Keenir wrote: ↑07 Feb 2018 01:31
Loki stuff
Good to know! So much for my knowledge of Norse mythology! (I admit, I've immersed myself more in Greek/Roman than any other)
And, what language are they all in, again?
well, maybe they aren't in a language? (except the personal private language of that particular god)
I mean in terms of phonotactics. Like, in the gazetteer, I'll probably have a page per deity, and I need some name for them.
In terms of their self-identification in whatever language they had prior to Mto's creation, I just kind of shrug. It's not human, and not worth really thinking about.
But at the point they started interacting with humans, they needed some collection of sounds to start identifying themselves as. And I think it's probably fair that the actual phonology of their names hasn't changed—just the phonotactics that interpret it (which has an impact on orthography). This is the problem I referred to earlier: what phonotactics are the names in?
(For a more concrete example: I'm using <Anadiel> for the goddess of Science and Women, though when brought into Situnyan phonotactics and orthography, it turns into <Anadyel>, because the diphthong represented by Entleisian <ie> doesn't exist in Situnyan, but they're content with palatalizing the /d/ represented by <d>. On the site, I'm sticking with Entleisian orthography, but I also have some grasp on Entleisian phonotactics (even if I can't explicitly articulate them); when it comes to other languages, I don't necessarily have that. But then, the question is raised: what is the
actual pronunciation of the name of that Goddess? How does she herself pronounce it when not bound by language phonotactics? Or does she actually have that independent of a language? If it's not independent of a language, then I have to somehow figure out phonotactics for languages and then fit deity names into them, which is...tricky to try to get right.)
Mind, an option is to shrug on it, and allow for the names to have changed over time, which is why they tend to be in Situnyan phonotactics—because Situnyan is the lingua franca, thank you Valya—and so even their identity is somewhat mutable over time. That just feels a little odd.
And then, these names would have been granted hundreds (thousands?) of years ago, and languages change a lot in that length of time...so how does that play in, I wonder?
As noted, this is complicated, and part of what was getting me wanting to drop polylatrism earlier; in a deity-per-nation model, it's pretty clear that the deity's name is in the (dominant) language of the nation, and that's a bit easier to manage.