Fantasy
A fantasy culture does not need three pages of invented phonetics to feel real. It needs rules.
Who gets a true name. Who is allowed to use it. Who is stuck with a working name because the true one is private, dangerous, sacred, or simply none of an outsider’s business. That is the interesting part. Not whether the vowels are suitably ancient.
The useful trouble starts when someone uses the wrong form of address and thinks it is a small mistake. In some worlds, that would be a social blunder. In others, it is a threat. Much better material, really.
Who gets a true name. Who is allowed to use it. Who is stuck with a working name because the true one is private, dangerous, sacred, or simply none of an outsider’s business. That is the interesting part. Not whether the vowels are suitably ancient.
The useful trouble starts when someone uses the wrong form of address and thinks it is a small mistake. In some worlds, that would be a social blunder. In others, it is a threat. Much better material, really.
The trouble is that “rules” can get fetishised just as badly as invented phonetics. A culture can have perfectly sensible naming customs and still feel flat if the names never do any work in the story.
A working name that’s used in public, a private name for family, a name withheld from the dead. Fine. But the interesting bit is what happens when somebody breaks the convention on purpose, not when the author has spent seven pages making sure every apostrophe is in its ancestral place.
A working name that’s used in public, a private name for family, a name withheld from the dead. Fine. But the interesting bit is what happens when somebody breaks the convention on purpose, not when the author has spent seven pages making sure every apostrophe is in its ancestral place.