Not what I was looking for, but cool nonetheless

[naomikritzer]

I'm revising Freedom's Sisters, the third book in my current trilogy. I'm at the "making the changes my editor wants" stage now, but of course whenever I'm revising for my editor I notice things I want to fix before I send it back to her. There's this castle where the really powerful people live in Penelopeia, the heart of the empire. I dubbed it "the Fortress of Penelope" when I wrote the draft, but on reflection, that's a really dull, clunky name and I'd be happier if I could think up something better. My usual source of good labels are other languages. Since this castle is in a Greek-dominated area of Persia, the obvious language to use is Greek. Unfortunately, the Greek word for castle (that I found on the web, anyway) is "Kastro," and referring to "the Kastro" is going to summon up distracting images for my readers.

I'm still hunting for something better (I welcome suggestions -- uh, cnoocy, are you reading this? I want something that sounds good and translates to something along the lines of castle, fortress, palace, or stronghold) but I ran across this list of country name etymologies from Wikipedia. And how cool is this:

Pakistan: The Cambridge student and Muslim nationalist Choudhary Rahmat Ali coined this name. He devised the word and first published it on 28 January 1933 in the pamphlet "Now or Never". He made the name an acronym of the different states/homelands/regions, which broke down into: P=Punjab, A=Afghania (Ali's preferred name for the North West Frontier Province), K=Kashmir, S=Sindh and the suffix -stan from BalochiSTAN, thus forming "Pakstan". An "i"-sound later intruded to ease pronunciation, producing "Pakistan". Rahmat Ali later expanded upon this in his 1947 book Pakistan: the Fatherland of the Pak Nation. In that book he explains the acronym as follows: P=Punjab, A=Afghania, K=Kashmir, I=Iran, S=Sindh, T=Turkharistan (roughly the modern central Asian states), A=Afghanistan and N=BalochistaN. Another shade of meaning is added with the Persian word Pa-k, which means "pure"; the full name therefore meaning "land of the pure". Use of the name gradually became widespread during the campaign for the setting up of a Muslim state in what was then British India. Note too the Persian suffix -stan meaning "land".

I find it totally fascinating that Pakistan's name came from an acronym.

Also cool: Ukraine means "border territory" in Slavic. (My paternal grandfather's parents came from Galicia, a region that has been passed around among a number of different nations thanks to its location, but is currently part of Ukraine. It was Austria-Hungary when they emigrated and Poland for a while after that.)

Comments

Ukraine

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I use "the Ukraine" for the area and "Ukraine" for the country. They aren't quite the same. Both my mother's parents were born in the Ukraine, but my grandfather's birthplace is now in Belarus.

Alternatives

[devonbree.livejournal.com]

I did some similar web-crawling...

Akra means high place, and naturally if you put a walled city (polis) up there, you get akrapolis. I suppose that might be considered terrifically unoriginal.

Lerisae or Larissa is evidently another word for citadel, in the Prohellenic language of Greece (Ionic?). Not quite right etymologically, but it has a nice sound to it, though I understand that the modern Greek city of Larissa is something of a backwater.

Adamas (the root of diamond and adamant) meaning invincible or unyielding might be a direction to follow. Kastradamas, mayhap...

I'll check with the reference librarian...

Re: Alternatives

[cnoocy]

Acropolis was my first thought too. I'm away from my books at the moment, but I checked through the Perseus lexicon and the "citadel" and "castle" listings are quite interesting, with phrourion and phylakterion way up there. But I actually found the one I like best, "koryphe", in a different place. It means "head" with lots of associated meanings like apex, summit, etcetera.

Re: Alternatives

[naomikritzer]

Koryphe is cool. How do you pronounce that?

Re: Alternatives

[cnoocy]

ko-ROOP-hay is closest to the classical Greek, but English-style greek pronunciation would be closer to ko-RIH-fey. In Greek letters, it's KOPYΦH or κορυφη. Take that with a little salt, my Greek pronunciation is very rusty.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

(springbok1 sent me here. Bizarrely, I know cnoocy and our moms (like, yours and mine) know one another. Um. It's a weird world.)

My normal source of an English-to-Greek dictionary is The Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.org). Click on "classics", then "other tools and lexica", and you will see an English to Greek word search. You can plug in English variants and look for cool-sounding Greek words to your heart's content :).

(Also, you should finish the book, as now I have read the first two and my bookshelf is depressingly full of Serious Nonfiction and short on stuff I actually want to read when I come home from work... ;)

[naomikritzer]

That is one seriously cool resource. Thank you!

[naomikritzer]

Oh, and it's not that bizarre that you know cnoocy if you went to college with my sister, since cnoocy's brother went to Harvey Mudd. The fact that our mothers know each other amuses me, though.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but...that's not how I know him ;).

Actually, his brother graduated from Mudd before I got there. I met said brother at a Mudd wedding, which made it very easy for me to recognize cnoocy when I met him.

[fehler.livejournal.com]

Hey, Galicia! My cousin who is trying to do geanology traced my Grandfather to there (only to hit a dead end).