For this article, I’m confining the discussion to names of European or Slavic origin and hope that covers a broad range of the requirements for this community. Other cultures certainly have their own sets of historical constraints, but I’ve not done the research to be able to present them here.

It’s a Matter of Time . . .

. . . and place and language . . . and don’t forget religion.  

Some names seem to have been with us in more or less the same form for more than a millennium. Names like John, Phillip, Mary, Samuel, Margaret, Peter—and their equivalents in other languages—have been in use since at least the Middle Ages. This most likely stems from the Judeo-Christian heritage of the geographic area in question.

Other names that were common in medieval times, for example, have either disappeared or evolved into a more modern spelling and/or pronunciation. These days, one doesn’t run into guys named Fulk or Drogo or Basewin, or women called Hermesent, Geva, or Estrilda. However, if you meet a man named Everett, it’s likely that his medieval namesake was called Evrart or Everard. And today’s Evelyn might be a family name handed down from a 12th-century ancestor called Auelin or Avelina.

One might argue that place and language are just two different ways to reference the same influence, but I suggest there’s a distinction. Language is the easy one. Let’s take a few of those old but commonly used names:

These are just examples from some of the so-called “modern” languages. Depending on where your story is set, you may need to find names from more uncommon languages, such as Breton, Welsh, Gaelic, Basque, Catalan, and the like. Some might be equivalents such as Dafydd (David in Welsh) or Joan (John in Catalan) while others may be unique to the language such as Kenza, a Cornish feminine name, or Corentin, a Breton masculine name.

If your novel is set during the period of the Roman Republic and early Empire and your characters are Romans, the names will be Latin, of course. And the masculine names will be what we consider straightforward—a given name plus a family name, as in Marcus Aurelius. But what about the women? They would be known by the feminine form of the family name—the daughter of Marcus Aurelius would be called Aurelia. And what if there was more than one daughter? The lesser one would be Aurelia Minor. Usually, this applied to the younger daughter, but other criteria of “importance” were sometimes used. In the later Empire, there was more variety in women’s names, but some families still followed the older tradition.

In some places (the Slavic tradition, in particular), all children carry their father’s given name as a patronymic. (This bears some similarity to the pattern in the Anglo-Saxon tradition where the son of a man named Richard came to be called John Richardson.) The patronymic, however, is not the surname but a second given name, as in Pasternak’s Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago – Yuri, son of Andrei, of the family Zhivago. It was quite common for an individual to be addressed by the given name plus the patronymic, so this is important to consider in creating dialogue.

Don’t forget, too, that in Russian, surnames have a gender-specific form. Alexei Karenin, but Anna Karenina. Ivan Petrov, but Ekaterina Petrova. Patronymics, too, are gender specific. So Alexander Petrov’s children would be Ivan Alexandrovich Petrov and Ekaterina Alexandrovna Petrova.

When Europeans began migrating to the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, their tradition of names migrated with them, so 17th-century French names would also be found in eastern Canada and in Louisiana. And don’t forget later migrations that brought, for example, German traditions to Texas. For stories set in the US, in particular, ancestry becomes a fifth dimension to consider. Its influence on given names tends to dissipate, however, after the first generation for many immigrant communities, but the surnames, of course, remain.

And then there’s that religion element. In the Roman Catholic tradition, saints’ names have always been popular. When the Protestant Reformation came along, a new trend in names emerged: virtue names that parents, presumably, hoped would shape the characters of the children to whom they were given. Women might be called Charity or Comfort or Patience or Verity. A man might be named Creed, Justice, Increase, or Valiant. Such names were particularly popular with Puritans, but their use wasn’t limited to the Puritan sect. Oddly, there seem to be far more virtue names for women than for men.

Finding Appropriate Names

It doesn’t take much Googling to come up with multiple sources for names for the era and setting of your story. A search string with time and place will turn up numerous lists for you to choose from, many with explanations of the meaning of the names and some that are actually extracts from government or church rolls of the time. When looking for medieval Nordic names, I even found a site that explained how names of both people and places were constructed in that part of the world, so you could actually build your own name.

In the foregoing discussion, I’ve focused more on given names than on surnames, but the internet sources for period—and setting—appropriate surnames are equally plentiful. Don’t forget that the form of surnames in some places may be related to a person’s station in society. In Britain, for example, after 1066, aristocrats most likely had Norman surnames such as “de Beaumont” or “de Carteret” while the common folk or peasants would have surnames from the Anglo-Saxon tradition; and the use of “von” or “zu” in German names indicates nobility. (For those interested in such details, “de,” “von,” and “zu” are called nobiliary particles—another internet research rabbit hole you can go down.)

In summary, know your characters first: when and where they lived, their beliefs, their station in life. Then go in search of wonderful names for them. One thing is certain: you’ll find a wealth of choices and likely some new favorites to bestow on the characters you love so that they feel like truly authentic inhabitants of your story world.

Pamela Taylor’s inspiration for her first book turned out to be that final straw that pushed her to leave the corporate world behind for the world of words and imagination. Now an author and an editor, she loves helping others polish their stories almost as much as she enjoys writing her own. She’s a member of the DFW Writers Workshop and the Editorial Freelancers Association and is in her third year on the judges panel for the Ink & Insights Contest. You can learn more about her books at secondsonchronicles.com, and about her editing services at editing4you.com.

The post Creating Authentic Details: Character Names appeared first on DIY MFA.

It’s just between you and me

Secrets are as old as time. As soon as humans realized they could gain an advantage by keeping others from finding out what they knew, they started devising methods to protect their knowledge. And when they needed to share that knowledge with an ally, they began developing techniques to transmit it in secret.

Among the earliest were pictographic techniques—either hidden in graphical representation of language or in drawings. Eventually, men developed locks and keys. Secrets could be protected in locked chests or boxes. Over time, the locks and keys grew ever more complex and often included booby traps that could harm anyone trying to break into them. Puzzles could also hide secrets (think complex puzzle boxes that could contain hidden messages or contraband). Invisible writing—using citrus juice or milk as ink—meant that the recipient had to know to expose the paper to heat to reveal what was written.

But boxes and chests and paintings and physical things are bulky. What if the protection of the secret could be embedded in the message itself?

Encryption

The first thing that will pop into many minds is protecting the data on your electronic devices. But the roots of modern encryption are far older than you might think. One of the earliest recorded uses of encryption techniques is the Caesar Cipher, so named because of its use by Julius Caesar to send secret messages during his military campaigns. It’s a simple alphabetic substitution cipher in which the receiver need only know the sender’s offset to decode the message. Julius Caesar was known to use an offset of three, meaning that the letter “D” would be substituted for “A” in the coded message.

Alphabetic substitution is something even children do at play when they randomly assign one letter to stand in for another and then write messages in code. The problem with this random approach is that both sender and receiver must be in possession of identical tables showing the assignments—and must take extraordinary measures to safeguard those tables lest they fall into the wrong hands. (This method is actually the basis for the one-time pads used in modern espionage, but that’s a discussion for a different genre of writing.)

Caesar’s simplification meant that sender and receiver could store the key in their heads, eliminating the additional risk of safeguarding code tables (perhaps not the easiest thing to do during a military campaign) or transmitting the key by a courier who could be waylaid and bribed or coerced into parting with the information. The substitution table could be constructed on the fly.

So Caesar might have sent a message to his field commanders that read “Wrpruurz zh furpp wkh Uxelfrq” and when each commander decoded the message, he would learn “Tomorrow we cross the Rubicon.”

So for any tale set in western civilization (and that would include the Middle East, given the extent of the Roman Empire) from about 55 BCE onward, it’s quite legitimate for your characters to send and receive coded messages using this technique.

And, of course, your characters are not restricted to using the same key (three) chosen by Caesar. They need only pick a key that is used consistently between sender and recipient.

Sometime around 800 CE, an Arab mathematician writing about code breaking techniques included references to polyalphabetic ciphers. These ciphers use a table such as the one shown here and the key is the letter of the row or column used for the encryption.

With such a scheme, one can actually embed the key within the message so that it’s not necessary for the recipient to know the key in advance. This makes messages somewhat safer because a different key can be used for each message. The recipient need only construct a table like the one shown to enable decoding.  And it’s also possible to change the key in the middle of the message. Though the polyalphabetic cipher is mathematically no more secure than a simple substitution cipher, using different keys each time means that the code breaker’s job isn’t “one and done.”

So how would this type of encryption be used in practice? Let’s say you chose “F” as your key.  Then you’d use the row beginning with “F” for the encoded text and the top row for the clear text. So a general’s simple message to his commanders—“Attack their right flank”—would be encoded as “Ffyyfhp ymjnw wnlmy kqfsp.” The first letter of the message tells the recipient what key to use and is a throw-away, with the letters following comprising the first actual word of the message.

Now let’s say a spy in the field needs to send a somewhat more complex message to his master, but wants to make it as secure as possible because lots of lives depend on it, so he varies the key within the message. The coded message would read:  Txgxfr lmkhxk matg px lahnzal. Cvgp ujkru uckn kp hkxg fcau. Hvyklyz hyl ahrl uv wypzvulyz. The recipient would start with a key of “T” and decode the first sentence to “Enemy stronger than we thought.” Then when he hits the next word (Cvgp), that decodes to “Jcnw,” which isn’t a word, so he knows that the “C” is a new key and decodes the second sentence to “Ten ships sail in five days.” The same thing happens with the next word, so the recipient uses the “H” key to decode “Orders are take no prisoners.”

If you look carefully at the construction of the table, you’ll see it doesn’t matter if you work row-wise or column-wise for either the encoding or decoding—the results will be identical. And it also doesn’t matter what language you use because the table can be constructed with whatever alphabet is appropriate for that language, and characters with accents or diacritical marks can also be included.

Given that the Arab conquest of the Iberian peninsula began in 717 and Arab knowledge began to make its way into the rest of Europe over the 9th and 10th centuries, tales set in the late middle ages or after could certainly incorporate these techniques. Tales set in the Arab world could use them much earlier.

There’s no doubt that, with either of these techniques, people would often double—or even triple—encode messages. So if Caesar’s coded message had read “Zusuxxuc ck ixuss znk Xahoint,” that would decode to “Wrpruurz zh furpp wkh Uxelfrq,” and finally, “Tomorrow we cross the Rubicon.” Mathematically, multiple encodings of this type are no more secure than a single one. But at least having to decode multiple times would slow the code breaker down just a little—possibly adding to the dramatic tension and/or the characterization of the code breaker.

Many other encryption techniques developed over time—perhaps a good topic for a follow-on article.

Pamela Taylor’s inspiration for her first book turned out to be that final straw that pushed her to leave the corporate world behind for the world of words and imagination. Now an author and an editor, she loves helping others polish their stories almost as much as she enjoys writing her own. She’s a member of the DFW Writers Workshop and the Editorial Freelancers Association and is in her second year on the judges panel for the Ink & Insights Contest. You can learn more about her books at secondsonchronicles.com, and about her editing services at editing4you.com.

The post Creating Authentic Details: Keeping Secrets appeared first on DIY MFA.