On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 03:48:06PM -0500, Chris Turkel <zizban at adelphia.net> wrote: > On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 03:40 PM, lazarus wrote: > >On Wed, 22 Jan 2003 12:22:29 -0800 (PST), you wrote: > >>Ruhlen, Rachel Louise (UMC-Student) writes: > >> This falls in the same category as the "Orlaan/Loraan" controversy. > >>_I_ > >> still don't believe there's no connection! > >>Note that, in _Taltos_, Vlad talks about a Jhereg named Rolaan. I > >>think Steve just likes the sound of those phonemes. > >>rone > >Also, names repeat in the real world, in every culture, but for some > >reason readers want every character ever mentioned in a fantasy world > >to have a unique name. > >How many guys named Bob or Steve or Jeff have you had working for you? > >At one point, my entire sales staff was made up of Chris's and > >Randy's. Drove the central office crazy, of course. > You are correct and a lot of writers miss this point. A good example is > Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" books. Ten volumes, I don't think a > name is repeated once. Its like everyone on the planet has a unique > name. The question with Jordan isn't so much whether names repeat, or whether the bit character mentioned in one paragraph in book 6 as coming from Tear and having blond hair is the same bit character mentioned in passing in book 10 without any screen time as being brown haired and coming from Murandy, only in disguise, or whether Jordan has simply made another mistake, or if they are perhaps two different people. There have certainly been instances where the same character has appeared under other names, in disguise; where two different characters have had the same name but different characteristics; and where Jordan mistakes one character for another. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp