Are Merlin's Welsh Names A Security Risk?

Agreed. That leaves my analysis that names are God given because he created individuals either fully developed or largely developed (adult teenagers) at Creation and so makes names special. Naming conventions likely more rigid because of that fact. Names falling beyond those conventions are likely to trigger a deeper response in Safeholdians than in RL.

JeffEngel wrote:

PeterZ wrote:Not everything about language has changed, Jeff. The written form of English for example has been fixed at the time of Creation. RFC's spelling is a function of pronunciation changes. So all the names are written just as they were at the time of Creation, they are simply pronounced differently. OAR III, Temple lands and Mountains of Light.

If that's theoretically true, I'm hard pressed to believe it's been followed in practice.
Two examples:
'Cayleb' - I do not see any plausible way to read that such that is isn't pronounced precisely as we pronounce 'Caleb'. Trying to make another syllable with the 'y' would be something, but no one would do that and retain 'Caleb' for spelling.
'Sharleyan' - There isn't a current terrestrial name that would plausibly retain an identifiable spelling and get pronounced like that. 'Charlene' is a stretch - too much of one, really - and anything else is even worse.

Last, the notion that spelling of names is just fixed regardless of pronunciation would mean, among the barely literate masses of Safehold and their only somewhat more literate parish priests, that kids would end up with theoretical "names" being recorded in records that have practically no relation at all to how they're pronounced, because the dialects will go all over the place among people with mediocre contact with the rest of the world and very little influence of the written word on how they actually speak.

Probably the most charitable thing to do is just ignore the Safehold name spelling conventions, when RFC himself regrets them.

Heaven's flora and fauna of course. There are oaks and pine in Heaven which look like the Safehold versions but are not. This is true only for those plants and animals not represented on Safeholds. I believe there are oaks if not also pines on Safehold.

noblehunter wrote:The whole thing makes me wonder what linguistics is like on Safehold. If they speak English, could they tell that it's had at least three different language groups meddle in it? Or rather, with only one language to work with, do they have any real understanding of linguistics? With no other context, how easy is it to read the history of a language?

Less esoterically, I recall some trees being called near-pines (or oaks or other tree). Unless they also have pines, wouldn't someone wonder what "pines" were that those trees were supposedly "near"?

We are shown "consecrated" vs "unconsecrated" ground. I tend to believe that the unconsecrated is tracts of the original Safehold flora and fauna without the introductions of Terran (and other worlds) life forms. "Pines" here have not been broken out as White Pines, Lodgepole, and a whole range of Terran pine species. Its ONLY been a thousand years, it is unlikely that the fleet was able to cover all that much of the planet with Terran species so those are concentrated in the areas most heavily terraformed. Just how long did it take the fleet to make the various physical changes (like build the canals) and greater geology changes and then set out the imported flora (and mostly microscopic) additions to the ecology plus set up the fields & farming habitat? 20 years post initial land sculpting plus inoculation of the soil to get at least significant growth in trees going and natural reproduction? Sure, a lot of the introduced flora is going to spread at various rates where it finds openings in the orginal ecology where it hasn't got competition in a given niche or just "brushes" aside the original competition. The Safehold fora is going to have a much harder time getting back into the ground prepared for the imported crops since that ground is going to very activly worked, Any of the cropland is going to- again I presume-have instructions in the Writ about removing plants that don't fit with the food and other goods programs. Lets say extreemly agressive weeding.

This give a practical reason for "pines" vs nearpine. One (or many) species of a type of tree might be noted as a creation by God for men and the other stuff (indigenous) species are not special and must be cleared away if you want to move into an area for farming. They are not bad, just not as good and the God gifted ones are superior (insert Writ reason here)

Do we have Cats running around such that the local analog is a "cat-lizzard" or did the TF zoologists just name them cat-lizards and not provide a Terran cat species for comparison. What is a "cat" to the Safehodians or is the name given similar to Slash Lizzard with cat becomming a term like "likes to cuddle up with people" without shown reference to a Terran cat.

Good points. Makes a nice bit of theology, too; the modified names representing something further from God's plan than the standalone. If the nomenclature is consistently different between life for consecrated ground versus life for unconsecrated ground, a linguistically-inclined theologian could have a solid monograph on which words indicate a closeness to God and which indicate a distance.

Or I'm reading too much into a convenience adopted by the author to say, "this is like a pine tree but not".

noblehunter wrote:Good points. Makes a nice bit of theology, too; the modified names representing something further from God's plan than the standalone. If the nomenclature is consistently different between life for consecrated ground versus life for unconsecrated ground, a linguistically-inclined theologian could have a solid monograph on which words indicate a closeness to God and which indicate a distance.

Or I'm reading too much into a convenience adopted by the author to say, "this is like a pine tree but not".

Chances are Shan-wei's terraforming crews started naming Safehold species well ahead of Langhorne and Bedard's people and without any interest in helping along a plan of banishing all knowledge of Earth which came as a later surprise to them. So you'd have near-this and pseudo-that, whether or not the this or that were included among the species introduced in terraformed areas.

Then Langhorne and Bedard and all had to try to sanitize the language being introduced to colonists in the Writ and in conversation from angels out working with colonists - or just let the language have near-this and pseudo-that without the this or that being around. At some point, leaving a few oddities like that or explaining them another way ("The crocus was one of Langhorne's treasured flowers and especially beloved by God, til the fallen archangel Grimaldi destroyed them all in petty spite...") may have been less troublesome than trying to purge all references to them.

So what amounts to an authorial convenience can get written under one rug or another.

JeffEngel wrote:So what amounts to an authorial convenience can get written under one rug or another.

Which is the sign of a good authorial convenience. It's internally consistent and makes implications about the setting without drawing the reader's eye to it.

evilauthor wrote:

n7axw wrote:There are lots of Safehold names that have old earth roots even if the spelling is somewhat altered. Consider Haarahld, Cayleb, Sharleyan, Nynian, Domynik (sp), Lewys, Kynt and on and on it goes. I doubt that Merlin and Nimue stand out as particularly odd..

Don

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On the flip side, no one today names their kid "Merlin" and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that that's changed in the Federation. And unless there's been changes to pop culture in 400 years, "Merlin" should be instantly recognizable to anyone from the Federation.

And I think it was noted somewhere that "Merlin" and "Nimue" ARE outlandish names. Outlandish names have even become a notable Seijinn trait (at least to those who know Seijinn names), at least for Seijinn who aren't trying to pass as normal Safeholdians.

Merlin is a rare name but not completely unknown try googling Merlin Olsen he was a football player(LA Rams 60's and 70's) actor late 70's and 80's and sports broadcaster.

I don't recall any fuss on this subject one way or the other in the Safehold books. In the Honorverse we have treecats with names like Climbs Quickly or Laughs Brightly that are descriptive of some characteristic of the individual and can be changed after a significant event. The ancients in our timeline did much the same.

But for Safehold, many if not all the names seem to have Terran Terran roots with shift in spelling that make them look odd, a choice by RFC. IT's primarily a literary device sinse we read the books rather than hear them. We have no idea how those spellings would have shifted pronounciation for a Safeholdan.

I'm not convinced that concern about names is a significant issue. If it has been there would be textev for it.

Don

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I really don't think we can draw any conclusions from the names presented other than RFC wanted them to sound cool and exotic.

We know the languages have drifted from English and will have regional dialects so it is inevitable that names will change as well. Couple this with a widespread loss of literacy in the 800 years since and name forms and spellings tell us nothing.

Lets take a real life name and look at how it has evolved on earth.

Catherine, Katherine, Katerine, Caitlyn, Katerina, Ekaterina, Cate, Kate, Katy, Katie, Kathy, etc etc etc.

How would a computer be able to tell which was original and which was just some parents dialect going off on an unpredictable tangent?

saber964 wrote:


Merlin is a rare name but not completely unknown try googling Merlin Olsen he was a football player(LA Rams 60's and 70's) actor late 70's and 80's and sports broadcaster.

When I think of Merlin, what comes to mind for me is the wizzard in the King Arthur story.

Don