Arabic names
Feb. 16th, 2011 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethYou know this morning I decided to have a character be from a muslim space station?
So I spent the day poking websites and getting a better feeling for the depths of my extreme ignorance.
Then I thought, hey, I skip all this, I go name the character and get on with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_name
... yeah, that's... not so simple. Makes complete sense in its way, but inventing one of those names? Oh, that would take some doing.
Names: Not just first and last, around the world
... I should have realised this earlier cause I know what Alexander Siddig was called before he simplified for an audience and made it Alexander Siddig. He was Siddig El Fadil on credits for a while, but his official site says:
Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig El Abderahman El Mohammed Ahmed El Abdel Karim El Mahdi (he goes by “Sid”)
funnily enough none of his characters on wiki have that much name.
so does a new made up character only need the one name? the one syllable? out of all that all?
And all naming convention massively complicated by the way there isn't a standard transliteration for Arabic so the exact same person's exact same name can have a huge great list of ways of writing it.
... apparently this has been screwing up US intelligence databases something awful for years...
I can make up a name simples, but it's a worldbuilding choice. If I make the names that sound easy to my British ears then I've made Arabic-via-Britain at best. If the migration didn't go through Britain then it sounds different.
In my head this particular trade ship picked up two passengers from an Islamic space station around a different star, with probably Arabic names.
They're connected to a black British descended Belter called Smith (okay, Mickey Smith in a new 'verse, and with a new background, and probably being a new person).
He is serving on a ship currently captained by a Chinese lady (played in my head by Michelle Yeoh, who is another with a selection of names, Michelle Yeoh Choo-Kheng, Yeoh as the family name both which ways up I think; wiki says she's ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia acting in Hong Kong and educated in London, which covers quite a lot of world. Wiki also says 'Yeoh learned English and Malay before Cantonese, and cannot read Chinese characters. As she does not read Chinese, she learned the lines for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon phonetically.' So that's a lot of languages too.) The captain brought some of her crew from her former ship with her, Cantonese speakers who are mostly ethnically Chinese.
But the ship was originally owned by a bunch of white people, who lost too much in an accident to run the ship themselves. Most of the survivors are in administration, which leaves white management doing trading while people of color do noticeable work, which is meant to set up interesting tensions but could possibly be faily.
So the other half of the crew are the original owners of the ship and their children (I needed a bunch of brothers who looked alike and I was listening to Big Finish audios so started with Paul McGann, cause there's four McGann brother actors and his son doing audios.) But where in the world their ancestors were from in the fiction I'm not sure. I was going to try and make space be full of people from more places than my little corner of it, but, I would have to learn how to write everyone's names. At this point this is looking non trivial. Mcsomething looks more appealing by the minute.
Also, if this were actual proper TV, I'd want to do the Firefly thing of mixing languages, only with people who actually know how to say the words. And are in fact Chinese. Because keeping the language without the people made that 'verse kind of creepy.
But if I'm writing from a particular pov I either translate everyone into English because the listener understands all the languages (the captain) or I leave half of it a mystery to the reader because the point of view only speaks Trade (Smith). I can neither write any chinese or arabic my own self nor know if the auto translators are making any sense at all, and I can't do what I'd do on TV of speak-and-subtitle with multiple language options on the DVD. So the language thing gets flattened out and maybe mentioned if it's a plot point who can and cannot understand.
The language history in this 'verse is that almost everywhere speaks English as a second language, so it's Trade to them, what they have in common. Merchant ships tend to settle on Trade so they can speak to all the docks, but they'll have their inherited language between themselves. Having more than one ship language aboard says more than one family is there, which is unusual. But the Fleet speaks English as its official, traditional, language, so fleetborn are not so much bilingual. They'd have to recruit translators.
The Star Trek thing or the Stargate thing for that matter is that everyone speaks English to us because the Americans contacted them first. Vulcans landed in America, or SG1 went out and made contact. I do not so much want to do things that way. I hear via Due South that Canada has a bunch of languages and they manage fine. Seems like a working model.
If whoever finds the Stargates sets the language then this 'verse had an English speaker find the gates.
If Britain found a Stargate we'd so totally get squished in the scrum. Unless we made some very solid deals very quickly.
Naming and language has so much history tied up in it.
The people turned up in my head cause of what I've been watching in films lately. So I haven't really turned it over to look from lots of angles. It isn't white people bossing everyone around cause the captain has the final word about everything. The idea was they were from two family ships that both got damaged, so whole departments would have been lost when the sections they work in got torn open. The Cantonese ship only preserved the bridge and one cargo hold, the English ship pretty much lost the bridge and cargo. Hmmm, that's a bit neat, if they have more crew in some specialities than they technically need that makes a different tension. Definitely English lost the bridge though. But saved the children. So they have a generation to inherit, but lost their mothers.
I read CJCherryh's merchanter books, so the idea of matrilineal trader ships makes fine and intuitive sense to me. But there's always many ways to work such things.
I keep thinking of the cargo and dock workers as monkeys, cause they've got specialities that ignore little things like up and down and the kind of flat walking most people tend to do and instead go around racks in all three dimensions as required. Climber monkeys. But if I've made all them all ethnic minorities (compared to around here and where people are likely reading) is calling them monkeys a bad idea or a very bad idea? But there's monkey stories where monkeys is win, can call them after monkey-of-win?
Complicateds.
I think I should go sleep now, I been typing on this for an hour and needed to sleep then.
So I spent the day poking websites and getting a better feeling for the depths of my extreme ignorance.
Then I thought, hey, I skip all this, I go name the character and get on with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_name
... yeah, that's... not so simple. Makes complete sense in its way, but inventing one of those names? Oh, that would take some doing.
Names: Not just first and last, around the world
... I should have realised this earlier cause I know what Alexander Siddig was called before he simplified for an audience and made it Alexander Siddig. He was Siddig El Fadil on credits for a while, but his official site says:
Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig El Abderahman El Mohammed Ahmed El Abdel Karim El Mahdi (he goes by “Sid”)
funnily enough none of his characters on wiki have that much name.
so does a new made up character only need the one name? the one syllable? out of all that all?
And all naming convention massively complicated by the way there isn't a standard transliteration for Arabic so the exact same person's exact same name can have a huge great list of ways of writing it.
... apparently this has been screwing up US intelligence databases something awful for years...
I can make up a name simples, but it's a worldbuilding choice. If I make the names that sound easy to my British ears then I've made Arabic-via-Britain at best. If the migration didn't go through Britain then it sounds different.
In my head this particular trade ship picked up two passengers from an Islamic space station around a different star, with probably Arabic names.
They're connected to a black British descended Belter called Smith (okay, Mickey Smith in a new 'verse, and with a new background, and probably being a new person).
He is serving on a ship currently captained by a Chinese lady (played in my head by Michelle Yeoh, who is another with a selection of names, Michelle Yeoh Choo-Kheng, Yeoh as the family name both which ways up I think; wiki says she's ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia acting in Hong Kong and educated in London, which covers quite a lot of world. Wiki also says 'Yeoh learned English and Malay before Cantonese, and cannot read Chinese characters. As she does not read Chinese, she learned the lines for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon phonetically.' So that's a lot of languages too.) The captain brought some of her crew from her former ship with her, Cantonese speakers who are mostly ethnically Chinese.
But the ship was originally owned by a bunch of white people, who lost too much in an accident to run the ship themselves. Most of the survivors are in administration, which leaves white management doing trading while people of color do noticeable work, which is meant to set up interesting tensions but could possibly be faily.
So the other half of the crew are the original owners of the ship and their children (I needed a bunch of brothers who looked alike and I was listening to Big Finish audios so started with Paul McGann, cause there's four McGann brother actors and his son doing audios.) But where in the world their ancestors were from in the fiction I'm not sure. I was going to try and make space be full of people from more places than my little corner of it, but, I would have to learn how to write everyone's names. At this point this is looking non trivial. Mcsomething looks more appealing by the minute.
Also, if this were actual proper TV, I'd want to do the Firefly thing of mixing languages, only with people who actually know how to say the words. And are in fact Chinese. Because keeping the language without the people made that 'verse kind of creepy.
But if I'm writing from a particular pov I either translate everyone into English because the listener understands all the languages (the captain) or I leave half of it a mystery to the reader because the point of view only speaks Trade (Smith). I can neither write any chinese or arabic my own self nor know if the auto translators are making any sense at all, and I can't do what I'd do on TV of speak-and-subtitle with multiple language options on the DVD. So the language thing gets flattened out and maybe mentioned if it's a plot point who can and cannot understand.
The language history in this 'verse is that almost everywhere speaks English as a second language, so it's Trade to them, what they have in common. Merchant ships tend to settle on Trade so they can speak to all the docks, but they'll have their inherited language between themselves. Having more than one ship language aboard says more than one family is there, which is unusual. But the Fleet speaks English as its official, traditional, language, so fleetborn are not so much bilingual. They'd have to recruit translators.
The Star Trek thing or the Stargate thing for that matter is that everyone speaks English to us because the Americans contacted them first. Vulcans landed in America, or SG1 went out and made contact. I do not so much want to do things that way. I hear via Due South that Canada has a bunch of languages and they manage fine. Seems like a working model.
If whoever finds the Stargates sets the language then this 'verse had an English speaker find the gates.
If Britain found a Stargate we'd so totally get squished in the scrum. Unless we made some very solid deals very quickly.
Naming and language has so much history tied up in it.
The people turned up in my head cause of what I've been watching in films lately. So I haven't really turned it over to look from lots of angles. It isn't white people bossing everyone around cause the captain has the final word about everything. The idea was they were from two family ships that both got damaged, so whole departments would have been lost when the sections they work in got torn open. The Cantonese ship only preserved the bridge and one cargo hold, the English ship pretty much lost the bridge and cargo. Hmmm, that's a bit neat, if they have more crew in some specialities than they technically need that makes a different tension. Definitely English lost the bridge though. But saved the children. So they have a generation to inherit, but lost their mothers.
I read CJCherryh's merchanter books, so the idea of matrilineal trader ships makes fine and intuitive sense to me. But there's always many ways to work such things.
I keep thinking of the cargo and dock workers as monkeys, cause they've got specialities that ignore little things like up and down and the kind of flat walking most people tend to do and instead go around racks in all three dimensions as required. Climber monkeys. But if I've made all them all ethnic minorities (compared to around here and where people are likely reading) is calling them monkeys a bad idea or a very bad idea? But there's monkey stories where monkeys is win, can call them after monkey-of-win?
Complicateds.
I think I should go sleep now, I been typing on this for an hour and needed to sleep then.