Making up names

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in seeing a discussion on made-up names. This is triggered by the post on "Alivia," where many people said they didn't like it because it sounded too much like a made-up version of "Olivia." But the name "Olivia" was made up by Shakespeare. And at some point, anything we use as a name had to have been "made up" by someone, unless it comes directly from the original word with no alterations. If it's just a variation in spelling from an accepted name, does that invalidate it (and how do we decide what is a valid variation in spelling - Sara/Sarah, John/Jon - and what is not - Michael/Maicol, Danielle/Danyelle)?

At what point does a "made-up" name become acceptable? Does it have to have been in use for X number of decades or centuries? Do we need to be able to trace it directly to a word or country of origin? Does it need to have appeared in literature at some point? Is it different if the name is made up by Shakespeare versus, say, a teenage girl?

Linguistically, this fascinates me!

Comments

[aquilinum.livejournal.com]

I personally wouldn't use a name if I couldn't tell my kid, "Your name is X, just like this scientist/artist/poet/mythological figure/etc.!" I'm not particularly bothered about how said scientist or whatever came upon their name.

[duckduckcaboose.livejournal.com]

I'm going to go all out on this one, feel free to rip apart/disagree with anything I say.

I'm not going to get into a debate about Shakespeare (I love him too much I could go on for hours), but there are several differences between his "made up names" and a teenager's "made up names," the way I see it.

Usually, when Shakespeare "made up a name," he was switching the gender (Oliver -> Olivia), or Anglicizing it from Greek/Latin/etc (Miranda comes from a Latin word meaning "wonderful"). The names he made up did not already exist in a practical sense in the English language. He also used the dialect of the day to spell the name in such a way that it would naturally cause a person of that time to pronounce the name the way he wanted.

GENERALLY SPEAKING, the "made up names" of today are taking names that already exist in a practical sense in our language and twisting the rules of English to try and fit. Expecting me to believe Jordan, Jorden, Jordin, Jordon, Jordun, and Jordyn are the same name means that we may as well go back to the beginnings of the language and spel thyngs feneticly. Aye persinly theenk weev pasd that poynt.

[lustdumpster.livejournal.com]

i know absolutely nothing about shakespeare but i agree with this.

[sandtree.livejournal.com]

Exactly. There was actually a rhyme and a reason to the names Shakespeare made up. Most of the made up names today are just sounds that people like strung together, like Kaylee, or Zayden.

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

Kaylee can just be looked at as an Anglicized spelling of Ceilidh, which is an Irish word for dance. Is that really much different from changing Mirandus into Miranda, or Padraig into Patrick?

[sandtree.livejournal.com]

But the name Kaylee didn't come about from someone saying 'I'm going to anglicize the word Ceilidh and make it into a name' (although plenty of people do that now). It came about from combining 'Kay' (like the nickname for Katherine) with 'lee'. It was probably also inspired by 'Kayla', which was invented for a soap opera, and was also just a mash-up of nice sounds. So I'd say that yeah, it's actually completely different.

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

The name Kayla wasn't invented for a soap opera. Did the soap opera writers invent the name without having heard it before? Possibly, but the name itself has long roots in Yiddish. And Kaylee (Caollaidhe) has been around as a surname for a long time.

[sandtree.livejournal.com]

If you string a couple of sounds together, chances are what you come up with is already a name in another language. That doesn't mean the name that you've created in English has any connection to that original name, or that the vast majority of people using it mean it to. All I'm saying is that there's a difference between taking a word and tweaking it so that it becomes a name (or tweaking a name that's already in use in another language), and just taking a couple of sounds that you think are nice and putting them together. I was just using Kayla/Kaylee as an example. I can be any modern name that fits that trend. I'm not saying that inventing names is a good thing or a bad thing, I'm just trying to work out the logic behind the different sorts of 'inventing' that happen.

[azelmaroark.livejournal.com]

Guilty pleasure time: I kind of love Kaylee and wish there was a way of spelling it that isn't either horribly impronounceable to people in the United States or looks-like-a-perpetual-three-year-old. Every spelling I've seen is either or both (mostly the second) to me. I think this could be because my name is Katie, I love my name, and all names that start with the "kay-" sound are almost default win for me. It doesn't fit with the other names I like, but I wish there was a spelling that worked for me. =(

ETA: stupid Firefox!

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

I really like it too (and I love the name Katie; it's my great-grandmother's name).

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

"we may as well go back to the beginnings of the language and spel thyngs feneticly. Aye persinly theenk weev pasd that poynt."

And what's wrong with spelling things phonetically? It makes more sense than what we do now.

And I could talk about Shakespeare for hours as well. He made up (or at least was the first to use) lots of words (eyeball!), and that interests me a great deal.

[sandtree.livejournal.com]

How does it make more sense than what we do now? If we started spelling things phonetically, everyone would spell things differently, due to different accents; and if we standardized phonetic spelling, we'd have the same thing we have now, and then language/accent would shift, and the standardized phonetic spelling would no longer make sense.

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

I just meant I thought it was interesting that you said we've "moved past" phonetic spelling, as if phonetic spelling is a bad thing.

[duckduckcaboose.livejournal.com]

She didn't say that, I did.

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

Oops, sorry. =D

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I thought you were the person who wrote the original post on phonetics.

[lorienellen.livejournal.com]

I just read a really interesting book by Bill Bryson called The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way. In part of it he discusses how English was undergoing a phonetic revolution at the time the written words were being standardized, and that's why we've ended up with so many irregular words. He listed an example that there didn't used to be silent letters and "knight" would have sounded more like "kuh-nig-uh-tuh." It was a really interesting read!!

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

Part of the fun I had studying Chaucer was reading Middle English out loud.

[duckduckcaboose.livejournal.com]

There's nothing *wrong* with spelling things phonetically, but in an increasingly globalized society, it would make a lot more unnecessary difficulty. Imagine an American business man trying to speak Japanese and not even being able to look up the phrase he wants because the author had a different phonetic spelling. Standardized rules of language give us a certain order and ease to communication. That was not an issue 500 years ago, when most people hardly ventured out of their hometowns.

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

Actually, unless that businessman is using a book written in kanji, he probably is using phonetic Japanese. I understand what you're saying, but Japanese might not be the greatest example. Romaji, which most translation books are written in, pretty much is a phonetic translation of Japanese into the Roman alphabet.

[duckduckcaboose.livejournal.com]

What I mean is:
I am an American in a foreign country- Japan, Romania, France, take your pick.
I need to communicate with people in said country and I have a phrase book.
I am from Atlanta, and the author of my book is from New York.
I want to know "wurz tha ristrume," which the author would probably enter as "weerz da rastrum".

I don't know. I just think that it's inconvenient. And many "creative" parents now don't even USE conventional phonetics. Especially when they use the "silent" h's. Chaydinz is supposed to be the same as Cadence? Really?

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

Ok, that makes more sense.

[cathubodva.livejournal.com]

The problem with not using phonetic spelling at all is that there are a great deal of words (in English) that we have that may have been phonetic at one point, for one group of people, but are no longer phonetically spelled for anyone at all. Anything with "ph," for instance. Or "th," or "ough." This is why English is one of the hardest languages for a non-English speaker to learn - most of our spellings/pronunciations no longer make any sense.

[starskye.livejournal.com]

I agree with you here, and on your comments above.

[daydream11.livejournal.com]

duckduckcaboose said a lot of what I wanted to, so I won't repeat here what she's already gone into. I'm going to talk about noun names (or adjectives, as the case may be).

My thing is, if it's found in a dictionary, an encyclopedia, on an atlas or map, in a history book, etc., changing the spelling is ridiculous. My name is Samaria and I hate seeing my name misspelt. It's not Sameria or Cemaria. It's a city in Israel, an area along the East Bank, and any spelling other than the traditional is wrong. Period.

This goes for names like Lavender, Aspen, Orion, Jet, Sora, Reason... The way I see it, parents look illiterate/uneducated to me if they choose Lavendar, Aspyn, Orien, Jett, Sorah, Rheazon (I've seen this, I swear). Some names have accepted alternate spellings - Blithe and Fay come to mind - and I don't cringe at that (especially since I prefer Blythe myself), but otherwise, meh. A wrong spelling effectively renders the name "not real" regardless of its pronunciation.

[requiem-morrow.livejournal.com]

This is a subject I'm torn on. I don't have a formula - creative spellings are an issue for me as are randomly putting La' Ty', Da' or whatever in front of a name. I can find meanings for most all of the "made up" names I like, though, and meaning is the biggest thing for me.

[flyingwild.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I really don't care. My name - Alana - has about a billion other spellings (the most common being Alannagh, Alannah, Alanah, and Alanna).

And considering how often I see people say they dislike a name simply because it's popular, you'd think more people would be all over the "made up name" thing.

How the name sounds and looks should be more important than how popular it is, or whether or not it's a "legit" name or something the parents made up (which would give it its own special meaning).