#onomatology

[muirneach]

his mothers name was DELIVERANCE BUTTS??????????

[al-zel]

Explaining every H:SR characters name, Part 1-- The Astral Express Crew!

I’ll put a symbol →(!!!) on every section that has a potential spoiler.

Stelle: A shortened version of the French name Estelle, meaning “star”. This name was derived from the Latin word “stella”. As for how it applies to the character, I’m sure it’s meant to show that the trailblazers true place is among the astral express exploring the cosmos. It might also be a reference to the Stellarons appearance.

Caelus: Derived from the Latin word “caelum”, Caelus is a name that means “sky” or “the heavens”. This name also belonged to the Roman god of the sky. It’s a little more convoluted than Stelle’s more straightforward name, but I think it holds the same narrative meaning as Caelus (the god) has heavy ties to the planet Jupiter, fitting the space theme. It's also the most yellow planet aside from Venus, (which is more associated with the color green due to how it appears in the sky anyway).

March 7th, DH, WY, and Himeko under cut!!

(!!!!) March 7th: It is the day March was found, but the specific date can bring some symbolism to mind. The month of march signals the beginning of of spring, a season full of new growth and revival from the stasis that winter brings. This fits into March’s character arc in her companion quest, as the garden of recollection locks away her past, essentially saying that It’s not something March should be remembering or looking for, implying something awful or traumatizing has happened to her. This shows that without those memories, March may have turned from a cold, "icy" character into a warmer, healthier one. 7 is also a lucky number, as it was very lucky that March has survived so long drifting in space and frozen, even if it was in 6 phase ice.

(!!!) Dan Heng: The character 丹 (Dān) simply means red, although it can also be pellet, powder, or cinnabar. I think this is mainly to tie in with Dan Heng’s maple leaf theme. The character 恒 (Heng) means “constant” or “persistent”, a nod to Dan Heng’s collected and steady nature compared to his eccentric companions. It may also be a reference to Dan Heng’s rebirths as a Vidyadhara or the number of years he spent inside of the Shackling Prison as Dan Feng.

Welt Yang: “Welt” is said to be the “name of the world”, but it’s really just the German word for world. “Yang” (杨) is Welt’s mother’s surname, meaning willow, poplar, or aspen, all three of them different trees. I don’t think that either of these names imply anything about Welt’s story, aside from the mantle of "welt" given to him by Welt Joyce, whoch is another post altogether. I think they highlight his responsible, powerful, and thoughtful character, as well as his sentimentality.

(!!!) (Welt Yang) Joachim Nokianvirtanen: Joachim is an abridged or contracted form of the biblical name Jehoiachin or Jehoiakim. They mean "Yaweh will establish" and "raised by Yaweh" respectively. Yaweh is a name of the Hebrew god, with possible roots to the old Semitic root הוה (hawah), meaning "to be" or "to become." This name is a probable reference to Welt inheriting his mentors Herrscher core and becoming the second Herrscher of Reason. His surname, Nokianvirtanen, is not an actual last name, but a mix of two names. The first part, Nokian, is a town in Finland. The second, Virtanen, is a common surname in finland derived from the word "virta", meaning "stream." I don't interpret this surname to have any meaning aside from establishing that Welt is (not confirmed outright, but heavily implied to be) ethnically half Finnish and half Chinese.

(!!!) Himeko Murata (無量塔姫子): Her first name is comprised of the characters 姫 (hime), meaning princess, and 子 (ko), meaning child. Put the whole thing together and it means "princess child", though I'm sure I didn't have to tell you that! I think it's less about her personality and story (especially in regards to Honkai Impact 3rd), but I think it represents her parents live for her, particularly her father's, as he's the one we know most about. The characters for her last name are-- 無 (Mu; nothing/nothingness), 量 (Ra(?); measurement, but with two connotations. First, it can mean a measurement, like weight or quantity, or it can mean "to measure" by estimate or actual documentation, or "to consider."), and 塔 (Ta; pagoda, tower, steeple). I think the most important part of her name is that last part-- in both universes, Himeko acts as a rock or mentor figure to many characters, being a motherly/older sister type towards the young trio of the express, and a teacher and squad leader toward Kiana, Mei, and Bronya, going as far as to strap a bomb to Mei's heart to keep her powers in check (with Mei's consent) should she lose control. 

And that's the Astral Express crew! I'm going by groups of characters divided into: Stellaron Hunters, Herta's Space Station, Belobog, The Xianzhou Loufu, and Penacony! (Characters are ordered by introduction. Characters will be put where they were first shown, despite their relevance in other places. Dr. Ratio, for example, will be put with the HSS characters instead of the Penacony category.)

[youdontknowhowtodiequietly]

y’all, andrew’s name is like fucking remus lupins name except it’s not wolf werewolf (or smth like that) it’s basically strong strong and actually that makes me cry so fucking much cause YES HE IS!

[useless-catalanfacts]

I'm guessing now it's the same as Spanish because of imperialism, but did Catalan names originally follow the First name + Second name + Father's surname + Mother's surname naming system?

Yes, nowadays we use both surnames. We can't be sure of what would have happened, but the two surnames we have now were a Spanish imposition in most cases.

Before the 19th century, most Catalan men used only one surname. Only the upper classes had more surnames, since they often wanted to keep stacking titles (think of those really long names of nobles, if you marry into another powerful family and yours is powerful too you wouldn't want either of the lineages to get lost, the most titles you can "collect" the better!). Women could often use two surnames after getting married (their father's and their husband's).

In 1870, the Spanish law decided that civil register should have 2 surnames (first the father's and secondly the mother's) for each person to identify them better. That's how people started to have two surnames.

The most visible effect of this law, however, is the spelling. When Spanish-speaker state officers had to write down Catalan surnames, they would write them down according to Spanish spelling rules. That's why many Catalan surnames have a "Spanishified" spelling, like "Peña" instead of Penya, "Calzada" instead of Calçada, "Lladó" instead of Lledó, etc.

(As for first names, usually we only have 1 except you've been baptized, but that's not an official name and how much those 1 or 2 extra names are counted as part of your name depends on each person or family)

More information about the origin of Catalan surnames below the cut.

In the Middle Ages, Catalans had a name and a "nickname", often referred to a characteristic. Many of our surnames come from here. For example, physical attributes like Roig ("red", red-haired), Tort ("hooked"), Petit ("small"), Rossell ("blond"), Calvet ("balding"), etc; or jobs like Ferrer ("blacksmith"), Fuster ("carpenter"), Carnisser ("butcher"), Oller ("potter"), etc.

Among Catalan people, the use of surnames started being generalized in the 9th century.

In legal documents of the time, we see people are referred by who their father is. If the text was in Latin (even though people already spoke Catalan, Latin was still the most used language in writing), the first name would be in nominative case and the father's name in genitive case; if the text was in Catalan, it would be after the preposition "de", meaning "of" (same meaning as the cases in Latin). For example, Berenguer son of Ramon was Berengarius Raimundi in Latin and Berenguer de Ramon in Catalan.

Genitive case often ends in -is, that's why in Spanish and Aragonese you can find lots of surnames that come from a name+ez. For example: Sánchez would be the son of Sancho, Hernández of Hernán, López of Lope, González of Gonzalo, Rodríguez of Rodrigo, Martínez of Martín... Even nowadays, in Spain, 14 out of the 17 most common surnames are a name+ez! (Source)

This is not the case in Catalan. This Latin-derived surnames didn't become used. We only have 3 surnames with this origin (Peris, Sanxís, and Llopis) and they arrived to us from influence of Aragon, Castile and Navarre. Besides, neither of them is very common, unlike their Spanish equivalents. There was an exception in the Valencian Country, because some areas had a lot of Aragonese people as well as Catalan people or at least a strong Aragonese influence, so there existed more surnames related to the Aragonese ones.

From the 11th century on, the nobles started using the name of their lands as a surname, either after "de" (de Barcelona, d'Empúries...) or in adjective form (Barceló, Tarragó, Giró, Tàrrec). This started in the nobility to know who inherited what territories, but it was soon followed by the lower classes as well.

Lower class people often didn't have a territory to refer to and so they would use a name that made reference to their farmhouse, where they live, or other geographical terms. From here we get many of the most common Catalan surnames such as Riera ("stream"), Torrent ("watercourse"), Puig ("hill"), Pujol ("hill"), Vall ("valley") or Valls ("valleys"), Coma ("mountain pass"), Pomar ("apple orchard"), Vinyes ("vineyards"), Rovira ("oak tree forest"), Ribes ("shores") or simply the names of towns or areas like Solsona, Bages, Segarra, Agramunt, Vila, Canet, Cardona, Cabrera, Güell, Barberà, Cerdà...

All of this applies to men, but it worked differently for women because they weren't considered carriers of lineage in the same right as men, and were seen as under the property of a man (father or husband). In the Middle Ages, Catalan women usually had a feminine version of the father's surname (for example, if the father is Ferrer, she would be Ferrera). After getting married, women sometimes had both the father's and husband's surnames or only the husband's.

Source: Janer Torrens, Antoni (2014), "L'origen dels noms i cognoms catalans. Les arrels antroponímiques que marquen una identitat", II Congrés de la Societat d'Onomàstica i la XXVII Jornada d'Antroponímia i Toponímia de la UB. PDF.

[the-fact-site]

The name “Alfred” literally means “Elf Counsel.” The first person on record with this name was Alfred the Great, one of the early kings of England. #FACT

[frankencanon]

it's six in the morning and i haven't slept and i just realized that santa claus and saint nicholas are literally the same name. like it's not alternate names for the same dude it's literally the same name

Saint Nicholas = Sint Nicolaas = Sinter Klaas

= Santa Claus

[gruenhorn]

I own a book on German surnames from the 1920s, and one of the previous owners left a ton of homemade sticky notes for names whose meanings he never figured out. This one below is made from a newspaper clipping from Saturday, September 8th, 1923, for the name Keilhan, which the owner apparently never figured out.

What really bums me out is that for this name, and for a few others he’s stenciled in, the meanings have since been discovered. He’s got tons of these notes in the margins of this book for the numerous names he presumably never figured out, but with the help of other materials (especially with the help of the internet) I’ve been able to uncover the meanings for almost all of them. I wish I could tell the original owner what the names mean.

[bobcat-pie]

Last name etymology is cool and all of them have their own valid story, but thank god my last name Isn’t “Fuller.” 

Your great-great-great-grandfather was one of the 17 dudes in his village named Tobias, and so everyone did the perfectly normal thing of tacking his profession onto the end of his name, but his job was stamping on linen in tubs of urine. So now his entire bloodline has the closest non-medical equivalent to a literal curse and everyone knows that Grampy Tobias had piss-feet! Your last name might was well be piss-feet!!