Valyrian Names in Game of Thrones

As I touched upon in my review of Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin’s character names are… how to put this?  Well, from a linguistic perspective, they’re not good. From Valyrian to Dothraki, few names are distinctive or realistic.

I took actual names we still use today, like ‘Robert’, and in some case I tweaked them a little bit. I made “Edward” into “Eddard.”

George R.R. Martin

You might wonder what’s wrong with this, and I would say that there’s nothing wrong with it so long as your cast of characters doesn’t exceed a few dozen.  It’s also important that these changes in spelling actually correspond to changes in pronunciation.

Sadly neither of these is true here.  Game of Thrones has over a thousand named characters, and George R.R. Martin respells names like Marjorie (his spelling being “Margaery”) without changing the pronunciation at all.  And if you think he had a good reason for it, keep reading; I assure you he didn’t.

Note that many of the Westerosi names do appear that way in Medieval texts; this isn’t strictly a question of realism. However, on the subject of historical accuracy, Martin doesn’t seem to understand what “no standardized system of spelling” actually means.

It’s also a bit ironic for an author to complain about others’ character names being “too hard to pronounce” while employing nonstandard spellings that actively make common names harder to pronounce. This has the consequence of confusing readers, while offering few—if any—real benefits.

Worse, even the Valyrian names that George R.R. Martin invented from whole cloth are spelled so inconsistently that one can’t even begin to guess how they’re pronounced.

International Phonetic Alphabet

Because I’ll be comparing spellings with pronunciations, I’m going to have to use something more consistent than the English alphabet.  It’s called the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA), and it’s designed to allow linguists to transcribe any sound in human language with as little ambiguity as possible.

Every language uses a different set of sounds, whether that includes plosives like /t/, fricatives like /z/, or even clicks like /ǃ/.

Brackets

First of all, an International Phonetic Alphabet transcription surrounded by forward slashes like /ˈðɪs/ is called a “phonemic” transcription.  It represents the way the word is pronounced relative to the sounds in a language.  Don’t worry about that thing that looks like an apostrophe; that’s just the stress marker, and it doesn’t matter much here.

Square brackets like [ˈðɪs] represent “phonetic” transcription, which is less subjective than phonemic transcription.  However, for our purposes it’s not necessary to worry about this.  However, I will use square brackets for isolated phonemes like this one: [qʰ].

When a word is enclosed in angle brackets like ⟨this⟩, that means it represents the way the word is spelt using whatever writing system the language uses.

Why Use the IPA?

This might come as a shock if you’ve learnt about “long vowels” and “short vowels,” but English doesn’t have vowel length anymore.  The word we spell ⟨book⟩ isn’t pronounced with a long [oː].  It used to be, but now it’s pronounced /bʊk/ in most places.

This is just one example of how you can’t tell how something should be pronounced just by the spelling (which I’ll sometimes refer to as the “orthography”).  Worse, there’s more than one way to pronounce a word.  Thus, the International Phonetic Alphabet is necessary when discussing language.

Tweaking Modern Names

One of the things I want to get across in this article is that writing is just a tool for representing language; words on the page are not equivalent to spoken language.  Game of Thrones doesn’t seem to realize this, as many of its names are merely real-world names with different spellings—spellings that only serve to make things confusing for the reader.

Standardized spelling in English, for example, is a relatively recent invention that came with the printing press.  Before that, people didn’t really care how you spelt a word so long as they could tell what word it was.  But once standard spellings were introduced, they were frozen in time even as the language changed.  This is why /bʊk/ is spelt ⟨book⟩.

Lost Etymology

I took actual names we still use today, like ‘Robert’, and in some case I tweaked them a little bit. I made “Edward” into “Eddard.”

George R.R. Martin

The most obvious problem with taking modern English (or, more accurately, modern American) names and tweaking them to such a minute extent is that it doesn’t feel as though we’re reading about a different culture, let alone a different world.

This is especially a problem here, as “Medieval historical accuracy” is the author’s go-to excuse for framing his characters’ atrocities as acceptable. Perhaps even worse (at least where this article is concerned) is that Martin’s method robs a name of all the etymology that makes it interesting.

The Origin of Ned

The diminutive “Ned” exists because the word “my” used to be “mīn” and people used to say “mīn Ēadweard” or “mīn Ēd” as a term of endearment.  As happens surprisingly often in language, “mīn Ēd” became “mī Nēd.”

When George R.R. Martin tweaked “Edward” and made “Eddard,” he essentially lost all that etymology.  “Eddard” is now a name that exists in a vacuum.

Winterfell

As it happens, Ned Stark is the lord of a place called “Winterfell.”  This ties into my point because, despite its name being rendered in plain English, “Winterfell” has apparently existed for around eight thousand years!

Consider for a moment that within a mere one thousand years, a Celtic village called Bre (“the hill”) acquired the Old English suffix “-dūn” (“hill”) from its Germanic conquerers, only to later become known as Breedon on the Hill (“Hill-Hill on the Hill”) after its later inhabitants no longer understood the meaning of either element.

Since the author based Winterfell on the real-life city of York, let’s explore how much the name has changed from its original form in a little less than two thousand years.

Given that Winterfell and many of the other places in Westeros have existed for thousands of years, the fact that almost all of them are still intelligible to the people living there is… unlikely.  Unless they translate their place names every hundred years, it’s downright impossible.

The strange timelessness of Westerosi place names suggests that language in Martin’s world doesn’t evolve like it does in ours.  I very much doubt that people in Martin’s world ever said “mīn Ēd,” which makes me wonder why the name “Ned” exists in Westeros.

Whereas names like “Ned” and “Jon” have long, complex histories in our world, the Westerosi equivalents feel like they simply materialized from the aether fully formed, unchanging through the countless years.  This has the effect of making Martin’s whole world feel artificial, too.

Catelyn

English speakers will be naturally inclined to pronounce it /ˈkeɪtlɪn/ when it’s supposed to be /ˈkætlɪn/ (which is close to the French and Irish pronunciation).

George R.R. Martin’s version of the name (Catelyn) doesn’t have the complicated etymology of ⟨Caitlin⟩, so its spelling should rightly be made as straightforward as possible so that readers know how they should pronounce it.  Something like ⟨Katlyn⟩ or ⟨Catlin⟩ would have easily sufficed.

Margaery

These range from ⟨Jeyne⟩ instead of ⟨Jane⟩ to ⟨Margaery⟩ instead of ⟨Marjorie⟩, and they’re probably the worst names in Martin’s work. Supposedly these respellings are intended to reflect archaic spellings in High Valyrian.

Unfortunately, George R.R. Martin has already talked about how spellings weren’t standardized in the Middle Ages, and spellings only reflect old pronunciations when they’re standardized.  Otherwise people just spell words however they sound.

Tolkien’s Names

Tolkien was a philologist, and an Oxford don, and could spend decades laboriously inventing Elvish in all its detail.  I, alas, am only a hardworking SF and fantasy novel, and I don’t have his gift for languages.

George R.R. Martin

Ah, yes…  We come again to one of George R.R. Martin’s favourite pastimes: comparing himself to Tolkien.  At least this time he admits he’s outmatched, even if the compliment is a bit backhanded.

J.R.R. Tolkien created entire families of languages, which certainly came in handy when making up character names.  It certainly shows in his work, as Tolkien’s character names were some of the best ever conceived.

The secret to his success was simple; Tolkien had a lexicon full of words to be combined with each other.  Although the work involved in making an entire language like Sindarin is immense, it’s really not that difficult to make up names in this way, as we’ll see later in this article.

Elanor

I’m going to use one of Tolkien’s character names as an example: “Elanor.”  For those of you who’ve not read The Lord of the Rings, Elanor Gamgee is the eldest daughter of the chief hero Samwise Gamgee.

While it is natural to assume that the name “Elanor” is just a respelling of “Eleanor,” it’s really a Sindarin compound meaning “sun star.”  We can see this in the original name of Minas Tirith: “Minas Anor,” which means “Tower of the Sun.”  As for the other element, we have Aragorn’s regnal name: “Elessar,” meaning “elf-stone.”

What does “Benjen” mean? Nothing. It’s just a collection of letters. Not even sounds—just letters! Because, as it happens, George R.R. Martin rarely gives any thought to how a name should sound; is it any wonder his names sound bland and generic?

Etymology

We’ll depart for a moment from the topic of phonology and discuss another way in which Westerosi names fail: even when they have some etymology, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

Etymology is the historical origin and development of individual words, and it’s obviously an important concept for fiction writers—regardless of genre or setting. My own name, for example, is Hamish /ˈheːmɪʃ/. It’s a name with a rather convoluted history, first attested as the Hebrew name Yaʿaqóv, which most likely derived from an earlier name meaning “May God protect.”

The name “Yaʿaqóv” then entered Ancient Greek, resulting in “Ἰάκωβος” /i.á˦kɔːbos/, followed by Latin “Iacobus” /jaːˈkoː.bus/; this was later spelt ⟨Jacobus⟩ to differentiate the approximant [j] from the full vowel [i]. The [j] sound became [dj] in Vulgar Latin, and by the time one dialect had evolved into Old French, it was pronounced [d͡ʒ]—same as in modern English.

The name had become “Jacomus” in Vulgar Latin, which then descended into the the Old French form: “James,” which entered Middle English as “James” /ˈdʒaːməs/.

Long before “James” became a common name in England, however, it caught on in Scotland. Now, Scottish Gaelic doesn’t use the sound [d͡ʒ], and it would have been hard for Hielanders back then to pronounce a Northern Middle English name like /ˈdʒɛːməs/.

On top of that, Scottish Gaelic names take different forms depending on their role in a sentence. This meant that the resulting name was “Seumas” /ˈʃeːməs/ when referring to the subject or object of a verb, but it became “Sheumais” /ˈheːməʃ/ when addressing someone directly.

The former made its way into Ireland and became the modern name Séamas, while in Scotland the latter became /ˈheːmɪʃ/. Eventually, the spelling was anglicized to ⟨Hamish⟩ so that English speakers would have an easier time pronouncing it (although I can attest that Canadians who’re not of a Scottish background still get my name wrong… a lot).

There are numerous names that share a common ancestor with mine across many cultures.  Aside from the English name James /ˈd͡ʒeɪmz/ and its diminutive Jim /ˈd͡ʒɪm/, the name Hamish has cognates such as…

• Jacob /ˈd͡ʒeɪkəb/ in English
• Séamus /ˈʃeːməs/ in Irish
• Kuba /ˈku.ba/ in Polish
• Iago /ˈjagɔ/ in Cymraeg
• Jacques /ʒɑk/ in French
• Hemi /ˈhemi/ in Māori
• Jakob /ˈjaː.kɔp/ in various Germanic languages
• Yaska /ˈjɑs.kɑ/in Finnish
• and many, many more…

Which brings us to another of Martin’s character names:

Jaime Lannister

And then there’s the fact that the spelling ⟨Jaime⟩ occurs mostly in Spanish and Portuguese; in Modern English it’s usually a feminine spelling. This, too, may contribute to readers’ confusion.

If he didn’t want readers to say /ˈd͡ʒeɪ̯m/ or /ˈd͡ʒaɪ̯m/, maybe he shouldn’t have chosen a nonstandard spelling. Especially if it’s a spelling that often is pronounced /ˈʒajm/ in Portuguese.

Also, in Medieval England, there were several regional pronunciations of “James,” including /ˈdʒaːm/, so assuming Martin actually cares about “historical realism,” there’s no reason /ˈd͡ʒeɪ̯m/ should bother him.

Brandon Stark

Although Brandon Stark’s name is less arguably bad than many others in Game of Thrones, I do think his name is illustrative of one of the reasons Westeros so often feels hollow. Bran’s name is unusual among Westerosi names in that there’s nothing wrong with the sound or spelling; the problem is etymological.

Bran is trained as a “skinchanger” by the mysterious “three-eyed crow” (“three-eyed raven” in the show), who teaches him to possess ravens. And at first glance, the name “Bran” seems meaningful, since the Cymraeg name “Brân” means “crow” or “raven.”

The problem is that Bran Stark’s name isn’t technically Bran; that’s just a shortening of his proper name: Brandon. “Brandon” isn’t even from the same language as “Brân,” and the former’s meaning is far less meaningful for the character.

“Brandon” does not, in fact, mean “raven.” Rather, it’s an English name meaning “broom-hill,” in the sense of a hill that’s covered in broom: a type of flowering shrub that’s common in Britain.

Brandon the Builder

Such a dissonance in etymology could work quite well for worldbuilding if we assumed that the name “Brandon” (“broom-hill”) began as a common name among the conquering Andals but became erroneously conflated with the similar-sounding First Men name “Bran” (“raven”).

Unfortunately for such interpretations, the Stark family is said to have been founded somewhere between six and eight thousand years ago by a legendary figure called Brandon the Builder, styled the King of Winter—millennia prior to the Andal invasion.

Thus, “Brandon” is established in the text as the original name, of which we are to assume “Bran” is merely a diminutive. This means that any meaning the name Brân has in Cymraeg is non-existent in the context of Brandon Stark’s name. Etymologically speaking, he is Brandon, not “Bran.”

Brandon < Beorn

For an example of something similar that’s done right, look no further than another skinchanger from a much better book. In The Hobbit, we meet Beorn, a creature who can take the form of either a tall, black-haired man or a huge black bear.

The name “Beorn” means “warrior” in Old English, which definitely fits, but “Beorn” also sounds a lot like the Norse “Bjǫrn,” which means “bear.” In fact, “bjǫrn” even shares a common ancestor with “beorn.”

Beorn’s name is meaningful both in itself and its relationship to “bjǫrn.” By contrast, I can’t see how a hill covered in broom relates to Brandon’s character at all. Worse, as I’ve said, making his name “Brandon” arguably robs “Bran” of the meaning it could have had.

It’s possible this was intended as some sort of pun, with Bran’s name simply bearing a resemblance to “Brân” (“raven”) despite his proper name meaning something unrelated. Might the author have been trying to do something like what Tolkien did with Beorn?

While I won’t discount the possibility altogether, I’ve seen nothing in Game of Thrones to suggest that George R.R. Martin would think to attempt such a layered etymology for one of his characters.

Assumed Diminutives

It seems more likely that Martin found the name “Bran” in a book of baby names, saw that it meant “raven,” and just assumed it was short for “Brandon.”

As I said at the beginning, Bran Stark’s name is far less of a problem than most of the names I’ve discussed here. For one thing, most readers won’t know that “Bran” means “raven,” nor that “Brandon” means “broom-hill.”

Unlike the confusing phonology and ex nihilo place names, “Brandon” won’t impact most readers’ experience of the story. Especially if they’ve not watched interviews where the author pretentiously boasts of his story’s supposed “realism” while directing backhanded compliments at better writers.

Old Ghiscari, Fricative Trills, and Linguistic Colonialism

At one point in the story, we learn that Tyrion Lannister speaks a dead language called Old Ghiscari, in which “zzzs” are supposedly “rolled.”  Tyrion remarks that in order to speak Old Ghiscari properly, you need to have “a bee up your nose.”

What Martin means by a “rolled zzz,” or even why he rendered it like that instead of actually describing the sound is anyone’s guess.

My best guess is that he’s referring to a voiced alveolar fricative trill [r̝], which occurs in some Slavic languages and falls somewhere between the voiced alveolar trill [r] and fricative [ʒ].  But when Tyrion says the “zzzs” are “rolled,” I can’t help but wonder: by what metric is he classifying them as ⟨z⟩?

I would assume that speakers of Old Ghiscari didn’t consider [r̝] to be the same sound as [r] or [ʒ]; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a phonemic distinction.  And it must have been phonemic, since we know that until the field of historical linguistics developed, people speaking Latin didn’t even realize they were pronouncing ⟨c⟩ and ⟨w⟩ wrong.

Assuming the language lacked an unrolled [z] phoneme and Tyrion somehow knows about Old Ghiscari’s phonetic intricacies, I have to ask how exactly he could possibly know something so precise—unless Westeros has something resembling the International Phonetic Alphabet that’s been in use since before the rise of Valyria five thousand years ago.

How to Define a “zzz”

Either way, the question remains: what makes [r̝] a [z]-type sound?  The only way I can think of would be if the Ghiscari language shared a relatively recent ancestor with Westerosi—which, according to Martin, is coincidentally an exact replica of American English—and thus had a large proportion of cognate words.

In that case, an English/Westerosi word with a [z] sound in it would correspond to a Ghiscari word with an [r̝].  For example, Westerosi “breeze” /bɹiːz/ would share a common root with a Ghiscari word like /vuˈrir̝ːi/ or something, similar to how English “sword” /sɔː(ɹ)d/ and German “Schwert” [ʃʋeːɐ̯t] both descend from Proto-West Germanic /*swerd/.

It might need to have been a recent ancestor, though. I mean, have you ever tried singing traditional Scots ballads to someone from North America? I can only speak from experience, but despite Scots being the English language’s closest cousin, North Americans always ask me to translate afterwards.

Given how Old Ghiscari is portrayed in the books, I very much doubt it’s closely related to English Westerosi.

Bastard Valyrian

On a slightly less humorous note, the Westeros Wiki page for Old Ghiscari has some distinctly racist undertones.  The wording seems very much in keeping with what I’ve read of the books, and I’d be very much surprised if these weren’t near-direct quotes:

Old Ghiscari is a guttural-sounding language, described by Tyrion Lannister as harsh and ugly and by Victarion Greyjoy as full of growls and hisses. “Zzzs” are rolled in the language. Its writing uses glyphs.

A Wiki of Ice and Fire

Alright… that sounds like it was written sixty years ago.  And “glyphs”?  What exactly is that supposed to mean?  Last I checked, all writing systems use glyphs!  Maybe try being a smidgen more specific than the most all-encompassing term imaginable.

Old Ghiscari developed from the ancient city of Ghis in Ghiscar. The region was conquered by the Valyrian Freehold in five Ghiscari wars, however, and the Ghiscari people became slaves of Valyria. The Slaver Cities instead came to speak bastard Valyrian, High Valyrian corrupted and flavored with Ghiscari.

A Wiki of Ice and Fire

Um… this talk of High Valyrian being “corrupted” and “flavoured” is making me uneasy.

A mongrel tongue, a blend of Old Ghiscari and High Valyrian, is also spoken along Slaver’s Bay. Maester Kedry is fluent in this mongrel Ghiscari. The bearded woman of Yezzan zo Qaggaz’s grotesquerie speaks in a mongrel Ghiscari which Tyrion Lannister finds uncomprehensible. ^[sic]

A Wiki of Ice and Fire

Well, that just got so much worse!  Bloody hell.  First there’s the phrase “mongrel tongue” used in reference to a creole language; the implicit racism is rather obvious.  And then we have the bearded slave woman kept by a rich collector of deformed people, described as incomprehensible due to her “impure,” “corrupted,” “mongrel” tongue.

To be clear, none of these things are illegitimate as subject matter.  The problem, as usual, is that the text of Game of Thrones never bothers to frame these aspects of its fictional cultures—in this case, racism, ableism, and a general disdain for those who look different from “the normal”—as the harmful bigotries they are.

Instead, the story consistently frames cruelty and inequality as an inevitable and even necessary part of society.

Valyrian Names

It’s time to look at George R.R. Martin’s other method of creating names: throwing a bunch of random letters together without considering how they’ll sound.  As I hope will be clear by the end of the article, there is a right and a wrong way to do this.  Martin does it the wrong way.

The best I could do was try to sketch in each of the chief tongues of my imaginary world in broad strokes, and give them each their characteristic sounds and spellings.

George R.R. Martin

By this Martin means that he has a vague idea of how a language should sound, and he combines letters from the English alphabet till he has a name he thinks sounds Valyrian.

Because he doesn’t work from a set of root words, this makes Valyrian names look like a homogenized collection of letters.  Most of them begin with the same few letters and sound remarkably similar.  Here are just a few of them:

• Aegon
• Gaemon
• Aemon
• Aemond
• Aerys
• Daenys
• Daenerys
• Jaehaerys
• Maegon
• Rhaenys
• Rhaegar
• Vaegon
• Viserra
• Visenya
• Viserys

David Peterson

If you want to see the Valyrian language done right, then ironically the best place to look is the official High Valyrian language by language creator David J. Peterson.

Peterson started with all the Valyrian names and miscellaneous words George R.R. Martin created, but he built an inventory of phonemes for the language—not to mention the language’s grammar.

He’s even written a book on how you can make languages.

If you look at the current High Valyrian vocabulary, you’ll notice that the words David Peterson presumably made for the language are infinitely more interesting than Martin’s.  Here are just a few examples I found:

• [qrinunˈteŋka]
• [ˈtolvi͡ot]
• [pryˈɟatys]
• [kustiˈkagon]
• [ˈru͡aka]

Spelling and Pronunciation of Westerosi and Valyrian Names

Aside from George R.R. Martin’s character names lacking any distinctive flavour, there’s another huge problem: pronunciation.  How you pronounce a name should be the first thing you think about when making one up, but this isn’t even on Martin’s list of priorities.

I came to not care much about pronunciation. Pronounce the names of my characters however you like.

George R.R. Martin

Too Difficult

There’s no advantage to George R.R. Martin’s vagueness of pronunciation, and it may even slow the reader down.  It doesn’t help the plot, and it reflects only laziness on the part of the author.  Of course, not content with putting in the least effort possible, Martin criticizes other authors for trying to make their names even remotely interesting:

A lot of fantasy names are too much. They’re too difficult to pronounce.

George R.R. Martin

While it is true that some fantasy authors make unpronounceable names that end up being distracting, it’s usually the result of such authors doing more-or-less the same thing Martin does: tossing some letters together and calling it done.  There’s a lot to be said for bothering to learn how the human mouth works.

This quote is particularly irritating because it’s hypocritical; the character names in Game of Thrones, whether Valyrian names or Westerosi, tend to have confusing spellings that make pronouncing them at least as difficult as those in other books.

Confusion

Now, this isn’t too hard for an English-speaker, as both names are pretty standard as English spelling goes.  The problem only becomes apparent when we get to the names Martin intended to sound foreign.

Concerning Valyrian names, we have ⟨Aegon⟩, ⟨Aeron⟩, ⟨Aerion⟩, and ⟨Daenerys⟩, which are pronounced /ˈeɪɡɔn/, /ˈɛəɹən/, /ˈɑɹiɒn/, and /dəˈnɛəɹɪs/, respectively.

If we just look at how the digraph ⟨ae⟩ is pronounced in each of them, we have four totally different pronunciations: [eɪ], [ɛə], [ɑ], and [ə].  Without a pronunciation guide, there’s no intuitive way to know how Valyrian names sound.

We don’t even know if we’re supposed to pronounce a single vowel or a diphthong, because George R.R. Martin didn’t bother to decide beforehand what ⟨ae⟩ means in his Valyrian names. The result is just all over the place.

Living Words

What George R.R. Martin doesn’t seem to realize is that a name that you’re not told how to pronounce is arguably worse than a name that you can’t pronounce.  If you’re reading this, it’s almost certain that you can’t pronounce a ǃXóõ word like /ǂnùhã/—I certainly can’t, despite knowing more-or-less how to pronounce it.

This is an extreme example that probably won’t be used in most modern fantasy stories, but even if you can’t pronounce a name like Thranduil (it’s something like /ˈθrɑn.du̯il/), there’s at least a sense that Tolkien knew how to pronounce it.  This makes it easier for the reader to hear the word in their head as they read it, which is important for making a language—and the world it exists in, for that matter—feel alive.

The Right Way

If you’ve always wanted to write a fantasy story, you may well be asking, “But what do I do instead?  How am I supposed to make names for my characters?”  After all, not everyone has the time to make a whole language.

I’ve written an article where I explain how to “tweak” names effectively, but here I’ll focus on how you can make a “naming language.”  A naming language isn’t a full language: only a vocabulary of perhaps as few as a hundred words and some basic grammar rules.  That’s really all you need.

Choose Consonants

The hardest part of this will likely be realizing that letters don’t matter—at least for the moment.  You’re going to need to think in terms of sounds (specifically phonemes).  A phoneme is any sound that a particular language uses to convey meaning.

For spoken languages (though not for sign-languages) phonemic sounds are produced in the mouth in numerous ways.  We’ll begin with consonants, of which the most common are made by pushing one part of your mouth (often the tongue) against another part and pushing air through in various ways.

There are various places of articulation and manners of articulation, which linguists often arrange by way of a chart:

There are a lot more sounds on this chart than in English—or any other language, for that matter.  When creating a language, we only need to choose a few of them.  This can be as simple as printing out an International Phonetic Alphabet chart on a piece of paper and circling the sounds you want.

For this example I based the phonemic inventory on how George R.R. Martin pronounces the Valyrian names in Game of Thrones.

Choose Vowels

Like the consonants, they’re closer to modern English than the sounds of a fantasy language probably should be.

One could easily remove a few of these sounds, which would make it sound more like its own language, but I’m trying to stick as close to Martin’s Valyrian as I can.

From this point, were we making a full language, we’d want to decide where each sound is allowed to appear in any given syllable.  Syllables almost always have what’s called a nucleus, which usually contains a vowel phoneme.

The syllable can have an onset that comes before the nucleus and/or a coda that comes after it, and those can each contain a consonant, a cluster of consonants, or nothing at all.  However, I’m trying to keep this article relatively short so we’ll assume Valyrian names have syllables that are somewhat like English.

Roots

Now that we have an inventory of sounds (phonemes) that exist in the Valyrian language, we need to think up some root words.  We can do this by combining consonants with vowels, always making sure the word conforms to the constraints we’ve set for ourselves.  Here are a few that I extrapolated from George R.R. Martin’s Valyrian character names:

• /ˈɡɔn/
• /ˈeɪ/
• /ˈiɒn/
• /ˈɹɪs/
• /ˈɑɹ/
• /ˈdən/
• /ˈɛə/
• /ˈɹən/

It’s a good idea at this point to assign meanings to each of these elements in a spreadsheet.  Not only does it lend depth and realism to names, but it’s also great for inspiration.  If you know what a character is like, you can look up the relevant words in your lexicon and see how they sound together.  But once again, for brevity’s sake, we’ll ignore meanings here.

Respelling “Daen”

Since we’ve thus far worked with pronunciations rather than spellings, we’re in the perfect position to give the name /dəˈnɛəɹɪs/ a more intuitive spelling: one that would have made pronouncing it a whole lot easier for many readers.

The best way to do this is to work out some basic rules for how a language will be written in the Latin script.  We want these rules to be as straightforward as possible: ⟨a⟩ for /ɑ/, ⟨d⟩ for /d/ and so on.

For a language like this one, I find that ⟨y⟩ works well for representing two different sounds: [j] before a vowel and [ɪ] before a consonant.  The most important thing, however, is to be mostly consistent in how you spell names in a given language.

For the /dəˈn-/ part, I think it’s pretty obvious how we should represent the consonants (with ⟨d⟩ and ⟨n⟩).  The vowel [ə] is slightly more ambiguous, as the standard English alphabet doesn’t have a symbol specifically for that sound (which is called a “schwa”).

Still, it’s not that difficult; just use almost anything other than ⟨ae⟩!  That is, unless you’ve decided that ⟨ae⟩ will always stand for [ə]; then it’s fine.  Either ⟨a⟩ or ⟨e⟩ will work fine here, but I’ll go with ⟨a⟩.

Respelling “erys”

We could follow the pattern of using ⟨a⟩ for /ə/ and go with ⟨ea⟩, for example.  Another option is to assume that readers will anglicize [ɛə] to [eɪ], which would make ⟨ei⟩ just as viable.

However, I think an ⟨é⟩ with an acute accent is probably the best option, as it not only suggests an [e] sound (as opposed to [ɛ]) but also hints that that syllable should be stressed.

Lastly we have /-ɪs/.  As I said at the beginning, I think that ⟨y⟩ is the perfect letter for the job.  It naturally makes people think of the [ɪ] sound when followed by a consonant, and it doesn’t feel like it should be pronounced [i] the way ⟨i⟩ does.

In fact, that’s probably the best spelling choice I’ve ever seen in a Valyrian name (not that it’s consistent across other Valyrian names; it isn’t).  Thus we’re left with the spelling ⟨Danérys⟩.  It’s a subtle change, but it makes the name far easier to pronounce.

We can do the same with other Valyrian names.  A name like ⟨Aerion⟩ becomes ⟨Arion⟩, ⟨Aegon⟩ becomes ⟨Eigon⟩, and ⟨Aeron⟩ becomes ⟨Éron⟩.  Not only are these names now much easier to pronounce, but they’re more visually different from each other.  This makes them more interesting and easier to keep track of in your head.

We Can Do Better than Valyrian Names

There’s a trick to making interesting character names that readers can pronounce, but I hope I’ve demystified it somewhat.  In learning how to do things right, examining how a work fails can be just as helpful as reading a story that gets it right.  Often one must do both.

Martin’s version of the Valyrian language teaches us that tweaking modern names and playing around with letters is insufficient.  David J. Peterson’s Valyrian language teaches us that a talented artist can make something great from even an incoherent mess of ⟨ae⟩s.

Although English-speakers who read a fantasy story are likely to anglicize pronunciations anyway, you should still make an effort so your character and place names make sense.

Making up names doesn’t have to be hard.  Understanding the basics of how speech sounds are made can go a long way.  Just remember that you don’t have to make a full language if you don’t want to; you need some basic phonology and grammar, and that’s it.