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Post by rwley on Mar 3, 2008 22:25:30 GMT -5
I did some checking as well. "Eden" or "Edan", both female Hebrew names that mean "perfect" and "Ahuva" a female Hebrew name meaning "beloved". I don't know if you could meld those or use one.
I was looking for a Hebrew equivalent to the Greek "agape", which is God's love for us, but so far I can't find anything other than "chesed" which you've already been given.
If you want to stray a little from the Hebrew, "Ife" is the Egyptian female name for "love" and "Safiya" is "pure"; "Kamilah" is "perfection," also Egyptian.
Don't know if this helps or confuses, but I tried. Good luck.
Robi
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Post by Divides the Waters on Mar 4, 2008 1:06:56 GMT -5
Actually, it helps a great deal. I appreciate your going to the effort! I'm going to see if I can't come up with a better list, now that I have all of these.
Many thanks!!!
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Post by Jeff Gerke on Mar 4, 2008 8:38:35 GMT -5
I haven't looked it up lately, but the Hebrew word "hesed" is supposed to be pretty close to "agape," as I recall. If memory serves, hesed means something like "love" and "grace" and "faithfulness."
Jeff
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Post by Divides the Waters on Mar 4, 2008 19:29:35 GMT -5
I think that "chesed" and "hesed" are the same, aren't they? Bit of a gutteral in the Hebrew.
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Post by fluke on Mar 5, 2008 1:15:20 GMT -5
Yep. Some transliterate the cheth as an h some as a ch. It's a hard, hard h sound, which is why I use the ch. English doesn't have one letter that covers it.
With chesed meaning "covenant love," I would concentrate on that word. Especially since I see that there are many times it refers to God's loving kindness in "redemption from enemies and troubles, quickening of spiritual life, preservation of life from death, or redemption from sin." The perfect is more-or-less understood in it.
My favorite from the above is "Hedesha," but it is close to the word for "myrtle" (Hadasah), and would more likely be taken that way. Maybe Chasadah.
And many authentic Hebrew names will seem strange. For example, do you recognize these Hebrew names?
Dawid Mosheh Sha'ul Avraham Shlomoh (or Shlomih) Yehushu'a
Frank Luke
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Post by Divides the Waters on Mar 5, 2008 18:33:43 GMT -5
David, Moses, Saul, Abraham, Solomon, Jesus?
"Chasada" is pretty cool. Hesedaiah, maybe?
Wow. I got my own thread on a tangeant. Oops.
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Post by myrthman on Mar 5, 2008 22:55:04 GMT -5
Tamiahab Tamaiah Thamaiah Kesedaiah* Hesedaiah HedeshaAny thoughts? I really like the aural flavor of Tamaiah. Sounds Hebrewish and very very feminine. That would be my choice from what you've provided.
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Post by Spokane Flyboy on Mar 6, 2008 2:00:07 GMT -5
It doesn't have to be an attribute of God such as "life" or "love" either. Look at Jesus - which is technically the Greek form of Joshua if I recall correctly. It means "God is salvation". Isaiah refers to him as Immanuel which is "God with us".
And is there any major problem with the quesadilla connection? I could see potential for it to be mini-plot fodder.
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Post by Divides the Waters on Mar 7, 2008 10:14:45 GMT -5
Good points. No, it wouldn't have to be that, but I kind of wanted it to be. If you read the "Female Messiah" thread, you know that I'm looking at this character more as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. (I'm going to assume you're joking about the quesadilla connection...it's not that kind of story.)
Myrthman, Tamaiah might work, in that it has a resonance with the mother's name, as well. I'll put all of these into my "names" spreadsheet, and see if they grow on me.
Incidentally, Spokane, your signature for some reason made me think of the opening paragraphs of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams (providing a slightly different perspective, but funny):
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infalliable rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.
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Post by Divides the Waters on Mar 9, 2008 20:31:23 GMT -5
LOL Wouldn't you know it? Tamaiah is a real Hebrew name! Half the names in my novel I thought I made up ... turns out there is usually a real-life counterpart. Go figure....
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Post by Divides the Waters on Mar 11, 2008 22:36:36 GMT -5
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Post by strangewind on Mar 12, 2008 15:50:47 GMT -5
That's hilarious, and useful. I think there may be something wrong with fantasy novel that contains absolutely none of those elements that you link to, but the list of questions provides an excellent check on the writer's ego.
An epic tale is going to share some elements with fantasies that have gone before. I mean, seriously, do you think The Name of the Wind would be such a success if it couldn't benefit from the Gygax and Tolkiens and others before Rothfuss?
Good new fantasy tales are like good new celtic music: the performer had better be great, the themes better be both traditional and improvisational, and something new and bold better be brought to the table.
If the novel happens to have a forgetful wizard and a good hearted fighter helping some farmboy prince on a quest, so be it. But that is no excuse for the story to be unoriginal.
Artistic works are predicated on these tropes, from the Wizard of Oz to the Princess Bride (in film) and from Dante's Divine Comedy to American Gods (in print).
In fact, I think it might be a noble exercise to simply attempt to write a generic "epic fantasy" first, to get the hang of it. That's hard enough to do. Once that's finished, you can either go back and hack out or cover over the egregious derivations, or start all over, this time with a keener emphasis on creativity (now that you "know" how to write an epic fantasy, even a bad one.)
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Post by Divides the Waters on Mar 13, 2008 23:14:36 GMT -5
It also goes right to the heart of the question of when a theme, or icon, becomes a cliche.
I haven't read The Name of the Wind. I daresay that no modern fantasy could have come about without Tolkien or someone like him. We learned from his mistakes as well as his genius.
I like the analogy to celtic music. (And speaking of Celtic Woman, I caught one of their concerts the other night ... brilliant.) It reminds me a bit of George Lucas comparing Star Wars to poetry, and having certain sections "rhyme" thematically with others.
I love drawing on myth and literature. It gives my own humble work a certain gravity and credence it might not have had otherwise. In the formation of my novel, I was highly inspired by a cheesy eighties flick (great idea, poor execution). But I thought, what about turning a slightly silly concept into a Lovecraftian/Miltonian theme, and seeing where that goes?
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Post by scintor on Mar 21, 2008 0:56:58 GMT -5
I think that Theme, Icon and Cliche are all part of the same continum. The differentiation comes from originality and life given to a charactor or situation. A dead and derivitive treatment of a familiar topic is always cliche. A situation or person that has been givin life and and depth of treatment that goes through a familiar situation can bring a familarity to a story that is both reassuring and interesting. An otherwise believeable charactor that is put into a situation that doesn't fit well with the story just because the author thinks that his hero has to go throught an archtypical trial will destroy the rythm of your world and can cause it to collapse. Just because you use an idea that has been used in another setting does NOT mean you are telling the same story that has been told before. It is the difference between copying and learning from examples. Yes it is difficult to do something completely original, but that does not mean that there are mot mew and interesting ideas that can't be inspired from older scources.
just my 2 cents.
Scincerely,
Scintor@aol.com
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Post by Divides the Waters on Mar 21, 2008 11:07:34 GMT -5
George Lucas molded each of his characters off of a specific literary type (yes, even the detestable Jar Jar Binks), and his Star Wars saga off of the Hero's Journey as delineated by Campbell. That having been said, Lucas had the ability to tell a story that hit all of those elements in a fresh and unique way while still managing to evoke those classic iconic images.
We can't all be a George Lucas, of course, and one of the problems with using him as an example is that while many of us were influenced (some more than others *cough*) by him, one can assume that those are characters that themselves may need to be archetyped in our own works, when they are already archetypes to begin with. This is when we see character become cliche, or even caricature.
It's my hope that we can learn from those who have gone before, and incorporate elements of these things into our own stories in such a way that we have made them our own. (My own novel was originally inspired by an insipid little eighties sci-fi/exploitation flick ... when I saw it, I thought, "I like the concept, but I can do it better.")
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