Nimuë was one of the Ninefold Sisterhood of Avalon and one of three who could pass between this world and the Otherworld. Depends on which accounting of Arthurian lore you ascribe to.
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Nimuë was one of the Ninefold Sisterhood of Avalon and one of three who could pass between this world and the Otherworld. Depends on which accounting of Arthurian lore you ascribe to.
Yeah well..... were not faddy bandwagon jumpers like those people are hahaha. Thats really cool how its just about the same for you though. Makes me think that crayola box inspired future mersQuote:
Originally Posted by SirenaBridge
Have a fintastic day :p
I still haven't decided on my mer-name or mersona. :( I'm sort of waiting for a name to really grab me, I guess. But it's no rush because I can't afford a tail yet, anyways (I hit the $700 mark in my tail fund recently, whoot! Only $1,900 to go for a Merbella tail :P)
I have a couple of names that I've been chewing over. One is Aearthel, which means "sea sister" in Sindarin (I'm a huge LotR fan heh). The other one is a name that struck me many years ago is Aurelia and it means "golden" in Latin. I like this name for a few reasons; for one, it translates well as an Italian name, and I LOVE Italy (I'm learning Italian and will be making my fourth trip there for a field school next month... and you wonder why it's taking me so long to save up for a tail XD). I also like it because my real name is "Leanne", so the short forms of both my own name and Aurelia is the same ("Leah"/"Lia"). Furthermore, I like that it means "golden". For some reason it also makes me think of sunlight (maybe because it's similar to Aurora, meaning dawn?) and my favourite time of day is in the late afternoon, when the sun is close to the horizon and seems to bathe everything in a beautiful golden light.
The only reason I wouldn't choose Aurelia is because I'm not sure if it really suits me personally. Aurelia sounds like such a beautiful, feminine/girly name, but I don't think I'm either of those things, really, even though I sometimes wish I was. But hey, I guess that's the point of a mersona, right? To be someone you generally aren't as your human self? Hm. I'll think about it more I guess. XD
i think another mer already has the name aurelia but i could be wrong >.>;
You're right, there is. XD But she lives in Texas, US and I live in BC so I don't think it should be a huge issue, tbh. I don't plan on going pro, in any case. And furthermore, I would probably add a surname to whichever name I pick; right now I'm leaning towards Aurelia Duskfin or something similar.
It wouldn't surprise me. There are a lot if MERS now so it's rather hard to find a name that is truly unique.Quote:
Originally Posted by SeaGlass Siren
yes that was you i remember now xD
yeah tell me about it. there's another new girl on here who's user is also Sea glass Siren, but she messaged me and apologized because she didn't know "i was here first" :P we agreed to add in colour sea glass names or play off that we were sisters :P
Aurelia, would you mind if I used the same name as you and added my own twist to it (like a mer-surname)? As I mentioned I have no intention of going pro, and I live a loooooong ways from you so I don't think we would confuse people other than on mernetwork (and I might just keep using SeaSister on here, anyways).
Its so hard to find a unique mer name. I had thought of something orangey, so I went googling yesterday to look up orange colored flowers... None of them have easy to say names! I think I will hold off getting a mermaid name for a while.
I'm fine with that!Quote:
Originally Posted by SeaSister
SO MUCH RESOLUTIONS TODAY I LOVE IT!
what about using a completely different language? orange flower in vietnamese is Hoa Cam. cam, cammy, camille... :P throwing it out thereQuote:
Originally Posted by ireneho
I'm kind of late to the conversation. :P Anyhow, my mer name is the genus of a kind of sea snake. I've always leaned towards the idea of a dragon-mer for myself and I like the way Enhydrina sounds.
When I first found MerNetwork, I went by Merman Aeolius (later Æolius), using the screen name that I first devised for AppleLink (pre-AOL) in 1985. It seemed a bit off, though, so I opted for the more succinct "Dan", truncating my muggle name as I liked the alliteration.
I had been searching for a while.A little while ago I came across the name Muir. The name is Scottish for sea from the Clan Muir. I though it had a nice sound and meaning to it
Hm. I found this on wiki... The part that I have bolded seems too close to the truth. I love weaving! I have many looms, flower looms, scarf loom, potholder loom, rigid heddle loom... And have made many woven scarves for my family.
Mermaid[edit]
Jiaoren 蛟人 "dragon person" or 鮫人 "shark person" (cf. Japanese samebito 鮫人) "mermaid" is a later meaning of jiao. This mythical southern mermaid or merman is first recorded in the (early 6th century CE) Shuyiji 遹異記 "Records of Strange Things".
In the midst of the South Sea are the houses of the kău people who dwell in the water like fish, but have not given up weaving at the loom. Their eyes have the power to weep, but what they bring forth is pearls. (tr. Schafer 1967:220, cf. Eberhard 1968:378)These aquatic people supposedly spun a type of raw silk called jiaoxiao 蛟綃 "mermaid silk" or jiaonujuan 蛟女絹 "mermaid woman's silk". Schafer (1967:221) equates "jiao silk" with sea silk, the rare fabric woven from byssus filaments produced by Pinna "pen shell" mollusks. Chinese myths also recorded this "silk" coming from shuiyang 水羊 "water sheep" or shuican 蠶水 "water silkworm".
Hey, cool! I didn't realize that the Chinese knew of sea-silk! (Although Wikipedia just pissed me off by listing two Persian sources as "Arabia" when Qazwin and Estakhr are in Iran, and the third dude was from Spain) But I digress. I love that sea-silk is well-known outside of Persia. It means I can use it in my outfit and people won't think I'm crazy (well, maybe not real sea-silk though, because that shit is expensive. I remember it costing almost as much as a rug of comparable size. Also, I am dressed up in a mermaid tail, so maybe my crazy train already left the station....)Quote:
Originally Posted by ireneho
That's a nice find, irene!
What I dislike about said wikipedia article is that they just equate 鮫人 and "mermaid".
It's sometimes really hard to find a western equivalent for certain asian terms.
鮫人 are only mentioned a handful of times throughout chinese history, usually quoting one and the same sentence from the earliest source ("In the South [China] sea, there live the jiao people just like fish. They never quit using the loom, and their tears can be pearls" is a more literal translation).
Only at one time, their appearance is described, and is plainly stated to "look like everyone else once out of the water", and bartering their wares harvested from the ocean all day (which is a strong hint these people were actually human divers).
It's a bit like when westerners translated Qilin with "unicorn".
I really doubt the 2 terms describe the same creature xD
Thanx Caltuna! Prob not in the descriptions, but yea sometimes it gets confusing what with same or similar Chinese texts for meaning of different things!
For example, in Cantonese, depending on how you pronounce it, "Hai" can be a shoe, a prawn or a crab!
My knowledge of Qilin is that its a mythical beast with head of a lion and body of a large dog. Kinda like the Quillen in World of Warcraft.
oh, warcraft xD
They actually confused liondogs and the qilin (probably on purpose, because they like to be "unique". Like when they named the Manticore mount "wyvern".)
The genuine quilin is a horned aquatic creature covered in fishscales. It's also featured in WoW, but they named it the Windsteed! lol.
anyways!
I researched the heck out of the "Jiao people", and it wasn't made easier by the fact that old Chinese words are often confused because they're all pronounced the same way and just written with different radicals.
(and in olden times, most of the populace could not read or write, even upping the confusion.)
I'm 99% sure the correct term is "鲛人" (meaning fish or shark people), and not "蛟人" (coming from the term 蛟, which is a certain kind of water/flood dragon. Note also that the wikipedia article exists only in English, not in the chinese version, which explains what a 蛟 is, but does not even mention the existence of 蛟人.
The word itself is pronounced the same.)
Trying to find more about them apart from the few sentences of the ancient sources (none of which, sadly, feature a depiction- everything I came across was fan-made of recent), one finds mostly modern interpretations influenced by western stories, and (chinese) question-answer boards, which give the impression the story, while very old, is not widely known (which wouldn't be surprising if the described sea-people were divers, as those would only ever be seen near the sea.)
Or you could look it up in a Chinese dictionary. Curiosity is getting the better of me, I asked my friend in Singapore over fb. She's a true Chinese girl like with beliefs and can speak all of the Chinese dialects there, unlike me who grew up in Australia! I'll post her answer when I receive it.
I was thinking of using my Chinese name as my mermaid name. It means Beautiful Cloud in English. My Grandpa named me so don't ask me why I have that name!
But I found most Westerners can't say it properly and pronounce it as, Lie Yin or Lying, when its phonetic Lee Yin and spelt as Li Yin.
that's a beautiful name!
I totally would have taken my chinese name as a performer name if it weren't for the pronunciation issues.
Every dialect has its own pronunciation, so not even your name would be the same (and it's worse when, for example, Cantonese "translate" a western name into their dialect, and then you read it out in mandarin and go "what's that supposed to mean?!!" until you realize you have to pronounce it in Cantonese :p ).
I have several big older chinese dictionaries, none of which have any jiao people.
They have 蛟 dragon and 鲛 shark. That's it.
Maybe an even bigger dictionary yields more results (there are also tons of dictionaries online, but one can't know with them how traditional they are.)
My best bet would be something from a really old, big book.
The newer sources will all have stuff in them that's become a thing only recently.