Re: specific name-related question

[Dave Montuori <damont@wolfstar.com>]

Poster: Dave Montuori <damont@wolfstar.com>


> In addition, a portion of my
> >original submission name was from a different country than the rest,
> but
> >done on purpose to fit my family line (an Irish man who met an
> Italian lass
> >during the war and took her home--for SCA, I made it the crusades).
> 
> 
> We don't register persona stories, only plausible period names.  In
> period, mixed culture names were almost unkown, except for those
> instances where two different cultures were in almost daily contact
> -- Welsh/English, or Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon, for instance.  

To be more specific, current precedent reveals two groups of mixed-culture
names that are not registerable. (Admittedly, some of these groups have
boundaries that are very fuzzy indeed...)

1: two cultures may have interacted so little (or not at all) in period
that mixing their languages is so unlikely as to be practically
impossible. A name which combines two such languages will bounce.

2: two cultures may use the same alphabet, but their languages'
orthographic conventions are so different that nobody in period would have
mixed the two orthographies together and still be considered sane. In this
case, if the two cultures were in contact, the name will always be
rendered in one orthography or the other but never both. The best known
example of this is combinations of Gaelic with English/Anglicized-Gaelic
spellings. For example, one wouldn't be known as "James mac Domhnaill" -
one would be "Seamas mac Domhnaill" in a Gaelic context or "James
MacDonnell" in an Anglicized/English context. The pronunciation
in both cases is the same; the spellings are generated by folks trying to
approximate the pronunciation in the current linguistic context.
A name which combines two such incompatible orthographies will either get
changed or returned depending on the exact circumstance.

Language/spelling combinations that don't fall into either of the above
groups may be registerable; whether a given case *is* registerable is,
as always, up to Laurel to decide.

Evan

=======================================================================
List Archives, FAQ, FTP:  http://merryrose.atlantia.sca.org/
            Submissions:  atlantia@atlantia.sca.org
        Admin. requests:  majordomo@atlantia.sca.org