Nymph Names
Yael
[jeɪ-əl] · noun Nymph
A unique member of a Nymph population with innate recognition as the de facto leader of all related nymphs, whether geographically or species-specific.
A mother nymph
Originating in the dense forests of Indola’s Nynpuna, nymphs can be found all across Endala today. Though they are far from their old-growth groves, they have adapted well to the many diverse forests of this world. In turn, their cultures have expanded and diversified to match their migration and eventual resettling.
Nymph language is widely misunderstood by other peoples as being gibberish. Indeed, its high-pitched, rapid annunciations are difficult for even the most determined pheneticists to interpret, but it is not just crude sounds. Nymph speech is a true language though its origins are instinctual.
The evolutionary origins of Nymphs are shrouded in mystery. Attempts have been made to trace their lineage back to the offshoots of the ancient Indolan ancestor, but scientifically, the changes that occured during those millenia of evolution are baffling. Though Nymphs and Indolans have the ability to create offspring, their physiological makeup is so different, that experts cannot reconstruct the means by which they may be related.
So, a new attempt to trace a line between Nymphs and Indolans was made. But this proved to be equally fruitless as the physiological approach. Linguists compared thousands of words from either language, but apart from more modern cultural mixing, there seemed to be no link between the languages either.
When all efforts lead to dead ends, one lead was discovered that changed the study entirely. Though seemingly tenuous, there was one thing that Indolan languages and Nymph chittering had in common. Names.
With some variation, most Indolan dialects from the Ghan-Rethi to Duni-Gihan language families have a connected naming convention that has endured for many centuries. This is known as Trinomial Credego. While its forms vary, the core qualifier is a cultural convention to have three names and each name to have its own social purpose.
The first of these names is qualitative. It is given to the child at any point after birth and it describes something about the infant’s condition. In the Daihain language, a common first name is Misha meaning “barley”, referring to a child with light hair or skin. In Vinut, while the names tend to much longer, they are much the same. This is the name most commonly used by family.
The second name is auspicious or earned. This is the name that varies the most between cultures. While the Kanaam consult religious leaders to determine their second name, the Daihain recieve their new name after they come of age, their name being given by a guardian who knows them well. The second name is used by outsiders of the family such as friends, lovers, and superiors.
The third name is the most ubiquitous. It is the family name, often deriving from ancient clans names or geographical regions. This name is an identifier and often used with the second name.
Nymph naming convention could not seem to be further from the Indolans, but in reality, they are strangely similar.
The most blatant difference is that Nymphs, in their natural tribal configuration, tend to go by a single name. These names seem arbitrary to researchers. They are named after animals, plants, and sounds. But there is more to it than surface level meaning.
When looking at regional Nymph names, a pattern began to emerge. Nymphs in Endala are usually displaced from their original growths with names that are sometimes dialects apart from the others in their vicinity. But looking at the few intact tribes from Dorimae and La’ai’isan, it became clear that Nymphs of the same tribes all had related names.
It begins with the ending. During a most difficult census, Nymphs of a tribe in Southern Dorimae were found to all have one thing in common: their names ended with the sound /n/. Researchers of Kilchorpolis’ High Academy scrambled to find other tribes untouched by the expansion of civilization. Their numbers were few, but several other tribes were censused and the pattern continued. History books were examined, language analyzed and compared. Finally, a link between Indolans and Nymphs were found!
Nymph names were of three parts as well. Though the names appeared simple (Susa, Ishki, Margus, Samm, Yagus), their few syllables were packed with complexity. Most of the names were words with their own meanings, Yagus, for example which means “A long time”. When explained by one of the only willing participants in the study, the Nymph described their name thusly…
“Ya is the resemblance to my Yael, it means endurance and similarity. Guh is the sound of a felled tree, to show the loss of my sisters. Sss is the sound the wind makes through the lowland reeds, it is the name of all my sisters. I received this name when I lost my green and my skin grew thick. My wisdom was noticed by the ancestors. They chose Yagus for me. “
Few other Nymphs were willing to give so detailed an answer, but with much scouring, similar connections were found. We had an answer to our question. Though not rooted in the physical world, the connection was undeniable. The pattern of the three naming system was shown to go back for thousands of years from the earliest writings of Nymph and Indolan interaction.
The story did not end all that happily. The Kilchorpolean High Academy faced resistance to the release of this information. How could it not? The Nymph population of Kilchorpolis was blatantly enslaved. They held no rights, no respect by the government, and yet, the Academy had information that suggested they were not all that different from Indolans, one of the Common Races.
They would not have it. The heads of the school were paid off, researchers resisted, but as the Academy was one of the leading Anthropological institutes in the world and there was no where else for them to go, they resigned to hiding away years of research at the expense of their neighboring Nymphs.
It was not until many years later after the mass Nymph migration out of Kilchorpolis that the study was unearthed and published, though the struggling remnants of the once great city met it with no great enthusiasm or controversy. But Nymph names and the lengths it took to understand them are not forgotten. In the Gamadu School of Society, these research papers are being presented to a new generation of students eager to create spaces for all of the races of Endala. Though the inaction of the original researchers led to the continued oppression of Nymphs in Kilchorpolis, their work will do some good in the years to come.
