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AW:Dark Age / Re: Name lists
« on: September 03, 2014, 08:33:01 AM »
I'm a linguist, but this sort of work falls really far from my own research interests; as such, I think it'd be best to disregard my word in favour of any testimonial given by a speaker of a language. I do have a bit of training and experience here, but most of these observations are the results of intuition rather than intensive analysis.
I'm not entirely sure what names like Gunnarr, Hakon and Tryggvi are doing on the list of Germanic names, when their origins are in Old Norse. I suppose you could make the argument that since Old Norse is descended from Proto-Germanic, and that Nordic languages in general fall under the umbrella of Germanic languages, those names are Germanic. But if the list of Nordic names is there, those names ought to be on that list instead.
Jordanes, if I remember correctly, was a Roman known for conducting diplomacy with Gothic tribes. Definitely open to correction on this one, but I think that name would serve better on the Latin list.
The English names are especially odd, a bunch of them are actually Dutch (Douwe, Gerbrandt, Martinus, Wilrik), and, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't really any historical precedent for that sort of influence. I don't think there was a period during which England was under some sort of Dutch control, let alone one significant enough to realise that sort of linguistic change. Again, there's the same argument as above, that they're both Germanic languages. But they're on entirely separate branches of West Germanic, Dutch being Low Franconian and English a member of the Anglo-Frisian branch. 'English' in general is super tricky, even in medieval times, and depending on when the game is set, that name list could be hugely different. Pre-1066, most of the names would be Germanic, Anglo-Saxon specifically, but after William of Normandy conquered England, French became the language used in noble courts (if you've ever wondered, this is the primary reason we have so many French loan-words in English), and Romanic names would have become more prominent.
Of course, dealing with languages that haven't been spoken in centuries, or are still extant but vastly different, is a really difficult job. There's this great William Labov (renowned sociolinguist) quote that I feel should preface every attempt at historical linguistics: "the great art of the historical linguists is to make the best of this bad data, ‘bad’ in the sense that it may be fragmentary, corrupted or many times removed from the actual productions of native speakers" - and that's just it, nobody's alive to testify, and written works are extremely rare, if they exist at all. I'm totally in favour of linguistic accuracy and not misrepresenting anyone's culture, but if historical linguists whose job it is to tell us what a language might have sounded like in 800AD can't provide a fully accurate answer, I'm willing to extend some leeway to this project.
I'm not entirely sure what names like Gunnarr, Hakon and Tryggvi are doing on the list of Germanic names, when their origins are in Old Norse. I suppose you could make the argument that since Old Norse is descended from Proto-Germanic, and that Nordic languages in general fall under the umbrella of Germanic languages, those names are Germanic. But if the list of Nordic names is there, those names ought to be on that list instead.
Jordanes, if I remember correctly, was a Roman known for conducting diplomacy with Gothic tribes. Definitely open to correction on this one, but I think that name would serve better on the Latin list.
The English names are especially odd, a bunch of them are actually Dutch (Douwe, Gerbrandt, Martinus, Wilrik), and, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't really any historical precedent for that sort of influence. I don't think there was a period during which England was under some sort of Dutch control, let alone one significant enough to realise that sort of linguistic change. Again, there's the same argument as above, that they're both Germanic languages. But they're on entirely separate branches of West Germanic, Dutch being Low Franconian and English a member of the Anglo-Frisian branch. 'English' in general is super tricky, even in medieval times, and depending on when the game is set, that name list could be hugely different. Pre-1066, most of the names would be Germanic, Anglo-Saxon specifically, but after William of Normandy conquered England, French became the language used in noble courts (if you've ever wondered, this is the primary reason we have so many French loan-words in English), and Romanic names would have become more prominent.
Of course, dealing with languages that haven't been spoken in centuries, or are still extant but vastly different, is a really difficult job. There's this great William Labov (renowned sociolinguist) quote that I feel should preface every attempt at historical linguistics: "the great art of the historical linguists is to make the best of this bad data, ‘bad’ in the sense that it may be fragmentary, corrupted or many times removed from the actual productions of native speakers" - and that's just it, nobody's alive to testify, and written works are extremely rare, if they exist at all. I'm totally in favour of linguistic accuracy and not misrepresenting anyone's culture, but if historical linguists whose job it is to tell us what a language might have sounded like in 800AD can't provide a fully accurate answer, I'm willing to extend some leeway to this project.