Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

66%
+2 −0
Q&A How can I make names more distinctive without making them longer?

Another problem with this system is how the brain reading English doesn't require spelling to be correct, especially if the word has 4 or more letters. Basically, it's entirely possible to read th...

posted 5y ago by hszmv‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T11:42:50Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/44623
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar hszmv‭ · 2019-12-08T11:42:50Z (over 4 years ago)
Another problem with this system is how the brain reading English doesn't require spelling to be correct, especially if the word has 4 or more letters. Basically, it's entirely possible to read the intended misspelling word so long as the first and last letters are in the correct place and the letters in between are disordered. You can search online for examples that demonstrate this effect, and it's not something that is ruled based so much as how your brain processes information... Because you have lots of names that start with one of 5-6 letters and have a handful of letters between the end. This is even more troublesome as the names end on vowel sounds too. I would avoid repatition of middle letters and ending with vowels to help this move along.

I'd also like your thoughts on this, but as mentioned, you don't have many Y vowel names, though Y is rarely a Vowel in English if it starts the word, to the best of my knowledge. Y isn't the only "Sometimes" vowel in English language. For example, the Letter W is sometimes a vowel as well, though only when preceding another Vowel such as in Now, Cow, How, Vowel (hehe) and the second instance in Wow. It's also a vowel in loan words from Welsh, so you might be able to find some Welsh names where this occurse (it's important that you look up what a Welsh "W" sounds like on a IPA chart and then make sure the names duplicate that sound in the leading W. I'm not sure it counts in these instances in the Welsh Language. But, a few Welsh names will definitely stand out.).

Finally, made up names or very obscure names (all of your examples are either one of the two and I can't tell which) will need some extra security to ensure it's different, though similar leading letters can show a trend (For example, all names either start with an A rather than a Vowel, or they all start with a similar sound.). For example, in Star Trek, a general rule was that all Vulcan Males names started with an S and ended with a K and contained five letters total (Spock, Sarek, Sybok) and all Vulcan Female names Started with a T' followed by a short 3-4 letter set (usually a T'P T'Pringa, T'Pau, though). Though both genders had names that loosley followed the opposite gender rules (female Saavik from Films and male Tuvok from Voyager). While very limited, there are some real life languages with a short list of names (Latin/Roman names and Japanese Names tend to have rather short lists as well). Other systems have a broad range of names, but the traditional rules tend to limit the names. For example, Irish naming conventions traditionally hold that the first born child of a gender will be named such that [Father's Father/Mother's First Name] [Mother's Father/Mother's First Name] [Surname]. The second child of that gender would be a reversed order using the mother's parent for the first name and father's parent for second name. Presumably this would use middle names for children 3 and 4. This isn't always followed if the grandfathers are both Sean or if the name sounds terrible, but it did help to narrow a very broad list of traditional names.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-04-15T16:30:27Z (almost 5 years ago)
Original score: 6