: 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.

@LarsenBagley300

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Another problem with this system is how the brain reading English doesn't require spelling to be correct, especially if the word has four or more letters. It's entirely possible to read the intended misspelling word so long as the first and last letters are in the correct place, and the letters in between are disordered. You can search online for examples that demonstrate this effect, and it's not something that is ruled based so much as how your brain processes information: This is because many names start with one of 5-6 letters and have a handful of letters between the end. This is even more troublesome as the names end on vowel sounds too. I would avoid repetition of middle letters and ending with vowels to help this move along.
I'd also like your thoughts on this, but as mentioned, you don't have many Y vowel names, though Y is rarely a Vowel in English if it starts the word, to the best of my knowledge. Y isn't the only "Sometimes" vowel in the English language. For example, the Letter W is sometimes a vowel as well, though only when preceding another Vowel, such as in Now, Cow, How, Vowel (hehe), and the second instance in Wow. It's also a vowel in loan words from Welsh, so you might be able to find some Welsh names where this occurs (it's important that you look up what a Welsh "W" sounds like on an IPA chart and then make sure the names duplicate that sound in the leading W. I'm not sure it counts in these instances in the Welsh Language. But, a few Welsh names will definitely stand out.).
Finally, made-up names or very obscure names (all of your examples are either one of the two, and I can't tell which) will need some extra security to ensure it's different. However, similar leading letters can show a trend (For example, all names either start with an A rather than a Vowel, or they all start with a similar sound.). For instance, in Star Trek, a general rule was that all Vulcan Males names began with an S and ended with a K and contained five letters total (Spock, Sarek, Sybok) and all Vulcan Female names Started with a T' followed by a short 3-4 letter set (usually a T'P T'Pringa, T'Pau, though). Though both genders had names that loosely followed the opposite gender rules (female Saavik from Films and male Tuvok from Voyager). While very limited, there are some real-life languages with a short list of names (Latin/Roman names and Japanese Names tend to have rather short lists as well). Other systems have a broad range of names, but the traditional rules tend to limit the names. For example, Irish naming conventions traditionally hold that the firstborn child of a gender will be named such that [Father's Father/Mother's First Name] [Mother's Father/Mother's First Name] [Surname]. The second child of that gender would be a reversed order using the mother's parent for the first name and father's parent for the second name. Presumably, this would use middle names for children 3 and 4. This isn't always followed if the grandfathers are both Sean or if the name sounds terrible, but it did help to narrow a very broad list of traditional names.

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