Fun with technicalities!

[ursula]

Just in case you're not aware of this, the SCA registers names. The SCA guarantees that a registered name will be "unique": of course, the meaning of unique is a complicated issue, especially when we're talking about plausible names for medieval people.

This is a poll about what you think uniqueness ought to mean. This is not a poll about whether names should be unique, nor is it a quiz on the rules as they currently stand; it's a philosophical exercise.

[Poll #1098571]

Comments

[glasseye.livejournal.com]

Name uniqueness seems like an incredibly dumb idea to this non-herald.

[kid-prufrock.livejournal.com]

I meant to answer "false" to the first question.

[katerinfg.livejournal.com]

Is it sad that I thought that was really fun?

[elfreda.livejournal.com]

Given the relatively limited number of names available, and growing SCA population, it seems to me that applying the unique names rule should be limited to truly letter-for-letter, identical names. But then, I'm not a herald, nor do I play one on TV....
(Though I would like to get my name approved/passed!)

[ursula]

If you're curious about how your opinions compare to the current rules, you should be able to work out most of the "answers" using the RfS and www.morsulus.org .

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

I marked "A non-herald, non-paying SCA participant" but in fact haven't been active since 1996 and, for a year and a half, sat at the feet of heralds once a month while they chattered about points of difference for names and devices. (Literally. I was coloring in those descriptive mockups.) I was a paid participant for three years, at any rate.

[ursula]

If you fill the poll out again, it should change your answers.

[ursula]

Well, I am sort of looking for a reality check, though I'm not sure reality is the right word!

(E-mail me-- loyall at antir dot sca dot org is a reasonable forwarding address for this stuff-- if you want to talk about your name.)

[glasseye.livejournal.com]

Counterpoints:

1) Why should the heralds only recognize one "John Smith" in the entire SCA?
2) Why should the second person who wants to be called "John Smith" be denied due to someone who registered the name 40 years ago and promptly stopped playing?
3) The second "John Smith" will probably still go by that name regardless of what the heralds think. :)

[elfreda.livejournal.com]

Those are all great points. I personally would be ok without the rule at all, I guess I was subconsciously figuring we were stuck with it! :-)

[gwacie.livejournal.com]

Or one Stephan von Lübeck, for that matter ;)

I think it's funny that I'm a Herald; because I'm strictly a court protocol herald who doesn't know much of the nuances of this names stuff and can only blazon the most basic of devices. So I marked non-herald on the form ;)

[ursula]

I'm pretty sure the uniqueness requirement is in Corpora, which is why I'm not bothering to poll about it.

[ursula]

No, ZERO John Smiths. I bet you a whole lot we'd protect this one. (Also, I think we protect John Doe.)

[glasseye.livejournal.com]

You're just unnaturally prejudiced towards the east coast. ;)

He wasn't famous until post-period anyway. =P

[ursula]

That's what you think! I had four different people lean on me to do court at the last event ;)

[ursula]

I know, you secretly want to be a Kwakiutl samurai kidnapped by Chinese pirates. :P

[glasseye.livejournal.com]

A half Scottish half Kwakiutl samurai kidnapped by Chinese pirates and brought to India where I learned to belly-dance.

[ursula]

Oooh, how about Pictish face paint and a rapier?

[q10.livejournal.com]

i'm not answering directly because i'd need to know more about some linguistic history to answer most of the questions. i have no connection with the SCA. my general intuitions are as follows:

- name-like content conflicts only when there is total homophony or homography. so variant spellings of the same name give rise to conflict and and different ways of pronouncing the same written name give rise to conflict, but once two etymologically related names have diverged in their spoken and written forms, even if the divergence is slight, they don't conflict. (although the divergence should be audibly recognizable in most major dialects of all the languages involved). nicknames and variant forms of names are by the same judgment distinct tokens once they achieve adequate distinctness in symbol-space, although in a system based on this intuition there'd need to be a rule to let people reserve sets of related names.

- content with compositional semantics should avoid syntactically similar strings where one is semantically stronger than the other or where the two have conflicting presuppositions. thus ‘Order of the Star’ conflicts with ‘Order of the Star of X’, because if there's more than one star than ‘Order of the Star’ is unacceptably ambiguous, and if there's only one star then the Star of X must necessarily be that star, in which case we have unacceptable semantic collision. (some semantic details are being brushed under the rug as not sufficiently distinguishing). likewise total synonymy of interpreted content is generally unacceptable.

- cases where content is both name-like and semantically analyzable are tricky (i'm thinking here of your Ursula Georges vs Ursula filia Georgii example) my inclination is to say that, so long as they meet the graphic and phonological noncollision requirements on name-like content. any arguable syntactic and semantic distinction ought to be enough to separate them - so the case here is okay because the ‘filia’ complicates the syntactic structure and changes at least the semantic flavor. i'm pretty sure ‘Rupert, son of Partha’ and ’Partha's son Rupert’ should count as a collision, though.

[ursula]

Of course there are far more names with semantically analyzable content in medieval than in modern American contexts!

[p1kap1ka.livejournal.com]

Also you should fight in a pot helm and transitional plate, carrying a madu (sp?) and a round shield.

[p1kap1ka.livejournal.com]

The issue for me is that if you use just semantically analyzable differences, John FitzAndrew and John MacAndrew will be the same person. Oh, and John Anderson and Jan Andrewiecz. Even though, semantically, all those names mean the same thing, they are sufficiently regionally different that it's unlikely any of those people could have met unless they did some MAJOR travelling.

[ccommack]

(As of my answers, all of my choices were in the majority or plurality. I'm not sure what that means.)

To further expound on 'Whether two names could historically have referred to the same person', there's a lot of historical background that is attached to that. Ursula Georges would not have been referred to as Ursula George in England (unless she immigrated, maybe) because that's not how French people were treated in England, whereas Seumas mac a'Phearsain would almost invariably have been called Seamus MacPherson, because of the subordinate relationships the Gaelic-speaking countries had with England.

It's way, way out of period, but I shudder to imagine how the SCA would handle the Japonification of Korean names during the imperial era, which is a similar situation but with different/no rules applicable. (I personally don't know if/what the rules were.)

The one question I hesitated over for a long time was "Pedro Fernandez Perez", because I'm not sufficiently familiar with Spanish surname rules.

I've never been to an SCA event, but I've spent lots of time with people who have, and I like their lore, so the lack of official affiliation may be misleading.

[ursula]

What about the subordinate relationship English-speaking English people had with French-speaking English people?

I'm working on the assumption that most of my friendslist might have ended up in the SCA given a few interested friends at the right time.

[ccommack]

My knowledge of that period of English history and the linguistic norms associated with it is slim to nonexistant, but I will acknowledge the oversight.