mikwana wrote:Because it's a 'dead' language and departs from most of the anglo/english rules for names, and because of the meaning behind it. If I hadn't told you it was Celt, for example, would you have known?
Dead language? I can tell you've never been to Scotland. BBC even has a Gaelic radio channel there. So if I grew up in the highlands, yes, I probably would know what the word meant.
mikwana wrote:For that matter, why in game do we use english or german or french, or any other real language, how come we all arn't using Homin/Matis/Tryker etc? The answer is because we weren't brought up in these alien cultures using different grammer and vocabulary, there-fore we have to have some basis to build upon.
Precisely, and this shows the absurdity of the naming policy, and your slavish devotion to it. If we are to really escape our own culture, as the naming policy would have us do, then we would have to stop using our native languages and their standards of "foreign soundingness" that makes your name strange enough to be acceptable. It's no more an offense to the world of the game to have a character named "Joe Jackson," as to say in game "Hello, how are you Rhedyn?"
So why is the disbelief suspension threshold high enough to bar the former example and not the latter? We as English speakers have become accustomed to using names that are meaningless to us. This is largely because our names are taken from other languages in which they had meaning; think of common names such as Stella, Blanche, Peter. Our language is unique in this aspect, but it has not always been the case. There was a time when English names had meaning: Constance, Chastity, Felicity.
This restrictive view of what names can and should be is more representative of 20th-21st century Western culture than it is of human(oid) culture at large. How does it help the fantasy world to give it all of the peculiarities of our own particular culture, rather than give it a more naturalistic and universal characteristic such as meaningful names?
