Duh. (What's in a name)

[auronlu]

Square's slightly off-kilter yet apt use of names amuses me -- contrariwise, there's also the extremely random Laguna and Irvine, which happen to be the two closest cities to mine. Methinks somebody took a couple of darts to a map of California and/or chose them under the "Let's pick names that are barely pronounceable to native Japanese speakers!" method that spawned Zell, Quistis, Squall, and Loire.

But I digress, as usual.

Point. Here it is? Ah yes.

Auron = "gold". No, actually, Aurum = gold, and Auron is a Latin word with Greek ending tacked onto it.

I assume everyone knows what his name means, and then I suddenly realize that not everyone gets Latin shoved through their pores in school anymore. So, just in case that had never clicked, there you are.

Why am I not finishing writing this chapter? Argh.

Comments

[rustehroll.livejournal.com]

Canis et in horto is all I can (barely) remember from Gr. 7 latin. that an "Ehu" means oh dear? It was in this story about Hecules. A lion bites him and he went "EHU!"

Y'know, if a lion bit me I'd be more like "OMFGOMFGOMFGOMFGOMFGOMFGWAHCRY SANTA I WAS GOOD I SWEAR I SWEAR" as opposed to something as lamentably tame as "oh dear."

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

est.

Eheu is often translated as "Alas". The problem is most of our Latin is literary or poetic, and the part that isn't is really hard to translate because we don't have any primers on Latin swearing, and/or it's not generally revealed to students until you hit graduate school.

The Golden Ass is love. It's a Roman mythology handbook stitched together by pornography. The main character gets turned into a donkey early on and STILL manages to have sex with at least one batch of eunuchs at one point, unless I'm misremembering that scene. People keep lying around after having sex and saying, "mmm, that reminds me of the myth about..." Strangely enough, it's the only Roman novel that survived to the present day in its entirity, meaning that generations of medieval monks must have copied and recopied it. Probably on the sheet hidden under the sheet of vellum where they were copying out their hymns. "Oh, hello, Father, yes, the illumination work is proceeding, but slowly."

Er, anyway, hello little fluffy tangent! *pats into place*

[rustehroll.livejournal.com]

"Oh, hello, Father, yes, the illumination work is proceeding, but slowly."

XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDd
Oh that made my goddamn day.

I have to cry and laugh now.

[muggy-mountain.livejournal.com]

More on Final Fantasy names/trivia.

Grabbed from wikipedia: "Shin-Ra" is written with the Japanese kanji 神羅. The individual kanji mean "god"/"divine" and "snare"/"net"/"silk". The "Ra" is also often used to represent Rome.

This page http://www.ffcompendium.com/h/nchara.shtml#10 also provides some interesting possible leads, though I am not certain how accurate. :)

Also, http://www.answers.com/topic/hymn-of-the-fayth .

As far as writing goes, take all the time you need, but know you have at least one patiently waiting for the next chapter. :)

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

I love all the sun/moon symbolism! Neat. I bet most of that is pretty accurate. I had noticed Greek/Latin Aura "breeze, wind" or Auré "light, upper air" or Aurora "dawn" as well, but I'm not sure if those are correct echoes.

I think the -um got switched to -on because it's just easier to say words ending in -on. There's a lot of Greek/Latin crossover names in the series. (Kiros is another that comes to mind.)

[muggy-mountain.livejournal.com]

You know, it is posts like these that make me feel slightly more comfortable in my geekiness that looked up this game on a few scholarly journal databases. :)

And yes, there are articles out there. A few.

(Apologies if you get this five times...Livejournal has been behaving strangely on my end.)