#beautiful ruby

[calliclassic]

They're #MyGang

(I am their legal guardian and I am making sure they are fed and taken care of)

[fawntastic]

Can you maybe draw nona and her friends playing with noodle?

If you want to join the Noodel fan club it's three dollars, a dog treat and a zin

[ferretsquid13]

NTN AND HTN SPOILERS

Having fun exploring some of the names in Nona the Ninth. We get her corrected/called out on twice for how she hears names: Honesty and Born in the Morning. It’s the only two instances we get, which is odd because she should technically translate everyones names into meaning of she’s just listening and translating.

I don’t think Nona is doing literal translations at all, and those two instances are red herrings.

Theory that Honesty uses that as his gangster street nickname because it sounds cool and would be better for his business.

Theory that Harrowharks lobotomy to change how she hears Gideon… had some problems after her surgery healed over, and she can no longer hear Born in the Morning’s name as it’s spoken to her, so she approximates it to the closes thing she knows for what that name is trying to convey (because she runs on what people are feeling and emoting, not actual language)

So, what is born in the morning?

…a sunrise!

If i was the cutie pie soul of the earth, and i heard the name for one of my friends— the sun, who greets me over the horizon every morning, but couldn’t hear the actual name due to some lobotomy fuckery gone wrong in the brain of the body being inhabited— i would find what the name and sound is trying to convey!

And we know Tamsyn loves her parallels, and a pause from a confused character, who questions it but the. moves along isn’t a new thing:

[vaunted-and-vilified]

⋆ Let's Take a Walk, Gang! ⋆

[biracy]

Honestly while it's a cute idea and I could actually see it being canon I personally don't Love the idea that Nona is just automatically translating her friends' names and they "actually" have "normal names" that just mean "honesty" or "born in the morning." I think it's fun when a sci-fi world has "weird" names, I don't find it hard to believe that in ten thousand years some people would be named Beautiful Ruby while some people are still just called Kevin. Also, crucially imo, Wake's name just... is that. Gideon is the pov character when John says Wake's full name. And sure, Edenites have a reason they have those names (preserving pre-Resurrection culture and etc) but imo it's not a stretch to imagine that non-House planets where BoE influence is stronger would be less "standard" with names (and, if I need to say it, the very idea of some names being "standard" and others being "weird" is already very subjective and capable of being rooted in at best the centering of dominant languages and at worst like, straight up racism lol)

[melandrops]

not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet in relation to nona the ninth, but there's something so poetic about how in nona the ninth her friends names come across like native and indigenous names translated into english, where it comes across as strange or foreign to the colonial language and is read as a phrase or adjectives. and then how john is maōri and indigenous

[onefleshonepod]

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 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 New Rho 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.

Born in the Morning

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.”

Honesty

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!

Edit: I've seen "Frank" suggested a lot as a potential name, but I don't think this is likely, because "Honesty" is a noun, and "Frank" is an adjective. I think if Tamsyn intended the name to be a transliteration of "Frank" she would have used the adjective "Honest," not the noun "Honesty " – she doesn't seem the type to overlook something like that.

Beautiful Ruby

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

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!!

[hyumjim]

look at me!!!!!!!!!!