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Fantasy Names with Normality Potential.

Pet Peeve of Mine:

I have observed a phenomenon that mostly occurs in the fantasy or science fiction genre, or any other fiction where original worlds and cultures different from the ones we know are invented.

Either there are character names that sound like perfectly normal names from our (Western) cultural background, but have some ridiculous exotic spelling.

Or there are character names that are ridiculously exotic but conveniently contain one or two syllables that allow them to be shortened to an incredibly common nickname from our cultural background.

So meet my alien friends Uyllyum and Jondalumbumgrum (you can call him John). We’ll have so many adventures together. 

I am not in favour of this phenomenon. It’s irritating, and seems somehow condescending (as if the author couldn’t expect the readers to memorise names they hadn’t heard before.) It’s also philologically shallow.

Take a leaf out of Tolkien’s book. Besides the various Elvish languages and the other more exotic languages in Middle Earth, he also imagined a sort of standard lingua franca, which would have been spoken, f.e. by the Hobbits. This language is represented in the book by English. So while the original names of the Hobbits are something rather more exotic, for us they have been translated into names with an English etymology. I seem to remember that Meriadoc is actually called Kalimac, which would’ve been shortened to ‘Kali’, which means happy, gay or ‘merry’. Now I don’t know if Tolkien actually went as far as to imagine the ‘original’ name for every character, but it is not unlikely, because he was thorough/obsessive like that.

My point is that he gave so much thought to the whole thing that it actually all made sense. His name have plausible etymologies that are linguistically consistent. That’s just so much more dedicated than taking a Christian name and spelling it weirdly.