Talk:Name

This is a very comprehensive and well written wiki page, however it is very narrow in focus. The first line is "Names are what individual creatures are known by.". Whilst this is not a false statement, it is not a very inclusive or explanatory one. I think this page/terminology could do with the introduction of some nuance of meaning, as there are a lot of things in the game, that not only have names, but have both generated semi-unique names, and custom names that can be created by the player. Some examples are Fortress names, and Symbols (which could describe two different named things in the game: symbol of office and "group" Symbols. There is a changes to terminology centralized discussion relating to this issue, but I thought I'd make a comment here, as this is such an obvious candidate for disambiguation. --Alpacalypse (talk) 13:59, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

note on first and last names

It looks like dwarf first names use only the pool of nouns in the symbol groups listed in entity_default.txt

And last names use any words, but give weighted preference to those within the symbol group.

A helpful discord user Fang X. offered this: "[SELECT_SYMBOL:...] is determining what words from their language the civilisation associates with different concepts. The first argument is the concept that it'll be associated with and the second argument is a "symbol" which is defined in the raws, it's a collection of words. The "NEW" symbol contains the words for blossom, dawn, egg, growth etc - so in this case you are making the MOUNTAIN entity (society) associate the concept REMAINING with the group of words for the symbol NEW."

In the context of dwarf names, "the concept REMAINING," works to dedupe the pool of names.

Jerimee (talk) 22:09, 17 March 2023 (UTC)