On the naming of characters

[winter]

I'm trolling babynames sites, and there are such a lot of names that are just begging to be used in fiction. Aldona, Indré, Frauke, Berenika, Larissa - why don't they appear more often? It seems like anyone writing, say, HP fic uses the same three names all over again. Why not have a Nicodemus Malfoy, Theodosia Black, Malvina Weasley? Dare to leaf through that baby names book, people ;)

NaNo news: Part 9 and another Interlude - tape transcript this time. I'm a little behind, but I'm damn proud of Part 9 - it might not look like much, but it's the first time I've written an almost 5K-word action scene that actually has action in it. Normally, I can't write action at all.

Four hours until Vampires. Mrr. Krolock 4EVA.

Comments

[perpetualdreamr.livejournal.com]

Hi, I don't know who you are, but I clicked Meg's Friend's link accidentally and saw your post, and felt the need to agree. I feel thine pain; even fantasy novels with completely fantastical settings have characters with generic Earth names, or derivatives of Earth names. What's worse is when the writer uses a slur on a pre-existing character (Eragon = Aragorn, for example). Those people have no pride . . .

Have you gone to the sites that list the background of names? You search for a name, and it gives you the name's history and all it's derivatives (I seem to be using that word a lot); you'd be surprised what freaky things come up that no one, barring linguists, has ever heard of.

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

Tell that to a girl that actually *lives* in the capital city of Aragon :p

[perpetualdreamr.livejournal.com]

Heh, sweeeeeeeeeeet. ^_^

[winter]

BehindTheName.com is my favorite starting place - especially if I have an ethnic character to name. But I usually double-check the info it gives, in order not to mess up something. I've learned the hard way, by looking at the Polish category, that sometimes the information is pulled out of thin air.

The thing that drives me nuts is the fact they only have one category for African names, and while they do list the exact language by each one, most are South African and Nigerian, and there's no way to filter the list by language. I usually end up deciding that my African character's parents were culturally converted and named him in the old colony metropoly's tongue.