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

[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. :-)