I have a name that can be given half a dozen nicknames based on the first name alone. No one ever wanted to say the full thing, so it got shortened. I did not always pick the way it got shortened. I tried a few times, and at some point I even went by my middle name, but…
So, to me, what is being asked makes sense. My brain automatically translated it to: “Is Selkie a sort of nickname you picked out for people to call you instead of your birth name?”
My husband has a really ethnic (Eastern European) name, the kind a lot of people point blank refuse to attempt to pronounce, so he’s had a lot of nicknames in his life (some of them kind of cruel). He also has used a Western European version of his name, a nickname, as a professional name to make him seem more accessible to customers. It’s not unusual for a person with a “weird” name to pick a nickname or otherwise rename themselves to fit in better with their surroundings, especially if the name they hypothetically chose ties in somehow with an established known mythology (IE, selkies).
I work a lot with Chinese and Koreans in my job. Many of them adopt an English or (here in Germany) German first name for interaction with Westerners – often names that are kind of similar to their actual names.
@Chaos. Lol! I had to laugh reading your post because I’ve had the reverse experience. “Heather” is a very difficult name for a lot of people to pronounce when their language has neither the “th” sound nor any “r” sounds. It’s one that made one Korean teacher flinch the first time he took role, and my last name is worse.
I got a variety of pronunciations including “hotel” and some difficult to render phonetics. My teachers seemed determined they would use my real name, or I would have gladly claimed a pseudonym. Ha-eun would have been about as close to it as most got anyways..
My inlaws are chinese, when we got married they needed a Chinese name for me for the Chinese-language invitations. We picked a last name (there are certain words that are used as last names in Chinese) that is close to my real last name and we essentially figured out what two words were “auspicious” that were close to my first name. Then, I practiced writing the characters for 20 years, and hey, I have a Chinese name. Now our kids have the same Chinese last name as me, with their own Chinese first names.
I think it was really cemented down when I went to China on a work trip and used the chinese name on my badge and the other forms. Now there are people in China that ONLY know me by my Chinese name.
It’s different if people are ignoring the name you were given – more of making sure she isn’t being treated like her culture is irrelevant (considering she knows nothing about it). It’s like in the slavery epic Roots when the slavemaster tells Kunta Kente his name is now “Toby” and whips him when he refuses to yield to marginalization.
After what we’ve learned in this past few panels…”selkie” is a name from a human mythology, whereas “Selkie” (or “Naylee”) is the name of a young girl from another intelligent species. What role Miss Lillian played in the transfer of “selkie” the myth to “Selkie” the little girl…well, I suppose that revelation will come if the storyline goes on…though the appearance of Selkie (the girl) might very well have suggested it.
And taking that a little farther, if my parents named me Fred, but for the last 60% of my life they’ve called me George, I’d probably prefer to be George. It’s what I’m used to. Fred is just a name stuck way back in my memory.
Selkie might be legally called “Jane Doe Smith” or “Nelly Jones” and have picked Selkie out of some random nicknames that she was being called as a better choice than “Honeybunch” “Brat” or “Earless Wonder” or “Nelly No-Nose” It’s not like she was pre-verbal when she arrived at the orphanage even if she didn’t speak English, and Grandma knows that. We often do get some say in what nicknames we are called, at least if our families are decent people.
The civil war provides a decent reason for her Mum to abandon Selkie at the orphange – If you are expecting a fire fight dropping the kid off in neutral territory is not an act of callous neglect. I’ve been troubled about what could cause her Mum to abandon her and this mollifies me somewhat, as well as making my even more worried about completely different things now.
Her rights would be limited until she could get CPS and the courts to give her back. As an abandonment she gave up her rights to the child when she walked out of the orphanage without her.
I dunno, the attitude seems a little old for a, what, 4? 5? year old. Most kids I know of that age don’t do ‘fine, whatever’ unless told they have no choice (in which case they do the whole ‘the weight of my displeasure is forcing me to flop around dramatically as I do what you demand’ thing).
I disagree. It depends on the little kid. I’ve heard a 5-year old say “whatever!” before. Then my daughter is only 4 and has been a master of sarcasm since 3.5. Right now her favorite thing to say is a dejected, “OOOOH, MAAAAAAN!” when she doesn’t get her way. It’s just the frequency is a lot lower than would be if she was a teenager. After all Selkie had been through by this time, I think she’d earn extra “worldliness” points.
HAHA, the 4 year old I babysit would tell you patty cake is a babies’ game and she prefers Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders so she can at least try to win.
(What? No. Of course I don’t have a giant spreadsheet filled with all the ROT ciphers! Why would you ever think that? Yup. Yup. No giant spreadsheet here.)
That’s a clever way of showing that at the time she didn’t understand English, she was just figuring it out from body language… while still letting readers work out exactly what Lillian was saying.
Speaking of reading — do the floating green glyphs for ‘Nei Li’ mean that she does know how to read the Sarnothi script, at least for her own name? (That’s well within the range of the possible for humans, in fact some human four and five year olds can read quite fluently.) Or is it a graphic device to show us that she’s vividly hearing it in her head?
It was Lillia – ulp. It was Mrs. Haversham-Zhang? Now is this an attempt at approximating Nei Li or is Mrs. Haversham-Zhang a mythology buff?
Actually, I can come up with some pretty deep meanings for “Selkie”… like Selkie cast aside her Sarnothi “skin” to come here… perhaps Mrs. Haversham-Zhang knows this.
Edit: And I must not forget my duties as Language Geek Boy! Look at that there Tensei lettering! Presumably it means “Nei Li”, and seems to only have two symbols. I would hazard a guess that the Tensei alphabet is a syllabary.
The Tensei language does seem to be syllabic in nature, and perhaps agglutinative, but notice: each of those glyphs has two separate pieces. Writing could still be phonetic, using one set of symbols for consonants, combined in a block-per-syllable with another set of symbols for vowels, like the Korean Hangul writing.
Ooh, and remember the little Sarnothi boy’s interpretation of “Damn Right” or “Da Mrite”
Toddler Language, or a logical interpretation of this apparently new word mommy used. Because, you know, she just WOULDN’T be mixing English swears in with Tensi… O:)
I really, really, REALLY hope that Dave is a huge linguistics buff and the tensei language really does have the kind of internal consistency you’re describing.
Does she really have an impediment, or is the ‘s thing more something she does by choice? There have been a few serious moments where Selkie spoke normally.
The phone call with Todd during the stolen shirt scene comes to mind. Also, after she lost her heatpads and was slurring her speech and totally out of it, I don’t think she used the ‘S’s either.
But why would she speak oddly on purpose? Maybe she thinks it’s cute or endearing; that it makes her seem less threatening and monsterish. Maybe it’s a culture thing– her people could have introduced deliberate inpediments to denote moods, or for certain occasions. (A story comes to mind about a Spanish king who had a lisp, whose subjects would speak with a lisp to pay respect.) Maybe it has something to do with the “Be Strong, Be Brave, Be Good” thing, since the first time she left it out she was saying “Being brave sucks! And I Hate it!”.
The Selkies esses are one mystery I’ve been waiting for Dave to reveal a long time. XD
This maaaay be a fringe theory, but maybe the “esses” that manifest in English are a trait of her clan… and further, perhaps one of the traits that the aggressor clan used to justify the annihilation of her particular clan due to “inferiority’. I could give real life historical examples but I don’t want to because it’s sad and gruesome.
*Linguistics Girl arrives!*
I don’t think that’s the kind of thing an 8 year old would do on purpose – takes too much effort and dedication. That’s not the kind of thing that becomes a habit, not the way she does it; given the apparent mechanism, it couldn’t have been forced. I would suggest that, keeping in mind that never have *all* of her words in English ended in esses and that the esses disappear when she’s canonically speaking Tensei, that perhaps emotion or tears affect her speech to a greater degree than they do in human vocal physiology; or that it was an error on Dave’s part? Sorry Dave feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, the superhero I sidekick for certainly does…
*whisks away *
Looking at this sometimes I wonder if babies/toddlers feel the same way. “Great the big one wants to play and make those noises again. Alright let us get this over with so I can go back to sleep.”
“Tell you what – you tell me what you’d like to be called, and that’s what I’ll call you.”
I’ve said this to friends, co-workers, and little kids. My bass player’s grandson is named Jonathan, but he told me he likes to be called Jon. So that’s what I call him.
I assumed Selkie was sort of a nickname that manifested into a legal name because A) they didn’t want her birthname identified by other Sarnarthi and B) it might just evolved naturally to replace her birthname.
Though I can really understand her uncomfortably I can see Todd compromising and using her birthname inside the house or in private. Selkie in public or among friends and allowed Selkie to choose over time wheather she wants to be legally named Nai Lee or Selkie as she gets older
Um, is Selkie literally scrawling that on something visibly or is that tracings in the air? I gotta ask because we’ve seen her people create things like that for real.
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huh
“Is ‘Selkie’ a name you picked?”
Huh? Is “Dave” a name you picked, or did someone else pick it for you? I know I wasn’t given a choice as to my name.
I think Grandma missed the boat on this one.
I think it was more meant as “was this a name you chose for yourself instead of being called by your birth name”
Agreeing with Tori.
I have a name that can be given half a dozen nicknames based on the first name alone. No one ever wanted to say the full thing, so it got shortened. I did not always pick the way it got shortened. I tried a few times, and at some point I even went by my middle name, but…
So, to me, what is being asked makes sense. My brain automatically translated it to: “Is Selkie a sort of nickname you picked out for people to call you instead of your birth name?”
My husband has a really ethnic (Eastern European) name, the kind a lot of people point blank refuse to attempt to pronounce, so he’s had a lot of nicknames in his life (some of them kind of cruel). He also has used a Western European version of his name, a nickname, as a professional name to make him seem more accessible to customers. It’s not unusual for a person with a “weird” name to pick a nickname or otherwise rename themselves to fit in better with their surroundings, especially if the name they hypothetically chose ties in somehow with an established known mythology (IE, selkies).
I work a lot with Chinese and Koreans in my job. Many of them adopt an English or (here in Germany) German first name for interaction with Westerners – often names that are kind of similar to their actual names.
For example, Wu Hongda, executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation in Washington DC, goes by the name “Harry Wu”. Lee Bongki, Reunification Attaché of the South Korean embassy in Berlin, is also known as Willi Lee.
@Chaos. Lol! I had to laugh reading your post because I’ve had the reverse experience. “Heather” is a very difficult name for a lot of people to pronounce when their language has neither the “th” sound nor any “r” sounds. It’s one that made one Korean teacher flinch the first time he took role, and my last name is worse.
I got a variety of pronunciations including “hotel” and some difficult to render phonetics. My teachers seemed determined they would use my real name, or I would have gladly claimed a pseudonym. Ha-eun would have been about as close to it as most got anyways..
My inlaws are chinese, when we got married they needed a Chinese name for me for the Chinese-language invitations. We picked a last name (there are certain words that are used as last names in Chinese) that is close to my real last name and we essentially figured out what two words were “auspicious” that were close to my first name. Then, I practiced writing the characters for 20 years, and hey, I have a Chinese name. Now our kids have the same Chinese last name as me, with their own Chinese first names.
I think it was really cemented down when I went to China on a work trip and used the chinese name on my badge and the other forms. Now there are people in China that ONLY know me by my Chinese name.
It’s different if people are ignoring the name you were given – more of making sure she isn’t being treated like her culture is irrelevant (considering she knows nothing about it). It’s like in the slavery epic Roots when the slavemaster tells Kunta Kente his name is now “Toby” and whips him when he refuses to yield to marginalization.
After what we’ve learned in this past few panels…”selkie” is a name from a human mythology, whereas “Selkie” (or “Naylee”) is the name of a young girl from another intelligent species. What role Miss Lillian played in the transfer of “selkie” the myth to “Selkie” the little girl…well, I suppose that revelation will come if the storyline goes on…though the appearance of Selkie (the girl) might very well have suggested it.
And taking that a little farther, if my parents named me Fred, but for the last 60% of my life they’ve called me George, I’d probably prefer to be George. It’s what I’m used to. Fred is just a name stuck way back in my memory.
… How is it that I am just noticing Grandma and Grandpa wearing the same sweater/sweatshirt?
Selkie might be legally called “Jane Doe Smith” or “Nelly Jones” and have picked Selkie out of some random nicknames that she was being called as a better choice than “Honeybunch” “Brat” or “Earless Wonder” or “Nelly No-Nose” It’s not like she was pre-verbal when she arrived at the orphanage even if she didn’t speak English, and Grandma knows that. We often do get some say in what nicknames we are called, at least if our families are decent people.
The civil war provides a decent reason for her Mum to abandon Selkie at the orphange – If you are expecting a fire fight dropping the kid off in neutral territory is not an act of callous neglect. I’ve been troubled about what could cause her Mum to abandon her and this mollifies me somewhat, as well as making my even more worried about completely different things now.
It makes one wonder if her mother is still alive, and how Todd would act if she came back for Selkie…
Her rights would be limited until she could get CPS and the courts to give her back. As an abandonment she gave up her rights to the child when she walked out of the orphanage without her.
beautiful.
I’m with Selkie on the “slappy hands” thing.
I dunno, the attitude seems a little old for a, what, 4? 5? year old. Most kids I know of that age don’t do ‘fine, whatever’ unless told they have no choice (in which case they do the whole ‘the weight of my displeasure is forcing me to flop around dramatically as I do what you demand’ thing).
I disagree. It depends on the little kid. I’ve heard a 5-year old say “whatever!” before. Then my daughter is only 4 and has been a master of sarcasm since 3.5. Right now her favorite thing to say is a dejected, “OOOOH, MAAAAAAN!” when she doesn’t get her way. It’s just the frequency is a lot lower than would be if she was a teenager. After all Selkie had been through by this time, I think she’d earn extra “worldliness” points.
Very true. I’ve know a 12 year old that speaks on the same as his pediatrician.
HAHA, the 4 year old I babysit would tell you patty cake is a babies’ game and she prefers Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders so she can at least try to win.
Pfft.. my three year old sister is like that sometimes. 😛
I’ll ask her to do something, like throw her lollypop stick away, and she’ll go “Ogkay, phiiiiiiiine” and oblige.
Patty cake?
Selkie, Patty cake?
Patty cake?
Patty cake, Selkie?
it’s a pretty simple substitution cipher.
Yup. ROT7.
(What? No. Of course I don’t have a giant spreadsheet filled with all the ROT ciphers! Why would you ever think that? Yup. Yup. No giant spreadsheet here.)
Yep.
That’s a clever way of showing that at the time she didn’t understand English, she was just figuring it out from body language… while still letting readers work out exactly what Lillian was saying.
Speaking of reading — do the floating green glyphs for ‘Nei Li’ mean that she does know how to read the Sarnothi script, at least for her own name? (That’s well within the range of the possible for humans, in fact some human four and five year olds can read quite fluently.) Or is it a graphic device to show us that she’s vividly hearing it in her head?
I’d suggest looking at the ideograms of various languages and trying to simplify them like the kanji->kana transformation.
That said, you could also just write tensei in katakana, seeing as it sounds really Japonic.
Hmmm…
It was Lillia – ulp. It was Mrs. Haversham-Zhang? Now is this an attempt at approximating Nei Li or is Mrs. Haversham-Zhang a mythology buff?
Actually, I can come up with some pretty deep meanings for “Selkie”… like Selkie cast aside her Sarnothi “skin” to come here… perhaps Mrs. Haversham-Zhang knows this.
Edit: And I must not forget my duties as Language Geek Boy! Look at that there Tensei lettering! Presumably it means “Nei Li”, and seems to only have two symbols. I would hazard a guess that the Tensei alphabet is a syllabary.
The Tensei language does seem to be syllabic in nature, and perhaps agglutinative, but notice: each of those glyphs has two separate pieces. Writing could still be phonetic, using one set of symbols for consonants, combined in a block-per-syllable with another set of symbols for vowels, like the Korean Hangul writing.
Ooh, and remember the little Sarnothi boy’s interpretation of “Damn Right” or “Da Mrite”
Toddler Language, or a logical interpretation of this apparently new word mommy used. Because, you know, she just WOULDN’T be mixing English swears in with Tensi… O:)
Ah yes. I had overlooked this; thank you for bringing it to my attention!
I really, really, REALLY hope that Dave is a huge linguistics buff and the tensei language really does have the kind of internal consistency you’re describing.
Still feels weird to see Selkie speaking without her speech impediment.
Does she really have an impediment, or is the ‘s thing more something she does by choice? There have been a few serious moments where Selkie spoke normally.
The phone call with Todd during the stolen shirt scene comes to mind. Also, after she lost her heatpads and was slurring her speech and totally out of it, I don’t think she used the ‘S’s either.
But why would she speak oddly on purpose? Maybe she thinks it’s cute or endearing; that it makes her seem less threatening and monsterish. Maybe it’s a culture thing– her people could have introduced deliberate inpediments to denote moods, or for certain occasions. (A story comes to mind about a Spanish king who had a lisp, whose subjects would speak with a lisp to pay respect.) Maybe it has something to do with the “Be Strong, Be Brave, Be Good” thing, since the first time she left it out she was saying “Being brave sucks! And I Hate it!”.
The Selkies esses are one mystery I’ve been waiting for Dave to reveal a long time. XD
This maaaay be a fringe theory, but maybe the “esses” that manifest in English are a trait of her clan… and further, perhaps one of the traits that the aggressor clan used to justify the annihilation of her particular clan due to “inferiority’. I could give real life historical examples but I don’t want to because it’s sad and gruesome.
*Linguistics Girl arrives!*
I don’t think that’s the kind of thing an 8 year old would do on purpose – takes too much effort and dedication. That’s not the kind of thing that becomes a habit, not the way she does it; given the apparent mechanism, it couldn’t have been forced. I would suggest that, keeping in mind that never have *all* of her words in English ended in esses and that the esses disappear when she’s canonically speaking Tensei, that perhaps emotion or tears affect her speech to a greater degree than they do in human vocal physiology; or that it was an error on Dave’s part? Sorry Dave feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, the superhero I sidekick for certainly does…
*whisks away *
Looking at this sometimes I wonder if babies/toddlers feel the same way. “Great the big one wants to play and make those noises again. Alright let us get this over with so I can go back to sleep.”
Reminder to all our scientific enthusiasts, this is a thing. https://selkiecomic.com/images/Anatomy-Sketch.png
Oh, I posted this on the wrong page. Hmmmm, still relevant, I think.
“Tell you what – you tell me what you’d like to be called, and that’s what I’ll call you.”
I’ve said this to friends, co-workers, and little kids. My bass player’s grandson is named Jonathan, but he told me he likes to be called Jon. So that’s what I call him.
I assumed Selkie was sort of a nickname that manifested into a legal name because A) they didn’t want her birthname identified by other Sarnarthi and B) it might just evolved naturally to replace her birthname.
Though I can really understand her uncomfortably I can see Todd compromising and using her birthname inside the house or in private. Selkie in public or among friends and allowed Selkie to choose over time wheather she wants to be legally named Nai Lee or Selkie as she gets older
Um, is Selkie literally scrawling that on something visibly or is that tracings in the air? I gotta ask because we’ve seen her people create things like that for real.
That piece of fanart is what brought me here, and what a journey it has been. 🙂
N=19? N was 7 last time. Opposite of 7 (in 26) is 19… Coincidence?