Lucernic, Old French, and Lioness (part 2)
"La rochelle de nuit". Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
Last time, I wrote about how I was learning Old French because it is likely to have an influence on Lioness. Today, I'll talk about those specific influences.
In the MS itself, I'm trying to avoid being all "my world-building, let me show you it!" so for the most part there are only snippets of the Lucernic language used. But there is a lot going on in my notes document, and I'd like to give you a glimpse.
First of all, almost every name in Lioness means something. Occasionally I just picked a name from the SGNP Medieval French name generator, but for main characters, I often worked from French or Latin roots of existing proper names.
For example, the names of the main characters:
Yfre, my protagonist. If Lioness as a whole is a "fantasy retelling of The Three Musketeers from the POV of the villains," she is my Milady de Winter stand-in. In creating her name, I started from the Latin hibernia and the French hiver (winter), and made some common phonological shifts. The name Estevien gives her (in v2), is Yvernia, which is just a more Latin-sounding version. I imagined a division between the language spoken in Lucernica, the capital, and the language spoken in the provinces, as something similar to the langue d'oc/language d'oeil divide in Old French*, and Yfre taking on this name is pretty much an admission that she's working for The Man now.
Incidentally, her name also sounds close to the word "yvre" (old French)/"ivre" (modern French), which means "drunk." Bizel makes a joke about it this in v1, but that was a bit too dear to keep.
The main problem is, she's still the protagonist of the story, with a name I've been told is not easy to pronounce. (It's "EEF-ruh," in case you were curious, with the second syllable diminished, as -re endings often are in French). But at this point her name is so set in stone, I don't think I could countenance changing it.
Estevien, the Holy Warlord, is the Cardinal Richelieu equivalent. I... honestly don't recall where I got this name from. It's just a version of Steven/Stephen, but I don't know why I chose that. Cardinal Richelieu's given name was Armand-Jean du Plessis (ask me how I know that!), so I'm pretty sure I wasn't making a reference there. Maybe I just thought it was a holy-sounding name?
Estevien's birth name, however, is another story. [Minor spoiler]As many of you know, Estevien is an AFAB transman, and his birth name was Berengière. Not only is that clearly a feminine name (by the ière ending), it's also a reference to Berenger, one of the twelve peers in The Song of Roland.
Bizel does not have a very interesting name story, alas. He's the Buckingham character, and I just wanted a French-sounding name that started with a "b." His island-city, however, is another story--more on that later.
Other characters:
Malarme literally means "poorly armed." He's kind of the Athos stand-in, although more accurately he represents all the musketeers. Given how some nouns are declined in Old French, I recently chose to change it to Malarmez. As a plus, it also makes the pronounciation clearer!
Rechelle... needs a better name. She's the Rochefort equivalent, a name which literally means "stone fort" (and which is also a city near La Rochelle). So I went with something sounding like "rochelle," mostly just as a placeholder. I'm thinking I might rename her Bretesca, from bretesce, a type of fortress in Old French.
Charisse is a reference to Kitty, Milady's maid in the 3M. It sounded kind of like a diminutive of "chat," the French word for cat, to me. (Although it turns out "cherise" is the old French word for "cherry," so...)
Surnames are usually but not always toponymic, after the person's birth place. For example, Yfre is "dy Sarciel," Estevien is "dy Bargue," Bizel is "dy Voudre."
Worth noting is the surname that goes along with Yfre's cover identity--"dy Leonys." Not only is it a family name instead of a place name, but you can tell I intended something leonine with it. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the genesis for this whole novel started with a line in The Three Musketeers, where Milady is described as "a lioness embarked" when she's on her way to assassinate negotiate with Buckingham. Clearly I had to give a nod to that origin somewhere in text.
Place names:
Lucernica is the capital of the Lucernic Empire, and it's also used synecdochically to represent the whole empire. Understandably, it is Paris equivalent, and it takes its name from the Latin "lux" or "luce." Because Paris is the City of Lights, of course ;) It also brings to mind the Roman name for Paris, Lutetia.
Petrochon, the city Bizel is Lord Mayor of, is a lot of things all rolled into one. Its location relative to the capital, and its position in the story, make it roughly equivalent to La Rochelle. (Where, incidentally, I lived in France!) But it also plays the part of London, since that's where the equivalent of the diamond studs plot happens. Moreover, I really wanted to have a city that looks like Mont St. Michel.
Thus the name is kind of a mashup. "La Rochelle" literally means "little rock." "Petra" is a declension of the Latin word for "stone," and so I kind of smooshed that together with the "ch" in La Rochelle and the "on" from London. (Although the French word for London is actually "Londres," but whatever).
Lisieres, the city on the coast near Petrochon, is roughly equivalent to Poitiers, the capital of the the Poitou-Charentes region of France, which includes La Rochelle. In my story, Lisieres was originally farther away from Petrochon, but one of the alpha readers for v1 pointed out it would be improbable for an island city not to have a city on the mainland supporting it.
Also as it turns out "lisiere" is an Old French word for "border," so it works, too, as some place on the edge of empire.
Incidentally, one of my favorite landmarks in La Rochelle--the waterfront towers guarding the bay--ended up in Lisieres instead.
Bargue, Estevien's hometown, is based off Brouage, a tiny walled town near La Rochelle, which was the birthplace of Samuel de Champlain. You can in fact stand in the center of Brouage and see the walls on all four sides, and wonder, as I did--and as Yfre does in Bargue--what growing up in a town this limited does to a person.
Other locations are less interesting. Sarciel I can't recall a specific meaning for, but I can tell you it's in the equivalent of the Finistere. Same for Murchaia; I think of it in the location of Strasbourg, making it along the eastern border of an expanding empire. Maraisude (lit. the southern marsh) is too long a name, and will have to be changed, but it's supposed to be Marseille. Brejeanne is Bordeaux. Agivrat, I think I was thinking of Angers, a city near Nantes. Or Agincourt. Or both. I don't remember.
The currency. The Lucerns use "ecu" (a gold coin) and "piastre"** (a silver coin) which shut up I know they're currencies from different times in France. In keeping with the Old French names, I recently changed them to "escut" (which also means "shield" in old French) and "plastre."
Forms of address:
I spent a long time figuring out the old French versions of "madame," "monsieur," and "mademoiselle," because I thought they would be an unobtrusive way of using my language-building in the novel. Before I found Old French dictionaries online, I was digging through Yvain looking for these. From this I learned "mes sire" and "ma dame," but I found myself stumped for the final one--as M. de Troyes, much like Aramis, wasn't in the habit of addressing unmarried ladies. I later learned it was "ma damoisele" (or variant spellings). Interestingly, Old French has an equivalent for young unmarried men, "damoisel," without the final "e" (and with a matching masculine article or pronoun).
I also looked up the Old French equivalent of some of the French terms of endearment my host parents used for me: "ma biche" (my doe) and "ma cocotte" (my little chicken). "Ma cocotte" still eludes me, but "ma biche" in Old French is "ma bisse," a term which I put in Bizel's mouth in addressing Yfre.
Later, for whatever reason, I found myself looking at a list of Old French feminine nouns, and imagining them as terms of endearment Bizel would use. A surprising number were suitable ("ma empereriz," my empress), and those that weren't, were just hilarious ("ma devoureresse," my... devourer?)
From there, I had the idea of having Bizel address Yfre in increasingly ridiculous terms of endearment. I even have a list I intend to use! This may be a darling I later need to kill, but for the moment, it tickles me.
Anyway, long post! Executive summary: I am a big language nerd and learning new things about Old French gives me ideas.
* and to some extent, until today--my third host family told a story about a carpenter friend visiting from Toulouse who confused them all for asking for "un peigne" (a comb) at the dinner table. (His accent made it unclear he was asking for "pain," bread).
** Trufax: In addition to being currency in 1910s Egypt, and thus in Shadows of Amun, "piastre" is also what certain Quebecois call Canadian dollar coins.