Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The Difficult Questions of Weird Names...

So I was thinking how I hardly ever get last names written into my stories. Do you know why? To be honest it's too much trouble to come up with not one but TWO unique names per person. I mean, come on. But I was thinking that I probably should start having these dang last names or something similar if Yavn is going to progress much father. The question is, how do I make it work?

So last names probably first came from your father's name, or in some cases your profession (like Smith and plenty of others I'm sure). But what do I do with Yavn? I have the possessive prefix vu-, so maybe I can use that, but how is the name determined? Father, mother, some older ancestor? By city, perhaps? By founder of the city? Do last names vary by Element?

Well, probably not the last. I'm thinking most likely some important ancestor or something, much like they're done here on earth. Maybe it only matters if you're of the Nobility. Low Nobles and newer Nobles therefore command less respect, since their last name will be the same as their first, for a generation at least. That's where genealogy tends to matter, anyway. But then how do I identify families? I mean, that kind of thing can matter to people, you know? Ach, such a puzzle. I suppose it could've originally been held by the nobles, but in a hundred years or so it trickled down to the common man or sommat. And now I have to have enough names for everyone -.- great. Nice work, Rena. Give yourself a little more work, why don'tcha?

Oh, and I just got my hours for NaNoEdMo. I call Crystal Frontier about as done as I want it to be, so THERE. I cross it off the list. I move on to my next goal, focusing on Italian, maybe some Ganyi work, things like that. The summer hastens toward me, and then will hasten away.

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