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?

  • keepcarrot [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    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".

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.