Tolkien gets a lot of credit for the work that he put into crafting the sounds of names (“Ungoliant” sounds evil, “Galadriel” sounds beautiful, etc.) but as far as I’m concerned, his best named character ever was Bilbo’s dad. Bungo is boring from the first syllable. Amazing.
And Belladonna sounds exactly like the name of someone who would start some shit.
Tag: names
I don’t know who first spelled the name as “Guinevere,” but I’m forever thankful that it’s the form in most common use, because other options include “Guanhumara” “Guennuuar” “Gahunmare” and “Wenneuereia”
thanks to whichever medieval person decided it was time to stop calling the queen by random horse noises
i’ll never understand why we don’t call countries the names they actually call themselves
like, i know this is a weeaboo-sounding example, but let’s start with Japan. They call themselves Nippon or Nihon depending on… i guess, the speaker’s accent??? or their level of formality while speaking??? I dunno. But we still called them Zipangu for like a few hundred years. And now we call them Japan.
All because Marco Polo asked someone in China about that island over there and they said “oh that’s Cipangu” and Marco Polo was like “Oh, Zipangu, cool.” And then he went back to Italy and said “Y’ALL THERE’S THIS DOPE-ASS ISLAND CALLED ZIPANGU” and people back in Italy were like “An island called Giappone? Dope.”
And this pattern of people mishearing people kept repeating until we got to “Japan.”
And we still call them Japan even though we know better. Because fuck you, Marco Polo asked the wrong person 500 years ago and misheard them and we’re sticking to that, I guess.
that was literally just the world’s worst game of telephone
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