I didn't know there were other name nerds on this board. I wonder how many times I'll get ninja'd while typing this out.
M_Tee wrote:
So, in doing some brief research into the -iah family of names (Jedidiah, Obadiah, Josiah, Zedekiah),
You'll probably end up hitting some of the same sources I hit after watching
Halloween Is Grinch Night and trying to puzzle apart Euchariah's name, which appears to be a
hybrid compound of Greek
eu "good" and
charis "grace" with Hebrew
-iah. Are there any other -iah names that are hybrid compounds?
M_Tee wrote:
I stumbled across
this link of moderate interest in the uptake of terminal n's in boys' names.
I too am interested, as one of the settings I was writing for also uses -n in boys' names, as opposed to -a or -t for girls' names. But I don't see how a
My Neighbor Totoro and
Star Wars: The Last Jedi fan mashup is related.
M_Tee wrote:
Anyway, let's discuss names, children's names, and the naming of game characters (for relevance's sake).
I wrote an article about
personal names. And for the benefit of those translating my games, I tried to give the
origins of their characters' names to help ensure
dynamic equivalence à la
Ted Woolsey, as I know puns translate poorly.
dougeff wrote:
-iah is a a form of Yahweh, the name of God.
Or in actual Hebrew, before Greek, Latin, French, and the English Great Vowel Shift had added their own filters to all the names (turning Yeshua into Jeezus), this was more explicitly rendered "-yahu" as in Netanyahu.
But now that I think about it, a
My Little Pony fanfiction written by Jonathan Swift and
published in 1726 might be read as antisemitic in this sense. After the crew of his cargo ship commits mutiny and drops on an uncharted island, Lemuel Gulliver finds an island inhabited by talking ponies who call themselves Houyhnhnms as well as a gem-obsessed tribe of apparently inbred humans that the ponies call Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms find everything about the Yahoos detestable; even their word for disease,
hnea Yahoo, means "Yahoo's evil".
dougeff wrote:
Also common in Jewish names is El. Another word meaning 'God'. Samuel. Michael.
Yet -el also shows up in names from Tolkien's Elvish languages that have no relationship to Hebrew.
dougeff wrote:
And, of course, Superman. Kal-El. Jor-El. Jerry Siegel was Jewish, of course.
But then in this case, -El is a surname. Kryptonian women's names such as Lara Lor-Van have a patronymic middle element in almost the same way as real-world Russian names, just without the declension that would have produced "Lara Lorovna Vana". Incidentally, had Superman asked people of Earth to call him Kal while in costume, the people might have accepted it as a short form of Calvin. This might have reinforced his purported separateness from his journalist form Clark Kent, and he might not have had to use his reality distortion field as much.
dougeff wrote:
I dislike that every time a character becomes famous, you basically can't use that name anymore. Zelda. You can't have an important girl named Zelda in a game. You can't have a main character named Mario or Luigi.
The name among fans for this phenomenon is
One Mario Limit.[1]
EDIT: My worries were overblown. I wasn't ninja'd.
[1] If you're wondering why I use All The Tropes instead of TV Tropes, there are three reasons: a change in July 2012 to a non-free license CC BY-NC-SA in violation of the copyright of contributions written prior to then, an experiment for several months with requiring editors to assign copyright in their contributions, and most recently a script that confuses the tracking protection built into Firefox with an ad blocker. I can explain further in a separate topic if you're interested.