Naming Non-Schemes

Characters in the Gordian cycle deliberately don't have a single name scheme. This is a culture created first by migrants to Mars from, I'm implying, all sorts of different parts of Earth, creating a very broad melting-pot; that then suffered a societal collapse that has left it without much in the way of unifying structures or clear knowledge of its exact past, so there isn't anything to tell them "your names should be like this"--and nor has it been quite long enough for each region to have developed its own unique naming patterns distinct from the others. There are some vague rules I use, but first, the categories I pull from:

- Real, contemporary names from across the world: Morgan, Kaya, Salou, Cormac, Chandra. These help give a reminder that this fantasy world grew out of ours not too long ago.

- Cool words that are not generally names in real life: Shrike, Mach, Torque (or compounds like Trackboar and Driveheart). Classic sci-fi naming practice.

- 'Classical' Graeco-Roman names, as well as names that kind of sound like classical names but aren't: Cassius, Kyros, Kalis. See place-names below.

- Other historical/mythical names: Tzimiskes, Za (dynasty in Songhai history), Garuda, Bohemond. (More rarely there will be a 'fake' one of these but only when I know something about their actual construction; Arkwulf for Old English might be the only example so far)

- Brand new names that just sound cool and futuristic in a post-collapse sort of way: Rec, Maser

Place-names, meanwhile, are generously provided to me by our names for parts of the Martian landscape today. These are mostly in Latin and many of them are based in classical mythology, which I imagined became something for the local inhabitants to latch onto while forming their identities after the initial collapse, leading to the frequency of classical names and the creation their own vaguely Latin-styled names. Some regions also seem to correspond with their inhabitants. The places on Mars we nowadays call the Amazonian Sea and the Land of the Sirens have, in this story, come to be inhabited by warrior-women and nautical sand-farers respectively. This could indicate a deeper sense of drawing identity from their locality, or it could be our tale-tellers making stuff up, filling in the blanks by assuming those places got their names from whoever lived there in the time of legend.

There's also some place-names I've altered to show linguistic drift, though at what point presumably varies. Some of them have had their spelling shifted to conform with the language of the later culture our translator hails from, which itself has a mixed basis, primarily Arabic and Spanish. Meanwhile "Gordios" comes from an older name for Arsia Mons (the "Gordian Knot", from before astronomy was advanced enough to tell that it was a mountain for sure).

With all that laid out, there are a few rules I follow for character names:

- Patronymics (son/daughter of X) denote nobles. Commoners invariably have one name. (Za Salou is a variant and doesn't have "son of", but his multiple names still denote him as a noble, and gives his name the rhythm of Ulster cycle hostellers like Da Derga and Da Chocha)

- Kings are usually referred to with one name despite being nobles with known ancestry; this implies their names (which tend to be historical or mythical) are uncommon enough that you can say it without qualification and know that's the one they mean. I haven't yet decided if this is naming practice from birth in royal dynasties, or if they take up "regnal names" upon assuming power. Presumably we'll find out when we next hear from Isaakios.

- Commoners who are made into Hounds usually get an epithet to give their names roughly equal length to their noble peers. This is less necessary for Hounds directly working for the Angels because they're not in the public eye as much. Nobles can also have epithets--Kaya's helps to distinguish her from her brother using their patronymic, as their names are quite similar.

- Amazons tend to use "cool word" type names, though this isn't exclusive to them. "Toxis" is close enough to "toxic" to count, and sounds similar to Greek "toxotis" ("archer", the classic image of the ancient Amazon). Their single names denote that their culture operates on a more egalitarian level, although the lack of an entrenched hereditary aristocracy doesn't stop them clustering around more temporary warlords in a might-makes-right fashion. All this is part of why our translator considers the name of Mach's daughter "Glint" plausible.

- The names of commoners that are not major characters are often not recorded at all. The tale-tellers have repeated this bias, and generally seem to reflect a lot of the prejudices of the society they're depicting, while also gleefully singing praise of heroes fighting against that class structure. This ambivalence and what it says about the society of this later period has, as we will come to see, caused our translator and their colleagues no end of headaches.

This isn't quite everything; there's some very stupid and torturous puns behind a couple names in particular, some of them gesture at the character's tokusatsu inspiration, and there is of course a consistent naming scheme for the Sideworlders. But for now I'll just shout out Forcelgadd, which almost looks like it could be a medieval Welsh name, but is in fact a minor subroutine Linux computers run that I saw on my terminal and thought "hey, that almost looks like a medieval Welsh name". By Welsh pronunciation that would be "fork-el-gath", but I quite like highlighting the "force" aspect so I tend to say the chimera approach "for-sell-gath", since it's not a real name and originates in this jumbled future milieu. (On the note of Welsh pronunciation in names that actually are from that language, its "y" is, except in the final syllable, more like "uh", so Drystan and Cynan are properly pronounced "Druhstan" and "Kuhnan")