More on fantasy names

[tahnan]

A number of people have asked why I wanted gender-separated lists of names of non-Earth characters from fiction--among them, aspartaimee, who graciously provided a list of over 200 names from David Eddings (and snarky comments about them which are likely more entertaining than the books themselves were). Others, such as nubianamy, wondered whether Earth-but-not-human names counted, as from Watership Down. So, to elucidate:

I'm trying to determine to what extent an author, when making up non-Earth-culture names for characters, follows the kinds of patterns one sees in (American) names, or whether such authors fall back on certain gender-name stereoypes. For instance: In America, 31% of all women have first names ending with the letter "A". (That's people, not different names; so the fact that about 3% of the female population is named either Patricia, Linda, or Barbara is part of that 31%.) In Eddings, this time using the number of names rather than commonality (because the latter is nigh-impossible to judge--who knows what's a common name in these worlds?), well over 50% of the female names (26/45) end in "A".

Interestingly, though 15% of American men have names ending in "N", 24.5% of Eddings's men do, and the number jumps to 31% among male Dragaerans. (The influence of "Conan"?) Also interesting: although the letter "Y" is marginally less common among Eddings and Brust names than in American names, not a single one of the over 300 fictional names ends with "Y", compared to almost 11% of the men and over 13% of the women in America.

This isn't just idle flicking; if I can get anything like an interesting result, I may try to present it at the annual meeting of the American Name Society. (Though you might have to be a member; I don't know if they recognize cross-membership with the Linguistic Society of America, which meets at the same time.) Well, we'll see.

Comments

[jadelennox]

this is a serious question, in which I hope to be enlightened, not an ignorant rhetorical question: is America a good example, given our melting pot name situation?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

America's what I have data for. It's also the culture in which, e.g., Brust, Eddings, and Jordan live, and thus the culture whose names provided their stimuli. (And of course, though I cut out human names from Dragaera on the grounds that Brust wasn't making those up, the data from novels will likely be somewhat multicultural.)

But, no, perhaps not a great example.

[avon.livejournal.com]

When you say names ending in "a" for female names, do you include names that end in an "a" sound, but not an actual a, like Sarah or Deborah for example?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

The numbers above are just names whose last letter is "A". I'm intending to try to sort through the data more carefully for this sort of thing, though it's hard, for a number of reasons. First, it's not easily done automatically--how do I get a program to recognize that the strings "Jake" and "Gabe" end in a consonant sound, whereas "Dante" and "Guadalupe" end in a vowel sound? Second, pronunciations of names vary--"Irene" ends with a consonant sound for Ms. Castle, but not for my German-born professor, whose name is roughly pronounced "ih-RAY-nuh". (To say nothing of having to guess how "Nynaeve" is pronounced.)

So there's a whole lot of approximation that's necessarily going on here.

[avon.livejournal.com]

Gotcha.

What you need to mess up your data is a list of dragon names from Pern. :) But I bet that the female dragon riders (and everyone else's names) names, if my memory holds, follow the A pattern pretty well. I remember being annoyed at that while reading it.

[saphir23.livejournal.com]

That also suggests another correlation to explore: does the gender of the author have an influence?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Assuming I can get data from more than one gender of author. Most of my favorite female authors don't write books that qualify--Connie Willis and Emma Bull being Earth-based, for instance, and not prone to writing series. But I can try McCaffrey, and Lackey, and perhaps Weis and Hickman. Oh, and while Bujold's Vorkosigan books are of no help, the Chalion books could be.

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

i can do mckillip's "riddle master of hed" series for you, there are three books in that series. she's one of my all time favorites.

do you attend any linguistics conferences? i ask because i am sending my assistant to montreal in june to attend one and i wonder if you go, do you find them interesting/useful, and do you want free books.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I do attend conferences, when they're sufficiently local or I'm presenting at them. They're wonderful experiences; it's terrific to get a chance to hear what other people are working on, and to get feedback on one's own work. At most small conferences, about 50% of the papers tend to be interesting to me, the rest of them either too far outside my field or else bad papers. Some are a little higher, some lower, of course.

As for books: I suspect I would rarely turn down books. :-)

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

we might not have what you are interested in/studying, but check out the website anyway www.palgrave-usa.com. linguistics is a harsh mistress, afterall.

lemme know if you want the mckillip list.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

It certainly couldn't hurt to have the McKillip, though I hate to put you out any further.

[jcberk.livejournal.com]

Earthsea's use-names might confuse things, though true-names could work. Tamora Pierce's Tortall would work well (unsorted character lists to start from, I could probably sort male from female pretty well if you'd like).

I'd also suggest Catherine Asaro's Skolian Empire series, though I'm a little worried by this Amazon comment: "Ixpar? Deha? Avtac? Rashiva? What do these have in common? They are the names of some of the female lead characters. Asaro's naming convention is just terrible. The names are so "out there" and so unrelated to each other that it gets difficult to keep them straight. She should spend some time with some Robert Jordan books to see what a well developed naming convention can do for a story. Ixpar...yeesh!"

I don't know if any of the series have enough books yet, but you could also check the various Luna authors. Elizabeth Haydon seems to be up to six books - haven't read them to know if the names are sufficiently non-earth-based.

[jcberk.livejournal.com]

And Asaro talks about her languages and names here.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Got the list and am running through it. There seem to be an awful lot of names ending with "h". Wonder why that is.

Actually, getting a list of names of people of Pern might be interesting. Menolly, of course, doesn't end with an A, but it does end with a vowel (indeed, the elusive "Y").

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

Here I briefly entertain the notion of seeing if I even have my old Pern Logs anywhere, going through them and seeing how the naming conventions on a MUSH shakes out.

And then I think about the possible content of those logs, and I flee in fear.

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

I thought about suggesting MUSH names, but I'm not sure those lists qualify, since they're not generated by a single person, unlike a novel.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, it might be interesting to check, say, a Wheel of Time MUSH or a Pern MUSH to see how well people's chosen names correspond to the author's naming patterns. You could run into interference, though, if too many people take names from (a) other books or (b) real life names and especially their own names.

I'll throw it in as a "for future study" footnote.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Don't do it. Just don't do it.

[jcberk.livejournal.com]

Some Pern lists, non-divided. Lots of female names ending in 'a' and male names ending in 'n', but also several female names ending in 'n' (Deelan, Janissian, and Kitrin).

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

if my memory holds, follow the A pattern pretty well. I remember being annoyed at that while reading it.

i remember thinking this way when i read them too!

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

I'll volunteer to go through a set of Tamora Pierce books and give you names.

[cnoocy]

That would be cool just to have.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

That's the reaction I was hoping people would have. :-)

[siderea]

You may be amused to know that the topic of the gendered construction of names actually comes up in The Steel of Raithskar (Garrett and Heydron) because the protagonist is a retired linguist. :} At a key moment, he (from modern Earth) has to tell someone his real first name ("Ricardo"), and realizes he has to tack a consonant onto the end because in the culture he is visiting, only women's names end in vowel sounds.

[now with fixed HTML]

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Huh. Are the books any good? The Wikipedia article wasn't--I just saw, actually, looking at the revision history, that it oddly enough was just added four days ago--and I took the opportunity to fix some of the more egregious bad grammar.

[siderea]

I enjoyed them, though they're mostly adventure+politics and not terribly deep. I thought the ending of the series wasn't all it could have been; I gather it was written by Heydron alone after Garrett fell into a coma.

Note there is an important spoiler which may disqualify them from your study.

[siderea]

As someone who has been interested this very topic -- how fantasy authors name characters -- it seems to me that they fall back on rules which resemble the first two declensions of Latin: -a == f., -us, -o, -er == m.

(Which, now that I think about it, makes the names look very Old Occitanian.)

I suspect it has something to do with the general sense that if you want to make something sound archaic/medievaloid, shooting for Latin is a sure bet; hence all the "spells" in fantasy books which are in Latin or some approximation.

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

What about Tolkien? Obviously it's something he thought about a lot, but it seems like there's a big stack of data there for a given cultural context. Or a cross-cultural comparison between say Brooks and J.K. Rowling?

The American Name Society has awesome presentations, I believe. They were the ones with that Porn Star Name talk the other year. (Wait... I think you went to it, if I remember properly. I think I heard second-hand, tho.)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Tolkien is, on the one hand, an obvious place to look, and on the other hand, possibly not relevant, because he took the time to name characters according to actual rules, and not just a top of the head "sure, that sounds like a name" feeling.

Rowling's names may be too Earth-based, by and large, though. Sibyl, Harry, Miranda...now, it would be interesting to compare Tolkien to Brooks. If a little like shooting fish in a barrel.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

If authors who name their characters according to actual rules, rather than a top of the head "sure, that sounds like a name" feeling aren't relevent to your study, how can you be sure that any given author you have data for hasn't used naming rules of some sort?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Because they're hacks. Eddings? Jordan? C'mon. (Brust indicates at one point that "Kiera" is the feminine version of "Kieron"--how incredibly Earthbound his morphology is!)

OK, OK, not much of an answer. The truth is, I don't know. But what I suspect I'll find is that, whether it's unconscious (as I suspect) or conscious (as you suggest), most writers end up using naming rules that happen to correspond to American rules, only much much more so. For instance, if there's an author who consciously has all male names end in "L" and all female names end in "P", that will be so sufficiently different from real-world patterns that it'll be a useful counterexample to my hypothesis.

What I specifically mean about Tolkien is that he worked out a particular phonology and morphology for his various cultures, such that names in his work are likely to be in this latter category: it's not just that they follow a pattern, but that they follow one specifically devised to not resemble Anglophonic patterns.

[antihip.livejournal.com]

Another wrinkle re: Tolkien (taken from the Appendices after The Return of the King, and unfortunately copied from a textfile):

"I have treated Hobbit first-names, as far as possible, in the same way. To their maid-children Hobbits commonly gave the names of flowers or jewels. To their man-children they usually gave names that had no meaning at all in their daily language; and some of their women's names were similar. Of this kind are Bilbo, Bungo, Polo, Lotho, Tanta, Nina, and so on. There are many inevitable but accidental resemblances to names that we now have or know: for instance Otho, Odo, Drogo, Dora, Cora, and the like. These names I have retained, though I have usually anglicized them by altering their endings, since in Hobbit-names _a_ was a masculine ending, and _o_ and _e_ were feminine."

So Tolkien, besides designing names within a system, also thought about stereotypically gendering his names.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Huh. But how nice that he thought about it! And what a shame that he Anglicized them; how interesting it would have been to read about the brave men named Bilba and Froda. (Frada?) To say nothing of how different modern fantasy literature would likely have been.

[jordanwillow.livejournal.com]

this couldn't be more unscientific, but when you mentioned the male names ending in N thing i was reminded of my recent realization of how many irish names end in N or with the sound of N -- siobhan, brendan, alan, eomann, sharon, kieran, shannon, erin, aidan, regan, corin, galen, megan, caitlin, colin, tegan, dylan, dagan, ellen, helen, madeline, caroline, maureen, colleen, devon, ian, kevin, marian, robin, jaon, sean, duncan, rowan, to name a few. and continuing along with the unscientific analysis: fantasies often include characters with names that sound irish/celtic/gaelic. the irish mood thing.

i, for one, recently completed a fantasy novel with main character katsa (female) and male characters giddon, raffin, birn, murgon, drowden... and never noticed the Ns, and am a bit, ummm, embarrassed?

icon chosen on the basis of the thorpedo's real name-- ian thorpe. not because i think you like grown men in latex. you may, you may not. only the shadow knows.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

i, for one, recently completed a fantasy novel with main character katsa (female) and male characters giddon, raffin, birn, murgon, drowden... and never noticed the Ns, and am a bit, ummm, embarrassed?

I'm assuming when you say "completed" you mean you wrote it, and as another writer, I gotta say, it's *appallingly* easy to fall into that kind of trap. I have a thing for M names. They freaking litter my rough drafts, and I don't always get them out later on. Or both heroes having names that end in "-an" (which I *did* catch), or ... yeah. It's really easy to have that problem. You, at least, have all kinds of different letters immediately before the -n. :)

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

btw, if you're genuinely a fan of anthropomorphized fruit, you should probably become familiar with ursulav, whose name I don't see on your flist. As an introduction, I give you Weird Fruit. :)

[jordanwillow.livejournal.com]

hey, thanks!

and happy writing :)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

this couldn't be more unscientific, but when you mentioned the male names ending in N thing i was reminded of my recent realization of how many irish names end in N or with the sound of N

Indeed, incredibly unscientific. However, it is possible to get, if not a list of names of people in Ireland (which I couldn't yet find), at least a list of the top 100 names of each gender given to Irish babies from 1999 to 2003. (That's 76% of the known boy names and 65% of the known girl names.)

Of those hundred male names, 41 of them end with "N". (Which is to say, about 39.6% of the men, what with Jack and Adam and Conor and James rounding out the top five; but Sean is still on top, so. And that doesn't even count "Shane".) That's compared with less than 16% in America.

Women are harder to judge--there are 28 A's, 34 E's, and 11 N's. But I'm not qualified to pronounce "Grainne" or "Aoibhe" or "Sadhbh", so whether these names end with pronounced vowels or consonants, I'm not sure. (I mean, "Caitlin", I do know. But is the "e" in "Grainne" pronounced? Got me.)

[silkiemom.livejournal.com]

I'm intrigued. Are you interested in a list from Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince series? I can work on that if you are.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I could skim through dancinghorse's Luna series, which fits the criteria, and ... hm, there's at least two or three other Luna series' I have here that I could go through.

Jennifer Fallon's books would be good to use, too, but I don't dare start re-reading those or I'll never finish anything I need to write.

mindyklasky's Glasswrights books might be good, too. Y'know, there are a *lot* of authors on LJ. You could think about contacting them and seeing how many of them are organized enough to have this sort of thing already in a file somewhere...