Resolved, thanks! No more replies needed. Ethnicities in my SFF novel

indianroads

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I know OP has asked for no more replies here, but I do have to ask: after ten thousand years, what does "Kenyan cultural heritage" mean? Unless you're suggesting she shouldn't use a Kenyan-sounding name without incorporating modern Kenyan sensibilities into her story.

After ten thousand years, what would remain of any of our heritages? How many here have surnames dating from the Neolithic?
 

benbenberi

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After ten thousand years, what would remain of any of our heritages? How many here have surnames dating from the Neolithic?

Yes. After ten thousand years I would expect that there would be a completely different set of ethnicities, with their own cultural attributes & baggage and potentially associated phenotypes (if they were physically or socially isolated from each other).

10,000 years ago northern Europeans were hunter-gatherers as dark as south Indians today, and no human adults anywhere could drink cow milk. We all, obviously, speak languages derived ultimately from the languages spoken 10,000 years ago, but no one has yet been able to recover a single word of an actual 10,000 yo language. At even 5000 years ago, within the historical record, the languages are pretty much entirely dead dead dead and the names are completely alien to the modern world.

So using contemporary names as a signpost for ethnicity & culture pinned to the 21C in a setting 10,000 years in the future would force me to suspend my disbelief high enough to kill it. Unless there's an in-story explanation presented up front. (Cf Cordwainer Smith's "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," a wonderful far-future story that starts out by stating they're having a moment of cultural re-discovery/re-creation of the past and now we're all French.)

"She was not the girl I meant to seek,
I met her by the merest chance.
She did not speak the French of France
But the surded French of Martinique."
 
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eqb

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Oh, and, when i googled Najiwe, it means something like between matter and spirit, with a hefty dose of leadership potential, and that's Alphonse pretty much.

But we'll see. It's not a Kenyan name AFAIK, just based on Swahili words for 'by stone' which is how he accesses the Akashic library.

I know you've made your decision, but for anyone else reading here...

Google tells me that Alphonse isn't a Latino name. It's primarily a French name, but also used a lot in Italy and Belgium, which might account for readers' reactions. I'd also be leery of cobbling together a last name from dictionary definitions when there are perfectly good names used by various languages in Kenya. (Though a writer could do something with a character wanting to connect with the long-ago, but only having a dictionary at hand.)
 

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Alphonse became a popular name for Catholic children because of the saint. Saint Alphonsus Luguori is a "modern" saint, born in 1696, and died in 1787.
 

paddismac

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Alphonse became a popular name for Catholic children because of the saint. Saint Alphonsus Luguori is a "modern" saint, born in 1696, and died in 1787.
derail// This gave me a shiver down my spine... I had a nun during my elementary school days, Sister Liguori, the thought of whom, to this day, makes me cringe in abject terror. :scared://derail
 

Woollybear

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Here's the first Alfonso that came up in a google image search.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M...wNDgxODk1OQ@@._V1_UY317_CR3,0,214,317_AL_.jpg

(I used a different spelling here for reasons that are not important. Alphonse pulls up Alphonse Elric, a cartoon.)

Alphonse is not white in my book. That is all. ( lols And it shouldn't even matter!!!!! OMG this is so ridiculous. It is a book about carbon in the atmosphere and the sixth mass extinction on Earth. And it's not set on Earth.)

The 10,000 year thing is not mentioned in the story at all. It's in my head, along with 90% of the unwritten world building, for the sake of future books. No one reading this book knows it.

Thank you for all the responses! This thread is going in interesting directions, but my needs have been met. You all may continue to discuss at your leisure as you prefer.

(But, lol again, as long as we're on the topic, in terms of philosophical considerations, a straight extrapolation backward makes very little sense. Let's say we are all cybernetic within 100 years. Language could then potentially (hypothetically, theoretically) remain entirely static for ten thousand years. Evolution (biological or otherwise) does not move in a straight line or at a constant speed. It depends entirely on selective pressures and fitness.)

Thanks guys! Your thoughts have been very helpful.
 
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Jennie

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People tell me 'everyone sounds white' probably because of the euro-derived names. I'm thinking about mixing the names up a little bit. .This morning, I added/swapped names from Asia, Africa, India to see what I thought. I'm ambivalent. For example, Alphonse is still Alphonse, but his last name could be a Swahili translation of 'stone' which is very fitting to his character arc.

:hi: So Alphonse is a name of German origin, combination of two words meaning "noble" and "swift". It was imported in Spain in the 5th century. Many kings in Spain, Castille, Italy and Portugal carried this name. In France, we have several authors called Alphonse: Alphonse de Lamartine, Alphonse Allais and Alphonse Daudet (Lettres de mon moulin). In the 19th century, this first name was so popular in France that it became a slang word to mean "a man who is kept by his mistress." Nearly 2000 people have this first name in France right now. The name has different spellings depending on the country where it is used.

He's unambiguously described as black in the text - but he has a European name. Yes, readers assume white. Even progressive, multicultural readers. If you're selling to today's readers, you need to use names as well as descriptions if you don't want them picturing a pack of white folks. I'd go back and change this character's name if I could, despite the fact that there are plenty of black Europeans with European names in the world.

When I read this post and others, I got a bit confused by the expression "European name". What is that exactly? First names are incredibly diverse, and adapt to the languages spoken in various European countries, and they are not specific to skin color. I would say that last names are more likely to define a person's origin than a first name, and even then... First names follow trends. Just as an example, look at the first names and last names of the players in the French soccer team. There is lots of diversity here, and ideas about how to create names.
One of the goal keepers is Alphonse Areola! There is Paul Pogba, (prodigy) Kylian Mbappé, Corentin Tolisso, Olivier Giroud, Antoine Griezmann, Djibril Sidibé, to name a few...
 

lizmonster

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When I read this post and others, I got a bit confused by the expression "European name". What is that exactly?

It's a worthwhile question. I'm wondering if "Anglo-Saxon name" gets at it a bit better? But what it comes down to is this: for many readers, unless a name "sounds" non-Caucasian, they're going to assume the character is white.

My character's last name is Foster. Good, solid, storied British/German name. Plenty of dark-skinned Fosters in the world (and my stuff, like Patty's, is also set in the future, although not 10,000 years). But in terms of connoting a character's skin color, it's about as neutral as it gets - and neutral, for a lot of readers, means white.

I should also mention that the people who asked me about the black man on the Book 2 cover were not bothered by the discovery that he was my MC (although the one person I spoke to face-to-face about it was palpably embarrassed that she hadn't realized that). The assumption wasn't malicious. But it happened with enough readers that I can't deny the phenomenon.
 

indianroads

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One thing that always bothers me is when authors decide to "add diversity" without really doing any research.

A name isn't always an indicator of culture - I've know people with Nordic names from Texas who have not a shred of the culture that is usually associated with their surname. IMO it's best to let your characters be people - a name is just a handle you use to refer to them.
 

eqb

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A name isn't always an indicator of culture - I've know people with Nordic names from Texas who have not a shred of the culture that is usually associated with their surname. IMO it's best to let your characters be people - a name is just a handle you use to refer to them.

I was referring (in general) to books where the author said they wanted to add diversity, as in people of other religions or races or gender or orientation, but the result was a thin veneer and not well integrated into the plot or the characters. Names are only part of what I was talking about.