You mean someone actively looking to be irked for the purposes of social outrage is only looking at the surface of the very thing they're irked by? This is shocking to me.

I'm still irked that Lake Geneva Wisconsin culturally appropriated from the Swiss!

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1066466And I don't necessarily disagree with some of your underlying interests here. I think better understanding of other cultures and their mythology is good on the whole. But if you are going to use real world myth and legend as a hammer that stifles people's creativity, I think you only end up breeding resentment. Again, not everyone is going to have the same level of expertise with this stuff.

Basically everyone has some sacred cows, though some people have more than others. For example, Shark started a long thread recently on "Why Did They Kill The Paladin? ", which was about stifling creativity about what paladins should be like, as you phrase it.

I usually like killing sacred cows for delicious sacred hamburger. Still, I don't think it's cause for much resentment that some people are attached to them.

Actually, mangled naming bothers me more than straying from mythology. And I am bugged by ignorance of the source more than deliberate change.

Quote from: jhkim;1066474Actually, mangled naming bothers me more than straying from mythology. And I am bugged by ignorance of the source more than deliberate change.

I have no problem with people killing sacred cows in their games or with a person being personally annoyed by ignorance of source material. What I dislike is everyone treating this like a zero sum game where the goal is for everyone to do things the same: the right way to be creative. It comes from all sides I agree. It is when it becomes a rule, or just a basic assumption of the community, then I think it turns from your personal annoyance to something that stifles people to be creative (which is what this is all about).

Specifically on the point of knowledge of source material: I am all for it and strive for it myself. But nothing kills enthusiasm for a genre, myth or history faster in my experience than making people feel small because they don't know as much as you or as some expert. I think it is okay for people to come at this from different levels of experience, knowledge and education level.

One of my main concerns with the 'culturally Authentic=equals morally better and better quality play' is it becomes elitist and it often pits people who have the masters degrees and PhDs in the hobby against those who don't (or it pits the people who have dedicated a million nerd hours into something against those who haven't). Some will have deep knowledge of middle eastern folklore and Arabic when they make genies for a game, some will be going off pop culture knowledges. I don't think either way is wrong.

Quote from: jhkim;1066474I usually like killing sacred cows for delicious sacred hamburger. Still, I don't think it's cause for much resentment that some people are attached to them.

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That isn't what I was trying to say. I was saying if you establish a bar to entry with a list of rules for proper handling of myth in creative ventures like Box of Crayons is doing, people react to that with resentment. It doesn't produce greater interest in understanding the source material. It puts people on the defensive. They become more closed to what you are suggesting rather than more open.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1066480That isn't what I was trying to say. I was saying if you establish a bar to entry with a list of rules for proper handling of myth in creative ventures like Box of Crayons is doing, people react to that with resentment. It doesn't produce greater interest in understanding the source material. It puts people on the defensive. They become more closed to what you are suggesting rather than more open.

Gee, that sounds familiar.

Oh boy here we go again. Are you sure you found the right website?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1066477One of my main concerns with the 'culturally Authentic=equals morally better and better quality play' is it becomes elitist and it often pits people who have the masters degrees and PhDs in the hobby against those who don't (or it pits the people who have dedicated a million nerd hours into something against those who haven't). Some will have deep knowledge of middle eastern folklore and Arabic when they make genies for a game, some will be going off pop culture knowledges. I don't think either way is wrong.

I completely agree with this. Purist vs non-purist, authentic vs non-authentic, edition X vs edition Y - these are generally just arguments over taste in RPGs - and the answer has to be that its fine to have different tastes.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1066480That isn't what I was trying to say. I was saying if you establish a bar to entry with a list of rules for proper handling of myth in creative ventures like Box of Crayons is doing, people react to that with resentment. It doesn't produce greater interest in understanding the source material. It puts people on the defensive. They become more closed to what you are suggesting rather than more open.

Yeah. I disagree with BoxCrayonTales, I'm just saying that everyone's got some point of taste that gets them upset. Whether its purism for Gygaxian D&D or purism for Greek myth or purism for whatever, it's generally wrong - but also not something to get resentful or defensive about.

Many folklore monsters have different names that effectively name the same creature, especially if the monster occurs in various cultures or their tales are retold in various languages. I understand the OP's issue and I appreciate the oddness in naming. D&D has Red Dragons and Frost Giants, but no Ice Genie or Swamp Scorpion.

However, in general, I prefer monsters to have unique names - ESPECIALLY if it adds to the flavor the setting. AKA, in Al-Qadim, it's cool to have arabic sounding monsters.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1066492Many folklore monsters have different names that effectively name the same creature, especially if the monster occurs in various cultures or their tales are retold in various languages. I understand the OP's issue and I appreciate the oddness in naming. D&D has Red Dragons and Frost Giants, but no Ice Genie or Swamp Scorpion.

However, in general, I prefer monsters to have unique names - ESPECIALLY if it adds to the flavor the setting. AKA, in Al-Qadim, it's cool to have arabic sounding monsters.

Greetings!

Yeah, you're quite right, Spinachcat. I'm reminded of the oh, you know, how in Gaelic, Germanic, and Slavic languages and mythology--there's a dozen different names each all for essentially the same type of creature. Russian and Slavic myths, for example, having at least a dozen different regional names for the same small group of water or forest dryads and nymphs. Even with that--I'm using Greek derivations that translate over to these creatures described in the Slavic languages, which also embrace many different regional variations.

Jhinn, Genie, Jhann--all the same names for essentially the same creature. People have been using those names for such creatures for centuries--long before game designers ever came on the scene.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

So whats next? The cultural mis-appropriation of Kanaloa as is represented by the Mind Flayer? Krypto is a gross misrepresentation of Laelaps? Buggs Bunny is a pale imitation of Tu'er Shen?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066440I'm not broken up about this that I can tell, aside from finding the identical pronunciation silly. I'm bored and I can't remember the last time I asked anyone else for a second opinion. I enjoy engaging in deconstructionism, the critical analysis method.

The most popular monsters have those sorts of easily comprehensible names. Red dragon, frost giant, air elemental, gelatinous cube, rust monster, etc.

"Bad bowel movement" is putting it mildly. The non-element genie's name sounds like "Johnny" or "Janet." How would you feel if your entire species were called Johnnies and Janets?

I rather have a name any name than just water, fire etc. As a good example of boring and bad design is the number of boring names for Giants in Pathfinder imo. Okay we have a water Giant, then a Ocean, River, Lake, Sewer Giant. With nothing that makes them really stand out beyond living in their element, nothing in terms of special abilities related to their element and the only real difference is the art.

What's next though Orc sounds too much like PorK and you can no longer eat bacon or pork chops because your triggered by the orc sound in Pork.

Trust the Gene Genie ...

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1066466But Crayon, you are just using wikipages to look this stuff up. I promise you, arabic is a lot more complicated than you are making it out to be. And you have the benefit of the internet, which Gygax didn't. At that time, he'd have very few resources to help him even approach what you are trying to do (and you should look up both the Idafa construct and Sun/Moon letters (as well as rules governing , to make sure you are achieving what you want here). I am not trying to be pedantic, I just think if you want to make the argument that more rigor with language is needed, you should probably understand that it takes 6 months alone to learn the arabic alphabet for most people, then several years of formal study, and some kind of immersion. And if you stop at all, you are likely to forget just about everything. This is not easy stuff and you are making it out like its simple as pie to understand source languages.

And I have to say, it looks like you are just taking the first definition you find and running with it. How is that any different from what you are accusing Gygax and company of? There is a wealth of folklore, myth and religious jurisprudence on the things you are talking about here. Again, I don't think you need to go that deep with this stuff. But if you are, you probably shouldn't cast judgement using wikipages or google translate.

I understand your interest in authentic language and culture. I do not understand why that is being equated with good quality or morality. It isn't a crime to misunderstand something from another culture and produce a mistake that makes something new. It also isn't a requirement of all creative endeavors that people hold masters degrees or know an entire other language. Making mistakes in translation is a pretty basic step in how culture tends to spread and lead to new things. Again I think there is room for 'authentic' and 'inspired' stuff to co-exist. The basic thing to take home is, don't get all your information about the world from game books and fantasy stories. Those are imagination driven and people will often take a kernel of something, or just an evocative sounding word, and go in all kinds of directions with it.

And I don't necessarily disagree with some of your underlying interests here. I think better understanding of other cultures and their mythology is good on the whole. But if you are going to use real world myth and legend as a hammer that stifles people's creativity, I think you only end up breeding resentment. Again, not everyone is going to have the same level of expertise with this stuff.

You make a good point and I apologize if I came across as one true wayist. I easily give that impression when arguing about my pet peeves.

I don't know Arabic, yes, but I do recognize the problems with transliterations and such since Arabic inflects through transfixing and has consonants which don't exist in English or can even be transcribed with the Latin alphabet. This made my research of etymology really difficult due to the bazillion inconsistent spellings of simple words. I know that we English speakers are butchering the inflection terribly but I don't know how to address that.

You're right about folklore having lots of different connotations. In my research I discovered that Shaitan alone, for example, means "accuser", "devil" or "sand storm" depending on context.

To get back to my original problem that everything else spun from, my beef was with the names Genie, Djinn and Jann. I think it is annoying and confusing to use different spellings of the same word for different creatures.

During my most recent research I stumbled upon a surprising solution. According to a book on Google books, there is apparent a jinn tribe called al-Jimm (J-M-M being a root with possible meanings related to "large group of people, multitude, to abound, to be plentiful; forelock; to relax"). The Arabic word for "garden" is janna (with related words using the root J-N-N).

So instead of Djinn and Jann, those tribes could be (and I'm probably butchering the inflection here) Banu al-Jimm and Banu al-Janna meaning the "tribe of plenty" and the "tribe of the garden". At least in my opinion, the new names retain the overall shape of the old names while fixing the spelling and meaning problem.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1066492Many folklore monsters have different names that effectively name the same creature, especially if the monster occurs in various cultures or their tales are retold in various languages. I understand the OP's issue and I appreciate the oddness in naming. D&D has Red Dragons and Frost Giants, but no Ice Genie or Swamp Scorpion.

However, in general, I prefer monsters to have unique names - ESPECIALLY if it adds to the flavor the setting. AKA, in Al-Qadim, it's cool to have arabic sounding monsters.

That's a very good point.

However, I have to raise a particular objection. All supposedly unique names, when you get right down to it, can essentially be broken down into more basic words if you trace their etymology far back enough. Or it is a word in a foreign language with a simple meaning or three. Or the one who named them made up gibberish and called it a name. You can see this no better than in the "Atlas of True Names" that was first published a few years back, or in any articles about world building place names.

For example, I was able to trace the etymology of ghoul (which has historically been translated as "ogre", which in anthropology and folklore isn't related to the D&D's systematization) back to a root with a general meaning of seizing, snatching, grabbing and such. In at least some languages, the word for "lion" comes from roots with the same meaning (referring to their hunting behavior probably). Not only that, but words for "witch" or "ogre" in some languages were derived from the same root. This made my research very difficult initially before I learned that this was the case, since translations obscured this subtlety: one North African creation myth I read claimed that the first couple to live in the wilds became the first lion and lioness, but the specific translation I read translated this as a nonsensical lion and witch.

Languages have such fascinating baggage, don't they?

In any case, your suggestion for "Arabic-sounding names" would result in either Arabic-sounding gibberish or meaningful Arabic words depending on how much the writer cared. Much like how Tolkien included dense notes for translating his works into other languages while retaining the meaning, I prefer that all names be meaningful on their own rather than gibberish the writer made up on the fly.

Quote from: sureshot;1066518I rather have a name any name than just water, fire etc. As a good example of boring and bad design is the number of boring names for Giants in Pathfinder imo. Okay we have a water Giant, then a Ocean, River, Lake, Sewer Giant. With nothing that makes them really stand out beyond living in their element, nothing in terms of special abilities related to their element and the only real difference is the art.

Those are all good criticisms of the monster design. They really do need more interesting special abilities. One idea I had was to syncretize giants from Greek and Norse myth. In Greek myth the giants are the children of Gaia and their name is postulated to literally mean "earth born", so we have a solid basis for earth giants there. What makes them stand out from D&D norms is that they are often depicted with radically non-human features such as snakes for legs, the face and paws of a lion, a bazillion heads and limbs, covered in eyes, etc. And that's just in the depictions that have survived to the modern day; countless more have been lost to time. Some Norse myths relate similar features for their giants, such as Ymir's six-headed son, even to the point of being wholly animal in form such as Sleipnir, Fenris and Jormungand. (BTW, one book of North African folktales relates that genies can appear in similarly crazy forms, such as one example given being three-headed, six-armed, and one-legged.)

I think the criticism of the naming scheme is the weakest, since as I said before any name will either be gibberish or untranslated foreign words.

For example, in the Pathfinder bestiaries the frost giant eight-legged horse centaur with incongruous horns was named "svathurim." Surprisingly, this name is not Norse-sounding gibberish. Although the spelling threw me off at first, it appears to be derived from Old English swathu ("footpath") and hrim ("hoarfrost") or their cognates in other Germanic languages. I'm not entirely sure what it is supposed to mean, but it seems like it was derived from an actual description of the monsters as in real languages.

A more famous example would probably be the unicorn, whose name literally means "one horn" in Latin. The manticore derives from Persian for man-eater, but in folk-etymology it was rendered as "man-tiger."

The Chinese word for "vampire" consists of three words literally meaning "blood-sucking demon," and this spelling was loaned into Japanese and Korean (although pronounced completely differently).

If I sound one true wayist then I apologize. Let me know if I'm getting overzealous on you.

no no no! You have to rename them all "People of Element" :rolleyes:

Quote from: Omega;1066565no no no! You have to rename them all "People of Element" :rolleyes:

I have no problem with this.

In my research I have uncovered more passages suggesting jinn that live in elements other than smokeless fire, although I'm not sure if this means they were actually made of said element.

Quote from: Allah: the Concept of God in Islam. by Yasin T. al-Jibouri .p204Jinns reside wherever humans dont live around: deserts, oceans, uninhabited islands, forests etc. Some of them are good, but most of them are bad, as is with the human race. Jinns are also various species; here is a brief description of some of them:

One of their species is called SHAQQ. These are bedeviled jinns who look semi-humanoid, and they love to intercept travellers and aggravate them. Their of their species are so dangerous, those who are exposed to them may lose their sanity; they are: TABI, QAREEN and KHABIL. Those who reside in the seas and the oceans are known as DILHAB. Another species RI'EE, also called ARRAF, are harmless; they love to share some of the knowledge with humans; so they select the most brilliant from among the humans for their company. Among the other harmful species of the jinns are: ABAQAR and SA'LAT and they like to live in orchards. Another species , GHOOL, prefer to assume various forms and shapes to inflict harm on humans. MARID is also a harmful species of the jinns, and so are the NISNAS who look like the SHAQQ in form and shape; they have faces which look like humans but not exactly so. HATIF is a species of jinn that prefer to use sound to do their mischief, preferring to be seen by humans only as forms rather than beings. HAJIS jinns apply the method of intuition to communicate with humans, inspiring evil thoughs to them. All of these species are mentioned in Vol. 1 of al-Zamakhshari's encyclopaedia titled Rabee al-Abrar.