#and frankly any suffix would work? half of those prefixes already would work as suffixes!

[saltedsolenoid]

OKAY SO. A warrior name is made up of two parts-- a prefix and a suffix.

Both parts denote something that cats know in nature, some known examples being Fireheart (Fire and Heart, heart both representing the actual muscle and bravery), Jayfeather (Jay (bird) and feather (object)), Ivypool (self-explanatory) and Spottedleaf (adjective + natural object). All of these seem to take place in a typical continental forest, but what cats know depends on the location and thus can range from all sorts of things.

A cat can be named after their appearance or their personality, and their name actually changes throughout their life. However, their prefix stays with them as they grow older. As a cat is 0-6 months old, they have the suffix -kit, 6-12 months -paw, showing their apprenticeship, a suffix of their or the clan's choosing (literally anything) for most of the rest of their life, and if the cat succeeds to leader of the clan, they gain the suffix -star.

For example, take who is probably the most iconic Warrior Cats character of all: Firestar. Firestar came into the clan after being a kittypet for most of his life, and got his clan-like name after joining the clan. At first, he was Firepaw, named after his fire-like fur and his warrior apprenticeship. Then, Fireheart, a fully recognized warrior of bravery. As he succeeded to become the leader of the clan, he gained the name Firestar.

Make sense? No? Good!

So, basically, this will be the rules that every cat will go by.

does anyone want me to help them decide their warrior cat name

[mallowstep]

For the love of god, please consider renaming some cats, I've seen names like

"One-Eye, Halftail, Oddfoot, FLIPCLAW (what kind of prefix is 'Flip'?) Twigbranch, Clawface etc. Don't get me started on those atrocious SkyClan names with KITTYPET PREFIXES

Harrybrook, Snookthorn, Rileypool

Like tf?

so i'm going to start with saying! as a general rule, i love these names. i will address them each in turn, but i don't have a problem with warriors having "bad names," i have a problem with names that don't make sense given their context.

it does not make sense for blackfoot to be named blackkit, when he's mostly white. (and, as a colorpoint cat, i assume, would be born entirely white.) etc.

but i have no problem with bellaleaf, because well, yeah! makes sense to me.

after all, leaf was named leafdapple, why shouldn't bella be named bellaleaf.

i'm going to discuss each name you brought up in turn, and then, under the cut, i'm going to ramble about naming philosphies.

one-eye: i'm fine with this. i don't mind cats being named after their disabilities, not when it's an established part of warriors culture. (even if it doesn't happen anymore because people would be pissed about it.) i don't know if i think it's right, or if i think cats would have a problem with it, but i think it's good. i'd like to think most cats wouldn't have a problem with it, though. that said, for one-eye in particular, her name was already white-eye, so it feels redundant. food for thought, i suppose.

halftail: i'm not okay with this, because he lost...half his tail? trust me, as someone who had a cat with half a tail, you don't notice it. doesn't make sense. he can keep sparrowpelt, altho tbh i almost always forget about him.

oddfoot: oops i forget him initially! i actually assumed he was named odd because of numbers or something, but apparently it’s a deadfoot situation. we don’t know his kit name, so i’ll assume he was named as either an apprentice or a warrior to fit. it wouldn’t make sense for him to just have the prefix odd, and i’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn’t. if he did, however, i would have a problem with it because that makes his name a compound name, not because his leader renamed him.

flipclaw: i don't have a problem with it. what kind of name is flipkit? the kind of name a mother would give who looks a lot like the cat who traumatized her, i think. more importantly, i think it's cute! doesn't bother me. would i name an oc flipkit? probably not, but that's just me.

twigbranch: oh no i love her name. i love it! it's so cute. it means something, too! it has meaning. nope. no one is taking twigbranch away from me. i love it.

clawface: mixed. i don't really have a problem with a cat being named clawkit, but it feels...violent. shrug. i don't like it, but like, i also don't like sandynose.

and i won't directly address skyclan because uh i already stated my thoughts on them.

skyclan in particular, tho, it actually makes a lot of sense for their names to be like that. there is no reason to apply any clan norms to skyclan names.

i really hope they keep their names, too. tradition and legacy of names is important to them (pebbleshine and violetshine for the most direct example, but it's everywhere), and i want that to stay. i love that leafstar named her kit harrykit. never change skyclan.

as always, i want to say that i do not have a problem with anyone's methodology of naming cats. i do not care. i support every single name in existence (barring certain combinations of color and "-face," and anything in that vein), and i do not want to come across as telling you what you should do.

that includes you, anon! i do not think you should listen to me when i say i like these names. i think you should rename them whatever you want. (i strongly suggest reconsidering skyclan renames, tho. there's established reasons in canon for them to have those names, and i think it's a cool cultural thing worth exploring. i keep meaning to write a funny lil one-shot about it.)

but you know! if you want to rename them, go for it! i support you!

that said, here is what i think (and i am not an authority on this in any way, shape, or form) about names:

i've written extensively about naming traditions in the clans. if you want to read that, "names. leaders. meaning" and "names part two" are where i recommend you look. (note: first link is to my main, before i migrated warriors content here.)

i'm not going to go over any of that in detail, because well, i'd rather talk about something new?

anyway, i don't think there's a reason to rename the vast majority of cats. i have very, very, few rules. heck, in ashes, i even had squilf come out and say that there's not even a problem with cats sharing a prefix.

the two cats i have renamed are yellowstorm and runningcloud, both for very specific reasons: -fang is a suffix that only makes sense if you're a warrior, and yellowfang names runningpaw runningnose, but in this au, sagewhisker names him, and she doesn't seem like the type to give that kind of name.

in yellowfang's secret, which i do generally treat as canon, yellowfang explains runningnose's name. i don't have a problem with her giving that name to him in the slightest. i just don't think sagewhisker would, and that overrode my general conservative approach to cat names.

but i do think, to an extent, cats are named for the world around them. i explored this in "without warning," where cats can be named after all sorts of strange things (elevator is my favourite), because well, they don't know what strange names are and are not.

so, for example, if there was a kit named, say, chaffinchkit, i would probably rename them, because i've set my warriors in the pnw, and there are no chaffinches in america.

i would just name the kit finchkit, because really, a chaffinch just a specific type of finch anyway.

i also refuse to name a kit maggotkit. there are probably other canonical prefixes in this nature that i refuse, but maggot is the big one that comes to mind.

but i don't care that ferns are green and cats aren't green. maybe it's a name passed down through the generations, one they don't even remember the origin of, but now, it is a thunderclan name.

or maybe, it is given to a riverclan cat simply because their mother thinks ferns are nice and soft.

none of that matters to me, because i personally find limiting name to appearance is incredibly boring, and gives up a really nice chance to worldbuild.

in "fair is the night," ivypool and tigerheart have a brief conversation exploring this.

"ThunderClan is different," he says. "You don't use names in the same way. You don't know the Ivy before you. But ShadowClan isn't like that. Dawnpelt knows Dawncloud and Flametail knows Flamefur, but...I have Tigerstar." "That seems ineffective," Ivypool says. "You can get more mileage out of your names. Here, Ivy is for grey kits, right? But wiry ones. We need strong roots. And Dove is for grey kits, or white ones, but its for the ones who are born soft."

they go on, but i would never pass up an opportunity to explore that type of thing. (and yes i see the typo)

similarly, i like the renaming system. i am like, this close to saying i love it.

the only reason i don't make brightheart lostface in everything i write is because it'd be too much of a headache to remind people, and i also don't want to needlessly invite arguments about it.

she keeps her name in "saccharine tithes of love and glory" because it's the kind of au where i can throw small things like that, without worrying, because it fits, tonally.

i wish it didn't set a fic in a very specific tone, but it does, and so, i usually use brightheart.

(also, it's clear that she prefers brightheart in the books, and i respect that. i don't think, in my culture, that makes sense for her, but i've talked about my works as being on a spectrum between canon and me, and most stuff is far enough away from me that i call her brightheart.)

anyway.

part of it is, renaming cats is imposing my rules over canon. i feel that saying "flipclaw should be named something else" asserts that my world is correct, and canon is wrong.

like, tallstar as a name does not make sense in my windclan. a kit can't be tall, and i've established that windclan names are very literal. but i've let it go, because i chose to make that a rule, and now i live with it.

i hope i didn't come off as prescriptivist, here, because i honestly believe if you want to rename cats, you should. i'd even be happy to discuss alternatives.

for clawface, might i suggest scorchface? (the suffix is malleable, frankly, but i don't feel like thinking much about it.) scorch deliberately has negative connotations in shadowclan, so you keep the same effect as clawface. especially since it just kind of sounds ominous.

but as for what i will do, it is not rename cats. i like their names (especially skyclan's), in all their idiosyncratic glory.

[arabellaflynn]

My response to extended periods of stress is to distract myself by cramming new things into my head. I had a terrible semester at college once and front-loaded the entirety of the sci.electronics.repair FAQ into my brain. It wasn't useful at the time, but I can repair the shit out of a VCR now, so I assume I'll use it someday. I am so overloaded I am about to claw my own face off, so naturally I am teaching myself Hebrew. I've been using Duolingo to do it, which is frankly a very bad idea. (I should really be using Ha'Ulpan, which is where you'd typically go for a crash course in Hebrew before emigrating to Israel, but that costs money, so no.) Duolingo is billed as a way to teach yourself a language, which it is not. It is a way to memorize a bunch of interactive flashcards. This might be effective for people who don't care how language works -- which is most people -- but it's awful for people like me, who hang all of their memorization off of a framework of base patterns. Duolingo explains nothing. The "lessons":

Do not teach the alphabet. Hebrew is written in this sort of half-assed abjad, where most but not all vowels are not marked in non-teaching texts, and some but not most unmarked vowels are actually represented by a placeholder Alef. 'Aba' is father and 'ima' is mother, but they are both written Alef-something else-Alef. Look at that and imagine how the vowel change looks totally mental to someone who spells things in a full alphabet. Alef comes out looking like it says about six different things, one of which is nothing.

Do not explain the orthography. There are several pairs of letters in Hebrew that do, or at least can, say the same thing. Tet and Tav both say /t/; Kaf and Qof both say /k/; Yod and Ayin are both sort of /j/ and sort of not; Vav and Bet can both say /v/, although both also have other readings; Samekh is /s/ and Shin can be read that way as well. Some other apparent character pairs are actually the same letter that has a 'sofit' form when it comes at the end of the word, which on the Hebrew keyboard is a different key (as opposed to the Arabic IME, which auto-corrects to the final form when it kerns all the cursive joining). I still have no idea if there is a rule behind Tet vs Tav; Yod vs Ayin and Kaf vs Qof are almost certainly because they once represented different sounds (Yaa vs 'Ayin and Kaa vs Qaf are still separated in Arabic), but I don't have enough context to guess which is likely to be which in Modern Hebrew.

Do not consistently read new vocabulary words out loud. If you're not going to explain the letters to me, the least you can do is read me the word so I can figure it out myself. Of course, it also never explicitly mentions that you read all this right-to-left, which seems like an important note to give when you're using a left-to-right language for instruction. You would think it would be obvious when everything is right-justified, but this is the kind of stuff you shouldn't take for granted when building beginning lessons in anything.

Do not use any nekkudot. A nikkud ("point") is a diacritical mark, mainly underneath the consonant but occasionally beside, inside, or above it, that explicitly indicates ('dagesh') a pronunciation change or ('nikkud') an unwritten vowel. This is how you teach people to read Hebrew, in Hebrew. You use it for small children. Or, if you have any sense, novice adult learners.

Do not explain any grammar. There is no explanation of why "you" is sometimes 'at' and sometimes 'atah'. No explanation of why sometimes the present-tense verb has an '-et' on the end and sometimes doesn't, even when the subject is 'ani' in both cases. (Answer: Hebrew inflects according to gender of both subject and speaker, which seems like a thing that should be noted for anglophones.) You are left to guess at wtf to do with prepositions and particles like Ha, V', Be, Le, and others. 

Do not consistently account for the direction switch of Hebrew input. Firstly, there's no warning that the thing expects you to type in Hebrew; I installed a Hebrew keyboard before I started, but I also have six other keyboard layouts on the phone, because I'm me. If it wants you to type a full sentence, it can get the text running consistently right to left, but there are exercises that want you to fill in just one word, and that breaks it horribly. The words run right-to-left as intended, but they are arranged left-to-right in English order.

Do not listen to its own internal dictionary of synonyms. I have run into this in other languages and it drives me crazy. There are exercises where it asks you to translate a sentence in the target language into English. If you tap 'derech', Duolingo tells you it means a way, a path, or a road. Translating 'derech' as anything other than "way" in the English sentence gets you marked off. If there is some reason why 'Ha'yeled roah derech' could not mean "The boy sees a road" isolated from context, Duolingo does not give it.

I am already cheating by being a linguist who has some idea of how Semitic languages work. My one attempt at an Arabic class was a disaster for non-Arabic-related reasons, but I do know basic things like the idea behind an abjad, handling regular transformations of letter shapes at the end of a word, and how words are constructed by adding vowels/prefixes/suffixes to a triconsonantal root. These would be completely alien to most English speakers. There is a systemic way to accomplish transformations like the one from "(male) child" ('yeled') to "(female) child" ('yaldah') or "children" ('yeldim'), or from the noun "food" ('okel') to the verb for "to eat" ('le'kol'), but it is never actually pointed out.

I also have a living resource who grew up speaking Hebrew and enjoys teaching people things, usually at great length. I can ask the Eccentric all the weird stuff and he'll give me a long, detailed answer, fully 60% of which will have something to do with the original question. Technical grammar questions can be Googled to good effect, but the answers to cultural questions are, at best, unreliable. (Example: "Does Modern Hebrew have regional accents?" Google answer: "Modern Hebrew is very young and spoken in a contained geographic area. While there are some tiny variations in pronunciation and vocabulary, these are so slight it is unlikely a non-native speaker would ever notice them." Answer from actual Israeli person: "Absolutely, remind me next time I see you and I'll do imitations, some of them are hilarious.") [The question of accents is especially pertinent; I am never comfortable in a language until I sound like myself, and since I don't sound like a textbook all the time, this usually means picking a dialect to drop into. My informal Japanese tends to stay Tokyo-standard in grammar but in tone is rather bokukko, for instance. It's marked in speech (although often the actual pronoun boku is used in internet Japanese by female blog authors who don't want to be explicitly female in text), but I am clearly a non-native speaker, and I feel it conveys a proper warning that I am not going to do well by Japanese standards of femininity. There are a few potential accents I could wind up with in Hebrew. American is fairly far down on the list; I'm usually pretty good at not sounding like a Yank. The letter Resh is most universally difficult for non-native speakers. I could probably use the French or German R and be understood (both voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/, the French one higher and more nasalized), but the Resh as given in the only explicit explanation I've found is actually supposed to be a uvular trill /ʀ/, which occurs more towards the hard palate than either of those, and with a rounder sounding chamber behind it. It comes so far forward that it is the closest thing I have ever seen to the theoretically-impossible velar trill. Wikipedia says this is an Ashkenazim thing, which explains why you hear it so much in Yiddish. I would definitely be understood if I used the Arabic alveolar trill /r/, which is noted as a variation common among the Sephardim, but it's also associated with Arabic-speaking refugees, and I feel like that might not be the accent I want if I'm going to be practicing this on Israeli friends. I've no idea which one the Eccentric uses; I gather he has one parent from either tradition and they lived in Jerusalem, so who the fuck knows. It's impossible to pick up from his English. He's made no effort to zero out his accent, but he has had three decades to nail the English retroflex alveolar approximant /ɻ/, and more or less does. Chet is voiced /χ/, and undotted-Khaf is unvoiced /x/, both of which I have.]

An irksome aspect of learning Hebrew is the transliteration system. There isn't one. You notice that my Japanese is italicized and the attempts at Hebrew are in single quotes? This is because the Japanese is brought straight across using a standard Japanese-to-Latin alphabet system used in some textbooks and on the internet. (There are other, more precise systems, but they involve diacritical marks that can't be typed on a pure-ASCII keyboard.) The Hebrew is... uh, approximate. There is no way to unambiguously transcribe Hebrew text in Latin letters that is immediately readable to people whose languages use the Latin alphabet. Duolingo doesn't even try. I type things using the Hebrew IME whenever possible, because I'm trying to learn to spell, but when the Eccentric explains things to me he does it with the regular QWERTY keyboard. It has quirks. Words whose transliteration ends in '-ah', as in the new year's greeting 'shanah tovah', are words that end in He, a letter which normally says /h/ but when word-final represents /a:/ for grammatical reasons. He also consistently writes his Vav as "U'" when it's used as a conjunction, even though it's pronounced /v/. My guess is that this is how it is taught in Israeli schools. There seems to be a system behind it, but it does not make sense unless you also read the original Hebrew.

This is all somehow working anyway, probably because I'm me. I made it to Day 18 of my first ever stab at learning Hebrew before I started scaring up podcasts. It only took me that long because I had to figure out how to search for the word for "Hebrew (language)" in Hebrew, because searching in transliteration gets you nothing. Day 20 I picked up a series of linguistic interviews put out by Leshoniada (לשוניאדה, a word which gave Google Translate shitfits, but which the Eccentric informs me is a portmanteau that comes out something like "Grammar-lympics"). The details escape me completely, because I lack vocabulary, but because Hebrew has a very regular stress pattern (word-final, almost always) individual terms are easy to pick out. Between that and a lot of straight-up imports from Greek, the topic of the first episode was easy to get.

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