"Off-model" is considered to be a polite way to say "you don't match the intended template."
Also Cheevwut definitely named themself some cool sounding gibberish.
Transcript
Vinemaple asked: Gillie, how do you feel about the term "off-model"? Personally, I find it demeaning, and I'd feel uncomfortable using it for others!
Gillie: (ASL) Oh, it’s WAY better than older terms for us!
Background text: Defective, mutant, botched, lab accident
Gillie: (ASL) Personally it doesn’t bother me, but I have seen some people online using it as an insult... ehhh. Those types would use any term for us as an insult, because we're a joke to them.
Celadon asked: Idrisah and Gillie, what are some very common names in avian and bug ferret cultures, and where do they come from?
Idrisah: Hmm... I’ve met a fair amount of Tiiliitians called “Chit” and “Wiia” and “Tiiri." But technically, those are only the first few syllables of their name! For instance, Cheevwut’s full personal name is Cheevwutopiinwiiuhatalaal. For Wiariian adults, that would be followed by an inherited name referring to their dunparent, dunhouse, or both; but Tiiliitians do it differently.
Image: Dunhouse labelled "Oowouiib Ayiizty", an adult dun labelled "Aauwaliitjuotiilot", a child labelled "Cheevwut zwaa Aauwaliitjuotiilot zwaa Oowouiib Ayiizty".
Second image: An adult dun leaving the dunhouse labelled "Cheevwutopiinwiiuhatalaal".
Idrisah: A Tiiliitian kid will usually have a short given name followed by their inherited name. Then, when they become independent, they discard their inherited name and elongate their given name into a unique personal name. Wiariian personal names are usually identifiable sentences... run on, poetically phrased sentences... but Tiiliitian personal names have much more abstract or scrambled etymology. Sometimes it's just "pleasant sounds." Like I think "Cheevwut" is derived from an old Wiariian name meaning "lives by the hills" but I have no idea what "-opiinwiiuhatalaal" is from...
Gillie: (ASL) Well, that's easy, since all bug ferrets are named “left” and “right…” Just kidding. Sort of. The details vary a between different regions of space, but many bug ferret names follow a version of this layered naming convention:
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Honorific:
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Usually related to age, family role, or family occupation.
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Married Family:
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The family the individual has married into.
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Birth Family:
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The family the individual was born into.
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Mother’s Birth Family:
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The family the individual's mother was born into.
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Egg Case Orientation:
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Which side of the egg case the individual occupied.
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Ordinal Numeral:
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The first, second, third, etc. egg case laid by their mother.
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Gillie: (ASL) Sometimes instead of a number or orientation, given names are something closer to what we humans would consider a first name. Like, with an etymological history linking it to a word, phrase, or historical family. But it’s more common to encounter ferrets whose personal names are something like left-three, or right-ten. Maybe that sounds cold, but to be fair, there's plenty of human cultures with names that basically mean "first son," "second son," etc. Sometimes you just gotta name your kid something and you aren't feeling creative, I suppose.
63 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 38”
blythe
realizing that ive been pronouncing cheevs name in my head wrong, its probably not cheev like cheese, but more like cheh‐eh-v
MutableAlias
the FAQ say it’s pronounced CHAY-vwuht /tʃe:vwət/
S0glet
Important observation: these avian doodles look like they are wearing baggy sweatpants
FuzzySpiderPawz
Big fan of whenever Gillie goes :3
Boxthing
Anyone else getting Chiss vibes from the avian nomenclature?
Falconette
Who are the Chiss? I am unfamiliar with this culture.
0xabad1dea
the blue totally-just-humans-but-blue aliens in some Star Wars media.
Green Heron
now i’m reimagining rebels and the thrawn books but instead of a blue guy it’s a skimmer bright in a white uniform surrounded by humans
Smooti
These were fun questions. I’m wondering how, since big ferrets mainly use sign language, how that works with all of their names and honorifics. Do they have an equivalent of sign names like in Deaf culture?
Theoneandonlyvoid
On pinkie and brownies character page is their sign names.
CaptainStroon
Cheevwut’s full name gives me strong Romanadvoratrelundar vibes
Derikooo
Im Now Imagining A Xeno-BioChemist Avian That Lenghtened Their Lucky Name That Starts With “Methinyl” And Made The Long Name Rest Of The IUPAC Name For Titin (takes 2 hours to pronounce)
JoB
> Sometimes instead of a number or orientation, given names are
> something closer to what we humans would consider a first name.
Considering that in the convention, no part except maybe the honorific is up to choice, there’d be the possibility that two bug ferrets end up (living together and) having the exact same name (different mothers but same sequence of families). Guess that sometimes you have to get creative. :-3
DasGanon
I guess
<"
is now the emoticon indicating "Bug Ferret" and
<" <"
<" (…)
for an Avian?
DasGanon
Wow this comment got destroyed. I’m guessing that “greater than” breaks markdown somehow.
JoB
Since this comment section is Unicode capable, there is the option of U+1F4AC “speech balloon”: 💬
(Shamelessly stolen from the comments on RQ 28)
creetur
(•••o-)
Hunter
Bug ferret naming structure kinda reminds me of the salarian naming structure from Mass Effect. According to the in-game codex:
“A full name includes – in order – the name of a salarian’s homeworld, nation, city, district, clan name and given name”
A big *broader* than bug ferret names, but the same basic sort of principle.
Vinemaple
Ooh, yikes, did you just compare Bug Ferrets to Mass Effect aliens?
Light_In_The_Fog
As someone who knows little about Mass Effect, why is that a yikes?
HAL9000
think it might be because in mass effect the aliens are kinda just reskinned humans living on Planets Of Hats, mostly because you can have aliens be your squadmates and therefore the devs needed a basic universal model to ensure weapon animations / armour/ weapons etc didnt break for each different alien
Nick Alcock
See also naming schemes in Iain Banks’s Culture, which include addresses and a middle name that is a self-chosen personal descriptor (“Chiark-Gevantsa Jernau Morat Gurgeh dam Hassease”, and I’m appalled that I was able to type that from memory).
Gar G
Considering how large Bug Ferret families tend to be it’s probably easier than coming up with and remembering a unique name for everyone
(also kinda reminds me of Spo from Housepets. Spo is a mouse from a very large family, with his next younger brother being named “Spp”
JoB
> there’s plenty of human cultures with names that basically mean “first son”, “second son”
… Tertius, Quartus, Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, to name but the Roman Empire (with its back-then child mortality rates) …
> Also Cheevwut definitely named themself some cool sounding gibberish.
Cheevwut-Eleanor team-up is go. 😀
Peter Jensen
A time traveler meets some Romans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV34HW9CIzs
Arcstone
Theres a few scandinavian names that are basically just “son of blank”.
Like haraldson or håkonsson.
Which just means son of harald and son of håkon.
JoB
Though the only scandinavian country still doing proper patronyms is Iceland (as in, former mayor of Reykjavík Dagur Bergþóruson Eggertsson being the son of veterinarian Eggert Gunnarsson (and Bergþóra Jónsdóttir)). Elsewhere, the then-current patronym has, at some point in the nation’s history, been nailed down as the no-more-changing modern-style family name.
Peter Jensen
Through some unusual circumstances I ended up with a kind of hybrid of patronymic naming conventions. I have a middle name that I don’t use much online, because it’s a bit too identifying. How it came about was that my dad’s Danish and my mom’s Bulgarian, and my brother was their first child and was born in Bulgaria. They use the naming system with a given name, a patronymic middle name, and a family name. Middle names aren’t used too commonly in Denmark, and they didn’t intend to give my brother one, just given name and family name. However, this was still during communism, and they were sticklers for bureaucracy … And the naming form had 3 fields for names, so 3 fields must be filled out. So my dad’s name went in the middle name, though they had to relent on the gendered suffix, since that couldn’t be made to work with that name. Then some year later I was born in Denmark, and they figured they should keep the naming scheme to avoid bureaucratic issues down the line.
Chrysalis
The best part about nonsense names is that you can make up a new meaning each time someone asks, and no one can prove you wrong!
Gheesfellow
That goes double for alien civilisations, who really have no context to disprove anything you say!
SheTheTDE
Just cause we’re comparing alien naming conventions: My name is shortened from one line in an alien poem about not giving up during hard times. It’s not a poem from my planet though. On the planet the names are just abreviations of your ancestry. Native American + German + French + English, for a random example, we’d call Nagfe.
As for the first thing, yeah “Off Model” is probably the coolest thing you could be called as an insult. “Yeah you’re off model. You’re a one of a kind collectible that people would sell their mothers for.
roue
…what planet ?
40
God I love complicated naming systems. Honestly the main appeal of conlanging to me is the culture that I can build around it… and therefore the very long names I can give to people.
Arcstone
Wow, mutant actually really feels like it cuts in this context and setting.
That has to be one of the ones that people wont even say no matter the context and just use “the M-word” instead.
Like people do with the N-word.
Vinemaple
Thank you for answering my question, Jay! I’m glad that Gillie knows nothing will stop someone who really wants to be cruel… I don’t really know what else I expected!
Mitta
Chit is the name of a character in the dolphin xenofiction book “Pod”
Theoneandonlyvoid
My child left fetus and their brother right fetus.
AmbroseTV
is right fetus not also your child?
AmbroseTV
is right fetus not also your son?
Theoneandonlyvoid
I don’t like them…
Redacted
Grandpa ferret is slaying me
JoB
Sure. What else for would a bug ferret schlep a cane around? 😛
Mr. Son
That last pic of Gillie is really cute. Something really appealing about it.
Endymia
such a kind smile
Vinemaple
Nyan Gillie
guest
gillie went :3 and the world was better for it
BravoLimaPoppa
Jay,
I love the reader question days. They allow us to see sides of the characters we normally wouldn’t and makes the world lore easier to digest.
But the killer on this is Gillie. Your art shows her confident, knowledgeable and willing to share with her panels on bug ferret etymology.
Anyway, love the art today and enjoy trader question days.
Also, I now have a bit of a liking for the bug ferrets because my nickname means “third.”
Vinemaple
I want to do free-form, panel-less cartoons like these AMAs.
But Jay is actually really cooking with the page layouts. (they always do, but it’s even more amazing in the AMAs)
Every possible design element is used in exceedingly clever ways, to suggest panels and reading order that aren’t formally defined. And every time I try to look at old AMAs to learn how Jay does it, I come away with more questions than answers.
I can’t even make a 9-panel cartoon flow in an interesting and intuitive way. Jay, you are amazing!
iisaw
Official Notice: The person previously known as Octavia has changed their name to Starlin Windsong of Shadowsdance. But you can call them Shad.
Adrienne
Hi my name is Cheevwut Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way
Madame Thunderbone
Hahahahahahaha!
creetur
Unlocked memories I forgot I had…
HAL9000
hah, reminds me of how the thais do nicknames… i know people called “little frog” or “apple” or “buffalo”, & in the modern day, now many young people have an english word for a nickname, like “remote” or “golf” or “disney” or even stuff like “pepsi” and “airbus” lol (its not meant to mean anything its just becuase it sounds cool & exotically western). but also people are sometimes just nicknamed a fun sound that is utterly meaningless but is fun to say, like “urh” or “ek”. usually, it rhymes with their siblings’ nicknames, but not always. thai people didnt do long names or surnames until it became a problem for government trying to have organised paperwork in the 20th century so people adopted unique long poetical names that nobody ever uses except on forms. cheevut would fit right in with a fun nonsensical name!
JoB
I was with a large, worldwide company when they ran a unification project for their e-mail systems, switching addresses to a “first.m.last@dom.ain” scheme in the process. Determining these for their Indian staff was a flippin’ chapter of its own in the instruction book they wrote, because of the wildly differing cultural conventions found there.
People with no (static) individual names whatsoever. (Very clan-focused.)
People with only a single individual moniker (no last names).
People with completely dissimilar (and loooong, for us Westerners) names on a) their signed contract, b) the name tag they wear at work, and c) used to address them in conversation.
(Cultures where the “last name” goes first I knew from back at the U. Wrote a paper submission system for a conference there, and “‘family name’ goes first/last” was a mandatory field to enter authors’ names, along with “given name(s)” and “family name”.)
zaratustra
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Sparky Lurkdragon
Name etymology my beloved!!
This is a really fun one. 😀
Tumorhead
Big fan of the cartoon of Cheevwutopiinwiuhatalaal taking a big steppy out on their own as an adult!!!
And also Gillie’s face at the end – like I am a small child watching educational videos and she is teaching me 🙂
Verc
SAME what a delightful figure
Eux
even in the far future people will find ways to be dicks online………internet, internet never changes. also i ADORE the expressions here and the super old bug ferret <3
furubatsu
Amazing worldbuilding and beautiful expressions on this one
Viashino_wizard
Do bugferret egg cases have a clear front/back, or is left/right determined some other way?
Septemberdale
Possibly the front is whichever way you can more clearly see the outlines of the babies?
Thisfox
Or the egg rests on the back and opens at the front when they hatch? Sharks tend to chew their way out of their eggs at a particular place when they hatch.