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?

  • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
    ·
    1 year ago

    English is an isolating language according to morphemic grammar, so that's one thing that makes it unwieldy.

    The closest thing we have is stuff that's been passed down from Old English, where the words have faded but the names remain.

    Just ask "He-Who-Guards-Wealth" over here- or you can call him "Edward" for short.

    • Retrosound [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      It doesn't matter what the name is these days, people are going to cut it short to one syllable or add "ee" to the end. Edward will become Ed or Eddy in no time. William becomes Will or Willy.

      Names aren't for us. They're for the convenience of other people. They need a quick way to tell us from others. Thank goodness Mom gave me a one syllable name.