Naming characters

I worked this up from my Afterword, on the basis that some people who haven't yet read CWKB—and some who'll never read it—might like some notes on how I generate names for characters. As with naming giant robots, I approach this by developing a simple system that can generate names within certain formal parameters, saving myself labour and ensuring an impression of relative consistency—just as, in reality, if you meet a lot of names from one area you develop a sense for which ones are typical and which ones are not. I think this approach serves rather well, in the right project, and I commend it to readers.

High-born Taru people have two-word names, the first word signalling their clan and therefore consistent across all their family members, the second word functioning a little like our personal names.

These names are translated in the poem as hyphenated combinations of two single-syllable English words, usually words which go back to Old English. Sometimes the words go back to other early states of Germanic languages. In fact, the system resembles (but doesn’t exactly match) that used for names by the early English.

I didn’t choose this system because there is anything English about the Taru—there isn’t. But it’s a format that has immediacy and vibrancy for present-day speakers of English. It allows me to make a stab at a name-system that sounds cogent but also means characters can have—as the early English had, as probably the majority of people in the world have, but as the English today often do not have—names that mean things in their own tongue. It also gives the Taru characters family-name-first name order, and this amuses me.

Finally, the naming system meets one of my goals: that CWKB should avoid made-up words, despite being a space opera.

Taru names are ungendered. Either clan or personal name can identify someone if context makes the referent clear. In Taru high society, calling someone by their personal name alone, rather than their family name or both names, is somewhat informal and therefore potentially insulting outside intimate relationships. 

Within intimate or familial relationships, people sometimes address each other affectionately by using the personal name with a diminutive suffix attached; in the poem that suffix is represented by -ling (e.g. when Kin-Bright's brother calls her Brightling). Using this form outside intimate relationships, belittling someone, is very insulting indeed.

Clans sometimes choose personal names for relations that join, in various ways, e.g.:

• Kin-Might and Kin-Bright (rhyme)
• Sheaf-Tall and Sheaf-Haul (rhyme)
• Gold-Post and Gold-Past (matching consonance in syllable onset and coda)
• Spine-Leaf and Spine-Bark (semantic link: parts of trees)
• Moon-Word and Moon-Wise (alliteration)

This is a matter of parental choice and then, when someone's of age and can alter their name if they choose, personal choice; the joinings of names don't systematically map onto particular types of relationship (cool though that would be…).