings can be hazardous to humans. Some of the skeletal or fossil remains of long-extinct alien creatures cause hallucinations, personality changes, and permanent brain damage to humans who spend too long near them.

23. The Peregrine Flocks are an entire migratory society (or perhaps several unrelated societies) drifting from star to star in slowboats driven by the interstellar wind.

24. New Haven is a mostly abandoned city crumbling into the cracked and drying mud of a seabed ever farther from its planet's receding, shrinking ocean, acidic and rich only in jellyfish and a few hardy species of cartilaginous squid.

25. Just outside the Pale, and observable from within its borders, is a system once clearly densely settled by an advanced technological civilization—it is littered with decaying space stations, satellites, and other orbital infrastructure—but now silent and dead; it all looks, as far as instruments can perceive across the light years, like material of human design.

26. Near or beyond the limit of the Pale is a planet once settled by eugenicists banished from the ecumene. They dissolved into schismatic chaos as smaller and smaller splinter sects pursued their own visions of genetic perfection. Little remains of the life they spawned, obliterated by engineered plagues the cultists unleashed on one another, but the ruins they left behind teem with forbidden treasures and unspeakable dangers.

27. Operational Autonomy by the Seal of the Emperor is a status given to free cities, stations, or entire planets and certain corporate entities in the empire; OASEs answer directly to the emperor and are independent of any local lord's authority.

28. Here and there in the far reaches of the Pale, and even orbiting unvisited stars among the core systems, one finds a world scarred and twisted by exotic weapons of the Age of Strife but still inhabited by the descendants of those who endured those weapons’ power.

29. On the fringes of the empire, ambulatory cities rumble across the surface of a hostile planet following ancient programming or their own volition; being, or at least seemed to be animated by, thinking machines, they are considered dangerous, heretical technology—but where else can their citizens go?