Strange Names in Nona the Ninth
Nona’s gang of kids, plus the Angel, all appear to have weird names because they are Nona’s transliterations of their names in their native languages into the language of the Nine Houses.
Hot Sauce nodded. Nona guessed again, “Born in the Morning.”
“You mean Born in the Morning,” said Hot Sauce.
“That’s what I said,” said Nona.
There are seventeen local languages (according to Ianthe) on Lemuria / New Rho. Nona can speak all of them, without really understanding what she’s doing, so she understands the names she hears and the meaning of these names to be synonymous.
Nona understood everybody, and could speak back to them so that they understood her, and nobody ever said she had an accent. This confounded Palamedes. When she first said that she could speak back by watching them talk and making her lips look like theirs, it confounded him so much more that it gave Camilla a headache.
(I think the same thing’s going on with The Building that Troia cell lives in; I think it’s a word in another language that means building and is used as an official name for the building, but I have no guesses as to what that could be.)
I believe Nona is able to do this both because she is Alecto, who plays the role of the Holy Spirit in Tamsyn's Catholic Trinity 2.0, and the Holy Spirit gave the Apostles the gift of tongues during Pentecost, and because she is the soul of Earth. The languages spoken on Lemuria presumably came from Earth, so of course she can speak all of them!
This is my attempt to reverse engineer all of these names into House / English.
The Angel / The Messenger
BOE calls Aim "the Messenger" and the children and Nona call her "the Angel.”
We Suffer: “Usually you both meeting up with the Messenger, whom you call the Angel, would have been very bad.”
When the Angel first appears, her name is playing on the meaning of “angel” as a caring and godly being – the reader gets that it would make sense for children who love her to see her as an angel, so this remark flies under on the radar:
The Angel was what they called the nondescript, washed-out, dusty-haired personage who came to teach the Hour of Science. Why they called her the Angel was unclear.
But it is clear why they call her The Angel! It comes from a word with two meanings: the Greek word “angelos” originally meant “messenger” and later took on the meaning of “angel” or “messenger of God,” so all names originating from this word have both of those meanings.
Names originating from “angelos” include Angela (English, Spanish), Aniela (Polish), Aingeal (Irish), Anděla (Czech), Andjela (Serbian), Angèle (French), Angiola (Italian), Anzhela (Russian), and diminutives like Angelina.
The name is intended by BOE to mean Messenger, because of her societal role, but Nona is translating the other meaning of her name, Angel, because that meaning is what makes more sense to her given the way she sees and loves the Angel.
It's also possible that BOE has a more formal version of this name as a title for the Messenger and the children's "the Angel" which Nona hears as distinct from "the Messenger" is a diminutive or less formal version of the same name.
This name could be Sabah (Arabic), Akinyi (Luo from Kenya), or Asa (Japanese), all names which mean “morning” and more specifically “born in the morning.”
This is a bit more difficult and I’m really not sure about any of these. There are quite a few boys' names meaning “honesty.” There are even more names that mean “honest” or “truthful,” but for strictly the noun “honesty” we have these names:
Pheakdei (Khmer, from Cambodia); Satyam, Onnesha, and Sachh (Hindi); Zaka and Sadaqat (Arabic); and Onestà or Onesto (Italian).
I don’t speak any of these languages, so I can’t comment on which name is most likely, and there are probably also way more possibilities that I missed in my deep dive into 457 baby name websites and dictionary translations!
I think this name is probably just two names, in an unknown language, one meaning “beautiful” and one meaning “ruby.”
Unfortunately, there are millions of possibilities here and I can’t find any combination that particularly jumps out. If you have more thoughts on this please let me know!
Hot Sauce, of course – as a delightful choice that only serves to confuse the reader more with respect to all of these names – is literally just named Hot Sauce. You CAN put it on rice and you CAN put it on bread!!
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