Character name and its capitalisation
Nobody in my story knows the actual name of one of the characters. She calls herself 'tina. She always writes it 'tina and gets irritated if people write it Tina - it's short for something, but nobody knows what. To her, the apostrophe and the lower case "t" are important - she likes the air of mystery that it creates for herself, allowing herself to hide away part of her life.
My question: When I'm talking about her, should I always write her name as 'tina?
I want to, but it's a name, so an inner voice is telling me i should drop the apostrophe and capitalise the T when I'm saying "Tina did this" or "Tina said that". But if I start doing that then how do I decide when it should be 'tina and when it should be Tina. If I'm not careful then her name, an important part of her character, will be relegated to a throw away comment when I first introduce her and will likely make her sound much more pretensious than she actually is.
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1 answer
In David and Leigh Eddings's Malloreon series, one of the characters, a ruler, styles himself ’Zakath, with the apostrophe. The characters under his rule use the apostrophe; those who oppose him don't, if I recall correctly. So those who do and don't use it say as much about the character as the apostrophe does: do you respect (or fear) the person enough to spell his name as he wants?
It's later revealed that the apostrophe is meant to stand for "Kal," which means "King and God" (so the ruler is using an epithet attached to the country's actual god, Kal Torak). When the meaning of the apostrophe is revealed, it's done with great glee at Zakath's pretentiousness, because in this case he is pretentious.
By all means, reference your character as 'tina if it means something to her, and she can absolutely insist on it. You have a reason for it and character development behind it.
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