Annonymous asked over on Tumblr:
How did you come up with the names for your species?
I don't remember why maanul is called maanul, to be honest. It was back in 2021, i think i just compiled letters togheter until it clicked. I wasn't thinking ahead about conlang, which i doubt is something i'd dip my toes into seriously, aside from some rules i've given to myself related to the vocal lungs.
Kyhuines used to be called Okapies back in 2021- 2022, but since the spelling was so close to the spelling for okapi, I changed it.
Mierthri are recent (late 2024-early 2025 if i'm correct), but my memory is horrendous i can't recall last week, so i can't recall why they're named mierthri. Sadly i didn't think of noting down the process. Most of what I remember is that they're named after a scrapped biome I already created. The biome isn't fully scrapped, it has become different enough that i consider it a seperate thing than the base idea.
For maanuls, I didn't think about "are there things named like this already?", in fact, there is, pallas cats are also named manuls! Though how manul is pronounced is different than maanul. "Okapies" (Kyhuines), I knew of okapis, so the name didn't stick long because of the reseamblance.
If you want to think of your sophont as named from an outside viewer, go for it, if you want an in-world name, go for it, too. You'll just have to think of what the name means in the language chosen someday, haha.
Jamesofangus reblogged, asking:
Does Maanul have an in-world meaning?
Maanul is a word from the Shumatt's common language, Shuaait. While many ethnic groups spread across the territory still speaks their native languages, what's considered as "standard" language to speak under Shuamatt is Shuuait. Shuuait takes from the Nuinuk and Sani languages, as these are their close neighbors.
Most words across my blogs referring to maanul concepts, inventions, or how other maanul groups are called, are in Shuaait. Some words are more so how they would phonetically read words from other languages into their own, deforming them in their language not having the same whistling as another.
Maanul is one of many ways to refer to the species, making a distinction between the word for people as a whole. "Maaui" means "People", which includes all species together, and the word for the species they are. Maanul is referring to the maanul species.
Like the way we'd call another sophont a person, but we would use human to distinguish which species we are talking about.
"Maa" is for "my people". The "my" refers to "people who look like me". Like how in "Maaau" the maa is pronounced with a pitch in the whistle near the end, to sound like a deformation. Maaau means "Almost my people", it is the species name for maanul's closests living relatives.
"Nul" is a deformation of Nuaulu, referring to the sea as a neutral gendered person rather than an object, more akin to reffering to a parent. So basically, if taken apart, maanul means "My people from the Sea", tales of people washed over the waves because they were born by the ocean itself are very common in traditional maanul mythology for the population who were seaside, which a third of Shuamatt is, and the oldest part of Shuamatt originates there too. The name carries it too.
