Hullo. Here for WIP progress Sunday! Firstly congrats for your progress this week! Secondly: How did you come up with the names for the characters/kingdoms? Do they mean something specifically?
Thanks! I’m pretty happy with my progress, despite having two more rest days than I meant.
For the character names: basically, my whole setting is loosely based on the Korean Peninsula in the Joseon Dynasty, which admittedly is a very long stretch of time. But the point being, I wanted to make the language vaguely Korean-sounding. I already had two names to work with from the short story, Gideon and Hiram, which are both Hebrew names obviously. When writing the short story I had kind of just thrown the name Gideon (meaning great warrior) in there as the main character, and then added Hiram’s name (meaning beloved brother) to fit with Gideon. So once I had decided on the Korea-esque setting I had to change the names. Gideon became Gidon (pronounced /gi-dohn/), and Hiram, normally pronounced /High-rum/, changed to /Hee-lam/. With these changes, and fitting with the Korean system of names, I figured that Gi meant great or powerful and Don meant warrior, so Hi meant beloved and Ram meant brother.
Okay, so taking those names and meanings, and wanting to create a small connection between the short story and the novel, I thought of some combinations of single syllable sounds until I came up with Rahi, which means strong and beloved (see the connection to Hiram?). I wanted her name to reflect her inner strength of character and how her people feel about her.
For my male main character it was much the same, I used the four syllables I already had, now five with the added Ra, and did some mixing until I came up with Gijoon, which means great or powerful and gentle (see the connection to Gidon?) I wanted his name to reflect his character as well, showing that he is powerful but also a gentle soul.
For the place names: Still working with the Korea-esque setting idea. I kind of happened upon the syllable Kang, which in actual Korean means river. For this one, I played around with etymology a bit, and started with the river meaning. Originally, way back in the past of my story’s world, the word Kang did mean river, but because the original homeland was made up of lots of rivers and the people tended to build their cities on the rivers, then Kang came to mean “a place on the river”. Then, as the civilization grew and became a large nation, Kang came to mean “the people who live in places on the river”, and so Kang turned into the name of the nation.
Then, roughly 400 years before the start of my story, a great cataclysm happened that destroyed the land, burying it under water, and the people were forced to flee in ships west across the sea. Just before they landed on a new continent, the fleet was split in two by a storm, and the two groups landed on either side of a very large mountain range. Each group wanted to name their new home as some variant of their old home, so each group incorporated Kang into their new name. For the other two parts, Sana and Esun, I’m still working on the etymology of those, but I picked them because they sounded pretty and flowed well with Kang.