Suppose I wanted to make up a character in a piece of fiction who’s from another country. Suppose I researched that region, language, and culture, and found a first name that is reasonably well-used in that region/language/culture (i.e. not necessarily as common as “Chris” in America, but perhaps more used than “Aloysius”), and found a last name that is the same (not necessarily as common as “Smith”, but perhaps more used than “Obama”).
What are the odds that if I put the two together to make up the foreign name, it would sound odd somehow to those who know that region/language/culture? Are there particular regions/languages/cultures where this is more likely to happen?
I would think that if you’ve done your research, the composite name you choose wouldn’t sound strange at all. Possibly boring to a native, but probably not odd.
You mean names like Toniqua Cavendish or Mordecai Fitzpatrick?
I could see that happening. I think that there are potential pitfalls in randomly inventing a name and it would be helpful to be knowledgeable of religious and ethnic customs in a region. Go on Facebook and steal someone’s name.
I can’t give you odds, but I can tell you it happens to me pretty often - usually it indicates poor research on the part of the writer. It’s not so much strange name-lastname combinations as it is “bad” lastnames; after all, people do pull stunts like name their son Juan Ramón when their lastname is Jiménez (“the” JRJ was an important 20th century poet). I had a coworker who spelled his firstname out in full: Francisco de Javier (most people would have left it as “Javier”, “Francisco Javier”, “Francisco J.” or even “FJ”) - it looked strange until you saw that his two lastnames were “compuestos”, they had the same Something de Something structure.
There are some names which are very common in specific locations, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never encounter them elsewhere: Pilares are a dime a dozen in Saragossa, a quarter a dozen in the rest of the Hispanic world.
Some examples of “bad” lastnames I see often in fiction: the lastname Lobo exists and does mean wolf, but it isn’t Spanish, it’s Portuguese; lastnames which usually carry a “de” but which do not have it for the fictional character; “de” added to a lastname which will usually not have one…
If the work is old, ok, but nowadays it’s pretty easy to check the white pages for about any country and see if the lastname exists.
JK Rowling clearly didn’t do more than about ten seconds of research when she named her fictional Bulgarian character, Viktor Krum. Every single ethnic Bulgarian man I’ve ever met had a last name ending with “ov” or “ev”, ie, Atanasov or Dobrev. (For women, it would be Atanasova or Dobreva.) I am a little curious as to where she got that particular name, since it would be very unusual. Her description of a Bulgarian accent in English is also wildly inaccurate, FWIW.
So his her description of Hogwarts, for that matter. In real life, such institutions do not exist. I bet the people who believe in accuracy are laughing their asses off over that.
Yes, but he might be descended from immigrants. You might be equally sceptical about a fictional Frenchman with the name Nicolas Sarkozy – that’s not a proper French name!
No, schools of magic don’t exist. Bulgaria, however, does, and unlikely foreign names really are an unnecessary bit of laziness that can take you out of the story (suspension of disbelief being a powerful but fragile thing).
My own pet peeve is fictional Russian names (since that’s the language and culture I know best). Every second Hollywood or spy-novel Russian character seems to either be named after historical/literary figures (way too many Romanovs, Rasputins, Gogols and Chekhovs) or have a vaguely Slavic but gratingly un-Russian last name (Ivan Drago? Is this guy the world’s most Swedish-looking Serbian? Xenia Onatopp? What the hell ethnicity is she supposed to be?).
It’s one thing if it’s a deliberately mock-Russian name (I have no problem with Boris Badenov, or Premier Kissov from Dr. Strangelove) with a wink and a nod, but it sounds amateurish if it’s just a lack of research
and Giles/BobArrgh - such characters usually aren’t presented as immigrants, but as typical (indeed, stereotypical) representatives of their purported nation. To use the Sarkozy example, it would be like having a “French” character named Pierre Moholy-Nagy wearing a beret and a striped shirt, baguettes tucked under the arm and a Gitane dangling from his lips, with no further explanation. Vairy frenche, non?
Once I needed to make up a Bulgarian name for a psychology study and decided to ask my friend who had recently been to Bulgaria for one. She recalled that she had a friend X who was the son of Mrs -cheva. So plainly his name was X -cheva. Thankfully no one in the study knew Bulgarian naming conventions…
For the same project i needed a Sunni Arab name. I mashed together a first name and a last name from two members of Hussein’s cabinet who seemed similar demographically. If the result was somehow wrong, no one noticed.
Well, if we want to fanwank this: Viktor Krum goes to a school more dedicated to the Dark Arts, which is also associated with blood purity; and it’s often explained how very few families of pure bloodlines are still around (and a lot of in-breeding that occurs as result). So if Viktors father cared a lot about pure blood, and the only witch he found was in Bulgaria… then he would move there.
Also, wizards don’t live in the same society as Muggles do, they live seperatly, so the bad economic situation and infrastructure of a former East Bloc country would be less important to them than to the normal Bulgarians.
Given that Bulgaria has had a better history than the current state suggests, probably Krums parents are sitting on some old castle and thinking of the old times?
Given the opportunity of research with the internet, I suggest the easiest way is to search for full names in that other country and see which ones are common, because searching seperatly and combining can indeed be a pitfal.
Although taking an extremly common name is a problem, too: in his “Dead Zone”, Stephen King named the main male character … John Smith, called “Johnny”. Every time I hear/ read this, I give a small start and think “That’s a placeholder King put there and forgot to go back and insert a real name.” because John Smith is similar to John Doe. Surely there are people in real life with that name, but for a fictional character, I wouldn’t use it unless there’s a very very good reason (and no, Mr. King, that you want to write about an “everyman” isn’t one, I think.)
But you can’t go by that. My own real last name is Polish, but doesn’t end in “-wicz” or “-ski” or have any unlikely consonant juxtapositions. People mistake it for an English surname all the time, but a Pole wouldn’t think it unlikely. Similarly, not all Armenian names end in “-ion”, “-ian”, or “-yan”*. The famed Canadian photographer Karsh was of Armenian extraction, and his name isn’t altered or shortened.
*Nor are all names that end in those letters Armenian. For years I thought that the Russian general Bagration was Armenian, but I’ve learned better. And there’s that famous non-Armenian from outer space, Lando Kalrissian.
I’m not familiar with Bulgarian naming conventions, but I’ll bet they don’t invariably end in “-ov” or “-ev”, which is totally relecvant to the discussion. Not all Irish names begin with “O’” and not all Scottish names begin with “Mc-”, “Mac-” or “M’”.
About the only invariable rule I’m familiar with is that males Sikhs have the last name “Singh”.
Oh, okay, you’re totally right. I lived in Bulgaria for over two years and have met thousands of Bulgarians, but now that you mention it, not all Irish names start with “O’”.
So yeah, Krum is actually a really ordinary Bulgarian name, I have no idea what I was talking about.
ETA: p.s. go back to what I originally said - every single ethnic Bulgarian man I’ve ever met had a name that ended with “ov” or “ev”. I didn’t say it was “invariable” or that it could never, ever happen. My point was that “Krum” would be an extremely unusual name. Maybe that’s what Rowling was going for, I don’t know.
As the first reference I cite shows, “Krum” was the name of an early Bulgarian ruler. I suspect that, while not common, it’s also not an impossible Bulgarian name. Rowling certainly did at least five minutes of research: