From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: twinkie names
Date: 24 Jul 92 06:16:27 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.sca
Organization: SCA

Greetings all, from Angharad.  Lord, this thread on names!  I'm going
to give this one shot, because I think maybe a nonherald who isn't an
expert might have a better shot at communicating what I think is 
bothering Tadhg.

First, he's not objecting to translations.  Most people don't translate
when registering names -- an Italian name might just as well be registered
in Italian, for heaven's sake.  But a reasonable translation, reasonably
documented, would I suspect be fine.  If you want to translate in ordinary 
use, I don't think Tadhg would mind.  But it is worth knowing that word-by-word
translations frequently generate nonsense.  It seems to me, for instance,
that either "Gilberts" or "Gilbertson" or even "son of Gioberti" are reasonable 
translations for "di Gioberti", but that "of Gioberti" makes sense neither 
as Italian nor as English.

Second, when Tadhg says that compound epithets should "make sense", I 
think he means that they should make sense in the medieval context: be
ways medievals put things together in names.  Every actual medieval epithet
I've heard, including those cited against Tadhg, is very concrete.  The 
ones Tadhg objects to make sense (sometimes) as modern figures of speech, but 
not as medieval concrete compounds.

The problem he has with these names, I think, is that they give the strong 
impression to those who know much about medieval language use in general
and naming in particular that nobody in period could have had them, and they 
give a _false_ impression to people who don't know anything about medieval 
names of what those names were like.  To use an example close to -- Tadhg's 
-- home, "Red Vashti" may be a reasonable translation of a period name 
(certainly in Wales there was "Iolo Goch", which means "Red Iolo", or, if you 
prefer, "Iolo the Red"), but "Vashti of the Flaming Tresses" is not, unless, 
as Tadhg suggests, you set her hair on fire.... ;^/   (For those not in on 
the Ansteorran joke, Vashti is Tadhg's lady wife.)

The problem is the stress between those who want the fantasy-neatness 
associations of their chosen names and those who want to promote a 
genuinely medieval atmosphere which, for them, is ruined by people with 
names that would have inspired not respect or other fantasy-neatness 
associations, but confusion or unkind laughter in period.  To a lesser 
degree, there is a similar problem with people who didn't know much about 
names when they chose theirs, and now for better or worse are known by 
them: although changing names is not so hard as some would make out, it 
is a nuisance.  A further problem is the stress between people choosing 
names to be funny and people trying to relate to them as names; this is 
really what the "Beerslayer" problem is.  For some purposes, people may 
choose to adopt a humorous name: "Plato" is (anglicized) Greek for roughly 
"Fatso".  But considerate parents don't name their children that way, and
never did.  If you claim that your honest-to-gosh name is something 
ludicrous, people must assume that either you are widely disliked and 
others hung it on you, or your parents are nasty.  -- Or admit, in the 
middle of their recreations, that this is not your name, it's your current 
modern jest.  Which again spoils the recreation for them, which is both
why they care and what makes it any of their business.

On the whole, it is polite to call people what they want to be called.  On
the whole, it is polite not to force people at SCA events to acknowlege that
there is nothing medieval about what we do.  These two points of courtesy
frequently come into conflict: one instance occurs when people want to choose 
names that, to those who know much about medieval naming, are blatantly 
nonmedieval.  It's blue jeans all over again, in a different guise.

In other words, I think that this thread as yet another manifestation of the
eternal "authenticity-is-more-fun versus modern-fooling-around-is-more-fun"
debate.  Also, I think it's time to let it go.

In Service to the Society,

-- Angharad/Terry
From: Tim@f4229.n124.z1.fidonet.org (Tim)
Sender: FredGate@ocitor.fidonet