Name Attractors: How Do They Work

[Alicorn]

The short story is titled Visitor, but yeah, that's where Promise is from.

[Tamien]

Aestrix: Do "Adrian", "Adriana", "Adrienne", etc fit the Adarin name attractors?

[Aestrix]

Nope! <3

[DanielH]

Chelseas (and Aftons)? I’d like to recognize them right away if I see one in a glowfic. Unfortunately, I feel if I meet somebody matching the naming scheme in real life I will have unfair negative feelings about them, but that’s true whether I know the attractor or not.

[Alicorn]

Chelsea names start with Ch, S, K, or Sh sounds (I don't think I've actually named any a Sh name before but it's possible; Z is also potentially allowed but less likely), a vowel that's almost invariably an E, and then an L (or possibly an R) and an optional vowel that's also usually more E- or A-like than, say, an O or a U, and then another sound from the [Ch, S, K, Sh] set (usually S) followed by anything else. There's room for other "anything else" in there too. Chelsea, Chelise, Chelsa, Chelasi, Kelsey, Selsiketra going by "Selsi". "Cherish" fits (and Cherish will be Chelseaed) but that's obviously not her given name, which is "Chelsea" again. I bet kappa could program a Chelseas Name Generator that got acceptable Chelseaish names every time.

Note that a lot of, say, Charlie names technically fit this attractor, not to mention random innocent third parties like Céleste.

Aftons don't have anything so regular but will only ever be found in the companies of Chelseas and their names will tend to start with A and end with N.

[DanielH]

Yeah, programming a Chelsea-generator from that would be easy and probably always pronouncable, but the “anything else” part would be beyond me if I wanted to make it namelike or pronouncanle, so I’d simplify it to something simple so that it could actually generate “Chelsea” but not “Selsiketra”. I can’t speak for kappa, but most decent programmers with little-to-no linguistics knowledge would probably say the same and produce different simplifications of the “anything else” bit.

[Kappa]

I just wrote a specialized generator for the parts described and then stuck on an extra syllable (one by default, more than that also possible) from one of my existing language generators to fill for "anything else".

[Anya]

I was wondering why you named the Soph and Alex templates what you did. Sophia and Alexander are Greek, or something, right? How do you think Renee's and Charlies decided on them? Is there a theme to Bel/Soph/Alex names? And if there was to be a fourth Swan child, what would you name them?

.....

Sorry, heh. Random line of thought that got carried away. :)

[Alicorn]

I don't remember how I picked Lexi's name, but the rest of them are backgenerated from that. I think for Soph I might have looked at a baby name website's list of names that are commonly siblings of Isabellas and used that? I might have done this for Lexi too, Alexandra does appear on that list. If I needed a fourth I'd probably do the same thing; names which are okay and don't have obvious collision problems with other characters include Jack and Amelia. (A single template wouldn't include both people named Jack and people named Amelia; I'd name the first one something gender-appropriate and go from there with Jacqueline or Mel or whatever).

Sophia being a Greek name only became important when I needed the male version and there wasn't an obvious pivot like "Alexandra" had.

[Kappa]

Now I'm wondering where you could manage to stick more Bell siblings... XD