- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Exigents: Out of the Ashes and a little bit in Across the Eight Directions' Uluiru section for Aurora. Also a very small additional amount of information about Aurora in Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course.
General Exalted Thread
I believe the majority is in Exigents, specifically the Sovereigns for Aurora, and Umbrals for Nebiru. AT8D may have some extra Aurora info in Uluriu, though I'm not 100% sure.
- Location
- Right Where I Am
Thank you both. The big issue was knowing that at least a bit was in more than just one book.
drearyArchon
Chaos Lord Chaos
- Location
- The Floor of Social Sciences
A question about the names in Exalted. Is it assumed that names are a lot more succinct in their In-Universe language and they only become unwieldy because of translation conventions?
Like, if someone names their child Radiant Glory of the Unconquered Sun, is that just the local equivalent of naming a kid Gabriel?
Like, if someone names their child Radiant Glory of the Unconquered Sun, is that just the local equivalent of naming a kid Gabriel?
- Location
- Bretonnia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What actually is the naming convention in Exalted? I probably just missed it, but couldn't find anything that spoke of it in depth in the corebook.
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
If someone's translated name is as cumbersome as "Radiant Glory of the Unconquered Sun", I'm going to assume it's just as cumbersome in their native language – because real people's names range in length from things like "Huang Li" to things like "Sripathi Panditaradhyula Balasubrahmanyam".
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
There's a lot of naming conventions in Exalted. It's a BEEG setting.
If an alien asked you what the most common naming convention was for humans we'd probably shrug and say "words that used to mean something important but we've forgotten most of them" and/or "depends on the language"
Same deal.
If an alien asked you what the most common naming convention was for humans we'd probably shrug and say "words that used to mean something important but we've forgotten most of them" and/or "depends on the language"
Same deal.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"Radiant Glory of the Unconquered Sun" would be incredibly ostentatious and hubristic almost everywhere. Don't name a character that unless you want people to raise their eyebrows. It's the kind of name where I would assume that's something someone decided to change their name to after they Exalted or something, rather than what someone actually named a child.
Most people in the setting who have that style of like, "short phrase name" just stick with "adjective noun". Knife Dancer, Radiant Sky, Sad Ivory, Silent Smile, White Sage. This is the most common naming scheme for peasants from the Realm, as well as for people from places like An-Teng, and you can find characters named like this in various parts of the setting. It is the most distinctive like, "house style" for character names that Exalted has.
There are a variety of naming conventions from across the setting, though. Dynasts tend to have their house name followed by their given name, both being derived from a (loose) consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel(etc.) system. Tepet Ejava, Ragara Banoba, Peleps Deled.
The Lintha have complex, formulaic naming scheme and will get mad at you if you use the wrong parts of it to refer to them. Uluiruans seem to have simple names of one or two syllables attached to a sobriquet. Nobles from Randan use "Clan Name u Given Name". In Autocthonia, Alchemicals are given names that evoke their function or important traits about them. There's no one naming scheme in Exalted.
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grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
It should be noted that Christendom is fucking peculiar in this regard for having quite so many of those.
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
Eh I'd replace 'Christendom' with 'the English-speaking world' given that we keep borrowing words from other languages many of which make no sense when placed next to each other.
But I was also thinking of things like how many words for animals or places mean some variation of the phrase "I have no idea what you just said". Or places that have the same name as the generic thing. A river called 'the river', or how most country names mean 'the land X group of people resides'. Or like how 'Smith' is the most common surname in English because surnames often came from occupations, and blacksmiths were the least likely people to die in a war (or so I hear).
We do this a LOT.
drearyArchon
Chaos Lord Chaos
- Location
- The Floor of Social Sciences
So is "The Power of God" but that doesn't stop all the Gabriels out there.
Still, point taken.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That isn't relevant. People named Gabriel are not named "the Power of God", they are named Gabriel. The Etymology is a neat fact, it's not really the basis for Biblical names as a practice.
Meanwhile, in our actual example, we're not talking about a name that comes from a religious figure filtered through half a dozen different languages, we're talking about literally going around calling yourself "Radiant Glory of the Unconquered Sun". Exalted names are not typically taken to secretly be a different, normal name when you call someone like that. That way when a character has a really ostentatious name, you get to lean into it and have fun dropping the whole thing. This is also like, part of the fun of Abyssals casting off their names and taking up these dramatic titles -- those tend to stand out as well.
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
I said Christendom, and I meant it. None of the following names:
John, Jan, Jane, Janez, Jean (male and female), Jhon, Joan, Giovanni, Hans, Juan, João, Johan/Johann, Johanan, Johannes, Jonne, Jovan, Juhani, Yahya, Yohannes, Ivan, Iven, Ifan, Ian, Ioan, Siôn, Siân, Sioned, Siobhan, Seán, Shane, Sinéad, ...
mean anything at all in the languages they're associated with... except one.
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I think the longer phrase names are meant to emulate professional/fighting names introduced to English speakers via dubbed martial arts movies.
I'm not familiar enough with traditional martial arts practices to know if those are a real thing or if they are as unwieldy or ostentatious as the translations sometimes suggest.
There is a joke in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon where a martial artist has an overly impressive name who turns out not to merit it, which might suggest that renaming yourself something silly is a thing that happens.
I'm not familiar enough with traditional martial arts practices to know if those are a real thing or if they are as unwieldy or ostentatious as the translations sometimes suggest.
There is a joke in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon where a martial artist has an overly impressive name who turns out not to merit it, which might suggest that renaming yourself something silly is a thing that happens.
A lot of names in the Anglophone sphere, here in our present day, are picked for their aesthetic appeal or euphony or familial tradition, be they patronymics and matronymics, or from further afield in the family tree. Yet the importance invested in personal names is bound to vary by culture, time, and place.
Exalted does the same thing, as @Gazetteer remarks above, different in-setting groups have different norms and rules when it comes to this sort of thing. Zhaojun citizens all have a marker of their ethnicity as the first component of their name, for instance: Zhao, Mei, Bai and so on and so forth.
Personally I consider this a positive, it's an invitation for you to consider what your character's name says about them and their culture, and perhaps the people who named them. This things can be plastic as well, nothing stops a character from changing their name in response to some event (like Exaltation), or taking courtesy and style names for their peers to use, and the sobriquets and epithets you pick up add further colour and detail to the picture.
I am reminded of a passage by Alex McAuley, when he wrote about Seleucid naming conventions, but starts with a more general review of Greek onomastics:
Exalted does the same thing, as @Gazetteer remarks above, different in-setting groups have different norms and rules when it comes to this sort of thing. Zhaojun citizens all have a marker of their ethnicity as the first component of their name, for instance: Zhao, Mei, Bai and so on and so forth.
Personally I consider this a positive, it's an invitation for you to consider what your character's name says about them and their culture, and perhaps the people who named them. This things can be plastic as well, nothing stops a character from changing their name in response to some event (like Exaltation), or taking courtesy and style names for their peers to use, and the sobriquets and epithets you pick up add further colour and detail to the picture.
I am reminded of a passage by Alex McAuley, when he wrote about Seleucid naming conventions, but starts with a more general review of Greek onomastics:
Remember that any concept has to occupy, minimally, one syllablle, and something like 'unconquered' is almost certainly two - you're looking at least five syllables here, unless you mean 'Unconquered Sun' as specifically the god in which case sure, get to shortening things
The most likely reason to be named that without doing it to yourself is to be descended from a long line of priest-kings who claim direct descent from Sol, then your personal name is Radiant Glory, which can parse as a far shorter 'Yirong d' Sol' or something like that
Blaque
Resident Catblob
- Location
- SLC UT
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
That's how it is to me at least. Like, you have names IRL that look like Exalted ones. You can ahve Amber Smith, Jasmine Walker, or whatever.
Like, a character in a manga I just read was 星川雫 (Hosikawa Shizuku). Which means Star River Drop literally. And while folks might comment on a name like that, ultimately to my reading (and as I learned Japanese, just kind of familiarity with the language) is just another name like the English ones I noted above.
And you can have names like mine which translates to something like Rich King Castle and Son of the Wreath of Victory. That it's a generic ass Richard, a Spanish name of a place, and a Son of SOmeone in English is because I'm use to English.
Real ones know that sometimes, it's just abbreviations. Like my first name is a shortened form of, in my language, as Useful Speech but has no meaning in of itself unless I tell people about it since it's just something my dad came up with.
So what I'm saying is just to name that guy Ragotus
So what I'm saying is just to name that guy Ragotus
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The reason why my name is recognisably a contemporary English name (or, realistically, a slightly dated English name) is not because people wanted to name babies "Foreign Woman", it's because of a story about God killing a girl with lightning one time.
It does not really make a lot of sense to name your character something extremely flowery and ostentatious and then expect this to be parsed by other characters as just secretly an unremarkable name, unless you have an established naming practice. You cannot, reasonably, call your character something like "Radiant Glory of the Unconquered Sun" and then expect this to just be treated like "Mike" or something, unless you're very specifically in a part of the setting where names like this are normal instead of incredibly ornate and conspicuous -- for most of the setting, it is the latter. It's the kind of shit that's going to raise a lot of eyebrows basically anywhere, which one of the Exalted can get away with because they just sometimes do things like that with a straight face.
It does not really make a lot of sense to name your character something extremely flowery and ostentatious and then expect this to be parsed by other characters as just secretly an unremarkable name, unless you have an established naming practice. You cannot, reasonably, call your character something like "Radiant Glory of the Unconquered Sun" and then expect this to just be treated like "Mike" or something, unless you're very specifically in a part of the setting where names like this are normal instead of incredibly ornate and conspicuous -- for most of the setting, it is the latter. It's the kind of shit that's going to raise a lot of eyebrows basically anywhere, which one of the Exalted can get away with because they just sometimes do things like that with a straight face.
- Location
- Ottawa
This conversation makes me wonder about the etymology of Exalted names. Does Chejop Kejak mean something in some long-dead language? Is Tepet Arada named after some figure from Immaculate scripture, whose name has become so commonplace that nobody thinks about its original meaning? Are immortals always a little bit out of step with the way naming practices change over the centuries?
That aside, I don't like the idea of treating the phrase-names as the meanings of normal names. Especially for Abyssals; I think the setting would lose something if Maiden of the Mirthless Smile translated to something like Virginia Dolores Belcher.
And going the other way...my given names technically mean something like Horse-Loving Warrior. But I don't call myself that, and if I turned up in an RPG I wouldn't be called that. I'd feel like it was vaguely false advertising if I was. (My surname's meaning is uncertain, so I left it out.)
That aside, I don't like the idea of treating the phrase-names as the meanings of normal names. Especially for Abyssals; I think the setting would lose something if Maiden of the Mirthless Smile translated to something like Virginia Dolores Belcher.
And going the other way...my given names technically mean something like Horse-Loving Warrior. But I don't call myself that, and if I turned up in an RPG I wouldn't be called that. I'd feel like it was vaguely false advertising if I was. (My surname's meaning is uncertain, so I left it out.)
- Pronouns
- she/her
It's covered in the most detail in Crucible of Legend page 28 and Exalted: Essence page 29.
Now I'm thinking about Tradgedeigh names in the context of Exalted.
What is the Realm equivalent to Reneesme?
What is the Realm equivalent to Reneesme?
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
*shrug* My name means 'beloved renowned-for-battle fort town' across three different languages.
"You told me to pick the worst name I could come up with"
"I DIDN'T THINK YOU'D ACTUALLY DO IT!! oh for the love of... if the dragons have any mercy at all she won't Exalt and this will only last a century-"
>Later that same century
"Oh hey V'neef Exalted."
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
- Location
- Ottawa
And wouldn't you find it incredibly weird if a French (or whatever, assuming that isn't one of the languages in question) RPG featuring you (pretend you're famous somehow) made your name into a French translation of that phrase?
I think phrase-names should stay phrases and names that just have meanings should stay names.