Whâts Üp With Fāntásy Nâmès?

[kraftcheese]

Jokes aside, why do you think so many fantasy writers (and subsequently RPG writers and players creating their own worlds) overuse/misuse accents and umlauts and the like in their naming conventions?

Is it just because it calls to mind Tolkien's use of accents not usually seen in English, and LOTR and The Hobbit were such big influences on the fantasy genre, and thus D&D and other RPGs? Or is it a trope that people think makes names sound more "exotic"?

[ThePurple]

Is it just because it calls to mind Tolkien's use of accents not usually seen in English, and LOTR and The Hobbit were such big influences on the fantasy genre, and thus D&D and other RPGs? Or is it a trope that people think makes names sound more "exotic"?

Well, first off, it's important to remember that a majority of Tolkien's influences for Middle Earth and the rest of his world wasn't actually English. IIRC, his primary influence were the Nordic myths, the languages of which make heavy use of diacritics (the term you're looking for when describing "accents, umlauts, and the like") even to this day. He was also a linguist, going so far as to design multiple languages purely for his own satisfaction, so his use of diacritics was probably very well done.

As an interesting side note, Tolkien actually remarks in the appendices of LotR that he actually changes the names of the halflings from their "real" names to those more appropriate for an English audience because -a was a masculine ending for Hobbit names whereas -o and -e were feminine. As such, Bilbo and Frodo were "actually" Bilba and Froda. As such, Tolkien did something incredibly interesting insofar as he created a fantastical culture and then proceeded to make it less fantastical and more approachable when he sent it into the world.

As to your question itself, it's probably a mix of the influence of Tolkien on the modern day fantasy genre, combined with author ignorance, as well as the desire for exoticism that you suggest. The fantasy genre is, by its very name, supposed to be fantastic (as in, "deviating from reality") so it makes sense for authors to use whatever tools they can to make the worlds they're building more exotic. Since a vast majority of fantasy worlds are shown to us almost exclusively through the textual media, diacritics are an easily accessible, easy to use (but difficult to use properly) tool for demonstrating that exoticism, it makes sense that diacritics tend to be pretty common in the genre.

Something else to consider, which I referenced before, is that it's important for fantasy authors to not deviate *too* far from what we expect or are equipped to understand. If the names of people and places in a fantasy world are too difficult to recognize or differentiate from one another, you're not going to have a good time. Authors have to walk a fine line between being exotic enough to be different but not *too* exotic.

Since the diacritics you mention are simply marks added to the letters of the Roman alphabet but are not used in normal English, they fit right in that sweet spot: they denote exoticism since they are no something we normally see while still being familiar because they're modifications to something that is incredibly mundane rather than something completely new.

In short, the answer to both of your questions is "yes": it all started with Tolkien, and it kept going and eventually hit the point of tropic overuse because people wanted to be exotic.

[Yora]

Tolkien might be partly responsible, and he actually had a very good reason. A lot of Germanic words and names end with the letter e, which is always pronounced, except in English. So writing in English for an English speaking audience, he had to spell Manwe as Manwë. In German, Swedish, or Norwegian that wouldn't have been necessary as the spelling Manwe would be unambigous, but in English you need it.
The other thing he did was using hyphens for some Numenoreans like Ar-Zimrathon. Earlier there was Robert Howard's Thoth-Amon.

And once the idea was out, people kept using it even when it's nonsensical.

I think the real reason is the attrocious spelling rules of English, really. There are so many things from Indo-European languages that you just can't spell normally when using English pronounciation.

[Xuc Xac]

I'm fairly certain that the most egregious examples are by authors who don't know that diacritics are actually functional and not merely decorative. Some of the authors who do know that they are functional don't know that the same diacritic mark can serve different purposes in different languages. For example, "é" in French has a different sound that "e". In Spanish, it has the same sound but the accent mark indicates that syllable has emphatic stress so it would be pronounced louder and slower than the other vowels in the word. In Vietnamese, it has the same sound as "e" but the accent mark indicates a rising tone so it would be pronounced with a different pitch. Many authors that know a bit of high school French assume that the accents are universal (and it certainly doesn't help that a lot of accents in French really are little more than decorative).

[Knaight]

A lot of it is just lazy writing from people who don't actually want to do the research into actual linguistics, and as such just throw around umlauts and apostrophes as if they are decorative.

[2D8HP]

According to my DM Bite'me'fat'boy" is not the Elvish translation of "Springtime Stargazer", and G't'b'nt'y'u'bearded'fatso is not an Elvish translation of "Summer Rainshower"!
Who knew?

[nrg89]

A lot of it is just lazy writing from people who don't actually want to do the research into actual linguistics, and as such just throw around umlauts and apostrophes as if they are decorative.

This. Whenever I tell someone who's first language is English how to pronounce the Swedish words "Örebro", "älv" or "år" they just can't get over the fact that "a" and "ä" are completely different letters without a lot of practice.

It has to do with cultural bias I suppose. We Swedes have the same problems pronouncing Finnish words even though we use the same alphabet and pronounce the letters similarly because they have special rules for double vowels while our rules only extend to the consonants.
If you're raised with such a chimeric language as English, where "bass" has two different pronounciations just because, you probably grow to expect that other languages are as loose when it comes to the sound of letters.

[Yora]

Drow is pronounced like bow.

[Eldariel]

It's as much about fictional languages as anything else. It's very frequent for otherworldly things to have names heavy on non-standard punctuation to drill home that Yog'Sothoth is not just Yogsothoth but he's an eldritch abomination and you should treat him as one (also, there are two points of stress in the word). They are often also used to try and aid your average English-speaker with pronunciation since English pronunciation is rather aberrant and thus pronouncing various non-English names like an English-speaker would tends to produce undesired results. Accents at least illuminate that something is up even if one might not know precisely how one should read them - indeed, in different orthographies accents are used to signify different things. E.g. in French, é signifies that a normally silent /e/ is pronounced while ô simply signifies the fact that at some point, a letter has been dropped from the word; in Tolkien's orthography for Quenya on the other hand, é signifies a long /e:/ (we Finns would simply spell it ee and Tolkien did in fact occasionally use the Finnish spelling).

[kraftcheese]

Drow is pronounced like bow.

But is it like bow...or bow??????

[kraftcheese]

A lot of it is just lazy writing from people who don't actually want to do the research into actual linguistics, and as such just throw around umlauts and apostrophes as if they are decorative.

I didn't really word my OP very well but this was what I was getting at: Tolkien (and surely a few other fantasy authors: e.g. I don't know if M.A.R. Barker used his diacritics effectively in Empire of the Petal Throne) used diacritics for a reason, and used them effectively, whereas further generations (?) of authors, creators, etc. saw that valid use of diacritics and misinterpreted or co-opted it as a shorthand for "fantasy" if that makes any sense?

[Murk]

I think this could actually be explained rather easily from the perspective of the story/setting. (Yes, of course a lot of it is lazy writing and a wish for the exotic, but it also makes sense within the story).
These names are names for entirely different species. If a great tentacle monster speaks, you can be sure it doesn't sound like any language we know.
We only have one alphabet, though.

So, rather than see the umlauts and apostrofs as human syllabels, see them as a sort of wonky phonetic script. The elf isn't really called ae'nöri-vallaçi, but that's the closest approximation of his weird, alien tongue - simply because we can't pronounce and write his name as it really is.

[Eldan]

Tolkien might be partly responsible, and he actually had a very good reason. A lot of Germanic words and names end with the letter e, which is always pronounced, except in English. So writing in English for an English speaking audience, he had to spell Manwe as Manwë. In German, Swedish, or Norwegian that wouldn't have been necessary as the spelling Manwe would be unambigous, but in English you need it.
The other thing he did was using hyphens for some Numenoreans like Ar-Zimrathon. Earlier there was Robert Howard's Thoth-Amon.

And once the idea was out, people kept using it even when it's nonsensical.

I think the real reason is the attrocious spelling rules of English, really. There are so many things from Indo-European languages that you just can't spell normally when using English pronounciation.

Of course, then you have the cases where people left the diacritics in in the translations where they really shouldn't be. Feänor is spelt that way in English to indicate that "ea" is not as in "tea", but is two distinct vowels. And then someone translated it into German without changing the spelling, where "a" and "ä" are quite different vowels, but "ea" would never be one vowel.

[OTG Wraith]

But is it like bow...or bow??????

Yes.......

[ThePurple]

But is it like bow...or bow??????

Reminds me of an old Dragon magazine comment that "Flind is pronounced like 'wind'".

[sktarq]

For good authors: They have a sound in their head and want the reader to have the same sound recreated in their head. Write it out in normal English with Roman characters - realize that with 54+ base phenomes and only 26 letters (plus all the sounds they may have in the name that don't appear in English-a Kossian click for example) that a new reader could pronounce the name in a. Half dozen ways and uses the various marks that distinguish between the sounds to communicate their original idea clearly.

Bad writers want to make you think they went through that process.

[Knaight]

I didn't really word my OP very well but this was what I was getting at: Tolkien (and surely a few other fantasy authors: e.g. I don't know if M.A.R. Barker used his diacritics effectively in Empire of the Petal Throne) used diacritics for a reason, and used them effectively, whereas further generations (?) of authors, creators, etc. saw that valid use of diacritics and misinterpreted or co-opted it as a shorthand for "fantasy" if that makes any sense?

Exactly. Tolkien was an actual linguist, he had the knowledge to do this properly. Gaining said knowledge is research intensive, so a lot of Tolkien imitators imitated the style, but without the actual knowledge of linguistics needed to do so in a coherent fashion. Hence the use of the decorative umlaut, accent, apostrophe (although that one was introduced in the Pern novels, again with an actual reason, and again imitated without one), etc.

[johnbragg]

For good authors: They have a sound in their head and want the reader to have the same sound recreated in their head. Write it out in normal English with Roman characters - realize that with 54+ base phenomes and only 26 letters (plus all the sounds they may have in the name that don't appear in English-a Kossian click for example) that a new reader could pronounce the name in a. Half dozen ways and uses the various marks that distinguish between the sounds to communicate their original idea clearly.

But diacritical marks don't have clear English meanings, so you aren't communicating anything anyway. At best, you're referring readers to an appendix or footnote to tell them how you're using a particular diacritic or diacritics.

Seriously, taking the diacritics sprinkled on the thread title.

WhâtsÜppen Withafān Tásynâmès would be read the same as Whatsuppen Withafane Tasynames.

[sktarq]

For historical reasons I would say using the Greek/Latin diacritical mark norms (vs the Gaelic, Hindi/Sandskrit, or Slavic ones) are also the norms in English, unless otherwise noted.

[Xuc Xac]

Yeah, if you want to spell a non-English name or word from a fantasy language (that probably doesn't even use the Latin alphabet anyway), just spell it phonetically with English orthography or translate it. In English, the dieresis means "this is not a diphthong". In German, it changes the sound of the vowel. So instead of writing "Zweihänder", English spells it "zweihaender" with a small "z" and an "ae" instead of "ä". If that was a completely new and unfamiliar fantasy word and you couldn't expect your audience to have any previous exposure to German or its alphabet, you're best off just going fully phonetic like "tsvie-hender" or translating it to "two-hander", which loses no information.

Unfortunately, English has a bad habit of looking at other languages with a Latin alphabet but much more regular orthography and saying "Words don't have to be spelled the way they sound. I'll just adopt that word the way it is without changing the spelling to make sense compared to most of my other words." So we end up spelling "caffay" like it rhymes with "strafe".

[johnbragg]

For historical reasons I would say using the Greek/Latin diacritical mark norms (vs the Gaelic, Hindi/Sandskrit, or Slavic ones) are also the norms in English, unless otherwise noted.

I don't think there is a norm for using diacritical marks in English. It's not a standard usage. You can't use them in your system of naming conventions and expect readers to understand them from previous knowledge, except for the macron indicating a "long vowel", which doesn't really give you that exotic frisson anyway. The best you can do is A) have a consistent system and B) let your readers know what the system is. You can't rely on readers knowing some previously existing rules for what diacritics mean. They probably didn't study Latin.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah, if you want to spell a non-English name or word from a fantasy language (that probably doesn't even use the Latin alphabet anyway), just spell it phonetically with English orthography or translate it. In English, the dieresis means "this is not a diphthong". In German, it changes the sound of the vowel. So instead of writing "Zweihänder", English spells it "zweihaender" with a small "z" and an "ae" instead of "ä". If that was a completely new and unfamiliar fantasy word and you couldn't expect your audience to have any previous exposure to German or its alphabet, you're best off just going fully phonetic like "tsvie-hender" or translating it to "two-hander", which loses no information.

Unfortunately, English has a bad habit of looking at other languages with a Latin alphabet but much more regular orthography and saying "Words don't have to be spelled the way they sound. I'll just adopt that word the way it is without changing the spelling to make sense compared to most of my other words." So we end up spelling "caffay" like it rhymes with "strafe".

“English doesn’t just borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and rifles their pockets for loose vocabulary.” – James Nicoll

[Xuc Xac]

I don't think there is a norm for using diacritical marks in English. It's not a standard usage.

There are a lot of standard use cases for diacritics in English, but most of them fell out of use when typewriters became common because most of them weren't included on most machines. You'll still encounter them when reading literature from before the 20th century though (and early 20th century authors who liked to sound archaic, like Lovecraft). The macron indicates that a vowel is longer than it would usually be and a breve indicates that it's shorter. The dieresis means "not a diphthong, pronounce these vowels separately" (e.g. "Zoë" or "naïve"). The apostrophe means "this is a contraction of a longer word or words" (the possessive case is actually a contraction of "es", but we stopped using the long form before or around when we dropped "thou"). The grave accent means "pronounce this as a separate syllable even though it looks like it's part of the previous syllable" (e.g. "learnèd" is "learn-ed" instead of "learnd"), although typically that's only used for poetry or song lyrics that need to stretch a word to fit the meter. The acute accent means "this looks like a silent vowel, but it isn't, so say it". It can also be used in poetry to put the "emphásis on a different sylláble" than usual.

[EtuBrutus]

Diacritics exist in almost every other language that uses the Latin alphabet.

So guys, maybe they get used in fantasy names because they serve a useful purpose, and English has just jettisoned them when it became the lingua franca.

Diacritics are only weird because as native English speakers, none of you are used to them. But everyone else uses them, as we used to (we even used to have more letters).

[kraftcheese]

Diacritics exist in almost every other language that uses the Latin alphabet.

So guys, maybe they get used in fantasy names because they serve a useful purpose, and English has just jettisoned them when it became the lingua franca.

Diacritics are only weird because as native English speakers, none of you are used to them. But everyone else uses them, as we used to (we even used to have more letters).

My biggest problem is that for the vast majority of English speakers, the meaning of diacritics is completely opaque.

As several others have suggested above, if you're writing a word that anyone who isn't a literacy major will think/say incorrectly due to use of diacritics, maybe there's a better way of representing those sounds (possibly phonetically).

I mean the only diacritic I even vaguely understood the sound of is the umlaut, and I suppose the é accent as in café. I certainly didn't get taught either in school; can you imagine someone with English as a second language who isn't from a Latin first language (or even most first language speakers) looking at diacritics in a fantasy novel?

And aren't diacritics uses in different ways in different languages anyway? For example, the Latin "B" letter in English and Cyrillic have completely different sounds (beh or bee in English, ve in most languages that use Cyrillic), so why would diacritics be any different?

They've just got a totally opaque meaning to most people, and I personally feel it takes away from something if you have to have the pronunciation of town names explained to you outside of the world's spelling, considering that's the function of the combination of letters we call a word.

[Knaight]

Diacritics exist in almost every other language that uses the Latin alphabet.

So guys, maybe they get used in fantasy names because they serve a useful purpose, and English has just jettisoned them when it became the lingua franca.

Diacritics are only weird because as native English speakers, none of you are used to them. But everyone else uses them, as we used to (we even used to have more letters).

There's using diacritics, and then there's using diacritics poorly. In a lot of cases, it's the latter that shows up. Nobody is complaining about uses that actually mirror real languages, particularly in the context of other things from that language. It's the decorative use that grates on people.

[johnbragg]

Diacritics exist in almost every other language that uses the Latin alphabet.

In other words, in languages where the spelling of a written word is expected to be a reliable guide to its pronunciation. (Except for French.) English doesn't have that expectation. "Read" may be a homophone of red or reed and we just deal with it. So if a fantasy author wants to name his city "Rèad", sounds like Riyadh, there's no English language spelling convention, diacritic or not, that's going to make that clear.

So guys, maybe they get used in fantasy names because they serve a useful purpose,

...again, they serve a useful purpose in languages whose spelling reliably indicates pronunciation, rather than indicating a vague guess.

and English has just jettisoned them when it became the lingua franca.

English didn't jettison them. English never had them to any significant extent.

(What DID happen is a massive shift in spoken English in the centuries just after the development of the printing press propagates standardized English spelling in the King James Bible. So just like French, English has a fossilized spelling system, preserving in amber the pronunciation of the point in the development of the language when it started to be widely written and read.)

Diacritics are only weird because as native English speakers, none of you are used to them. But everyone else uses them, as we used to (we even used to have more letters).

The "diacritic" most familiar to Americans is the tilda over the "n" in Spanish words like "ma~ana." And that is considered a separate letter in Spanish.

They're weird in English because they're not part of the English system. Which is not an insurmountable obstacle--if your muse compelled you, and you added a half-dozen extra letters to your fantasy world's alphabet, used consistently for some particular set of reasons, replacing say ch, sh, th, kh, a Khosian click and a glottal stop, or increasing the available vowel letters from 5 or 6 to a dozen, readers (and players) could learn it and there wouldn't be much of a problem.

It's an insurmountable obstacle if A) writers don't use them according to some consistent schema, and tell the readers the schema or, almost as bad, B) writers assume there is an already-existing schema for using diacritics in English that readers will comprehend and follow.

[Eldan]

You also have é, in French-derrived words like fiancé. It's like the Manwé/Manwë example above, without the diacritics, one could be tempted to pronunce it like finance without the first n.