Something I'm kind of struggling to wrap my head around. Is there a way for multiple word given names to work in English? Have you ever seen it done well? Just from a grammatical standpoint, it seems very difficult to construct sentences around a character with a name that is made up of multiple normal english words.
I don't even have any examples of such names yet because while I have the concept of a world in which names are supposed to be very directly and unambiguously meaningful, I haven't come up with one yet that doesn't completely fail a basic "Hello, my name is" test
Basically, how do I break English name rules without it sounding 110% fucked up?
Most names are phrases, just in language that's really old and out of use.
I do wonder how they get shortened. In another language "strong oak tree in the winter" might be one or two syllables, but it would be a mouthful in English.
If you were to name yourself "top poster" people might call you "top" or "poster" or maybe "ster".
There are baby name pages that will break down the etymology and origins of thousands of names. Fun fact: Tiffany sounds modern but it's actually medieval French.
Iana linguist, but apparently within a given language contractions and shortening and dropping parts of words happen in consistent ways so you can look at a modern word and the old word it was constructed from and trace how the changes happened.
Another fun fact: pretty much any moder name ending in "El" is a biblical hebrew name - Michael, Daniel, etc. I think Michael means "who is like god?" But i'd have to look it up. "El" was one of the eupmemistic names used to describe god back in the day.
I remember "Israel" means "struggles with god"
Semantically, "El" is a bit like Zeus's need to fuck everything. It's meant to metaphor how all derives from one.