Arêndron Names

Arêndron given names come from many different sources, as the Arêndron people were very liberal about borrowing names from the cultures they conquered. A common pattern was for most families to start giving their children the more prestigious native Arêndron names, but for names from the local culture to continue to be used by the aristocratic families as a mark of their heritage. Some names from the conquered cultures became “vogue” names across the Empire, even among families who had no connection with the region from which the name originated.

Throughout this page, I use blue for male names, red for female names, and black for epicene (names that can be used for either sex). The most popular names in each list are marked with an asterisk; a double asterisk marks names that have become popular outside their region of origin.

(Note that where variant forms are given, the asterisk(s) indicate the popularity of the name as a whole, not just of the first variant.)

Vardiscêan Names

Under this heading I group all names originating from the Vardiscêan peoples. Most names used by the Vardûrans and Beladrons came straight from Proto-Vardiscêan; a few are derived from vocabulary words in the daughter languages.

Many of the names exist in multiple forms. Most of these already existed in Proto-Vardiscêan; in some cases the relations between them were originally more obvious but have been obscured by sound changes. A few patterns are nonetheless noticeable: names ending in -a are always female; those in -er (and no others) always epicene. The suffixes -dis and -is create male and female variant forms respectively; they probably originate from diminutives.

Names from Proto-Vardiscêan

These names are common to the Vardûran and Beladron cultures, with one regular difference: the -dis suffix is Vardûran only, the Beladron equivalent being -den. I have not listed the -den forms separately; the name Orden is exceptional in being the only -den name common to both cultures.