: Re: How can I make names more distinctive without making them longer? In the point-of-view culture in my story, all of the women in priestly families have two-syllable names beginning with vowels.

@Phylliss352

Vote Up Vote Down

Your rules may be too limiting, given how few vowels English has, even after you remember y is a semivowel. Obviously, "use consonants instead" would require a huge rewrite, even if you can tweak the "reasons" for the rule to make it work. But I can think of three less radical ways to expand the options available to you. What they all have in common is that the people living in your culture might have found them useful, because the limits you're encountering would be an even bigger problem for them than they are for you!
One is to use accents (forgive me for using that term loosely for diacritics too). A name, especially that of a major character, could be distinctive because of accents, and not necessarily on the vowels. My favourite example of consonants is the "ny" sound ñ.
The second is to revisit what a vowel is. Vowels use an open vocal tract, while consonants partially close it; and when letters move from one language to another or inspire new letters, what's a vowel vs. what's a consonant can change. For example, the Roman A is a vowel, like the Greek alpha that inspired it, but that was, in turn, inspired by the Phoenician aleph. Aleph appears in several languages, and while the details vary among them, it's typically either a consonant or a combined consonant-vowel sound! So what's a vowel in your story, and why?
My third suggestion is to look beyond "the 26" letters in English. What about this, or this? English has also lost letters over time (albeit often consonants, but that's still a useful part of your names' variety because they still contain accents). Most amusingly, the ampersand was once treated as the twenty-seventh member of the alphabet!

(0)

Login to post a comment!