[Sca-cooks] OT Judith has an SCA name!

Craig Daniel teucer at pobox.com
Mon Nov 30 07:35:00 PST 2009


On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Judith Epstein <judith at ipstenu.org> wrote:
> 1. Registerability of only documentable names:
> I'm checking the name with the SCA Heralds list. The ruling I'm relying on is "establish that the name you want fits within a
> pattern of naming for your applicable time/place."

The pattern is taken to include the name elements, I believe. For
example, I'm Catalan, and a common pattern for Catalan names is one
given name followed by another. Xavier is a vaguely popular name in
Catalunya, and I can easily document the given name "Jaume" (my own
SCA name, albeit not yet registered) as being period. This does not
mean I can register the name "Xavier Jaume," since "Xavier" as a given
name was not in use prior to 1600. Jaume, on the other hand, appears
in guild records and census documents and so forth as being a very
name in late period Catalunya.

Now, "D'vorah" is not like "Xavier" - in the latter case, we know
exactly where the name comes from, and the answer is a saint
(Francisco Jaso, who was from the town of Xavier and later came to be
known as St. Francis Xavier) who lived in the sixteenth century and
was not canonized until 1622; the given name "Xavier" not preceded by
"Francisco" (and other languages' equivalents thereof) does not appear
until over a century after our period.

However, the college of heralds are a generally stuffy lot, and if a
name can't be documented as being period they're highly likely to
treat it more like "Xavier" than like "Jaume."

On the other hand, the existance of another Devorah is good news for
you, since the heralds will insist on a period name, and maybe a
period spelling, but for a name whose period spellings are in other
alphabets, modern transliterations appear to be the norm rather than
the exception - Japanese personas, for example, frequently have h's
and k's in their names rather than f's and c's. If you can figure out
what her documentation for the name was, it might well be applicable
for your persona as well.

 - Jaume



More information about the Sca-cooks mailing list