Whether you’ve read my book or not you can probably deduce from the blurb that there’s a fair few made up words in The Arben Bridge. Some of these are completely made up through an extremely intelligent and complex process of taking parts of words that I like the sound of and combining it with other words that I also like the sound of. Or simply changing one letter in a word. I know, it’s groundbreaking stuff.
However, a few of my made-up words have a lot of meaning and reasons behind them. I haven’t included all of them because I think it spoils the fun but here’s a few that may be of interest. Who knows, maybe one day they’ll be a question on a real-life pub quiz! Liliath – This is the name of the country in which the story is set and is named after my late fabulous nan. Her name was Lilian and I thought the ‘iath’ at the end made the country sound like somewhere you might find in Wales (Welsh speakers please don’t come for me, this is fiction.) I decided to name the country after her because she was a complete powerhouse of a woman and this seemed like a suitably epic tribute. Jobern – The name of Liliath’s capital city is named after my grandfather (or as I called him; Bampy.) His name was Bernard but everyone called him Joe, as you do. The story goes that when he was a child he and his friends decided to call each other by their father’s names for the day but somehow his stuck for eighty-three years! Jobern is simply an amalgamation of his two monikers and as someone who adored words I like to think he’d approve. Andice – This is a flyaway reference in the book that you may miss! It’s another city and an amalgamation of my parents’ names. My dad is called Andy and my mum is called Janice so you can see how I arrived at this one! Yanto – Again, another small detail that won’t have any meaning to anyone other than myself. My Bampy gave my brother the nickname ‘Ianto Full Pelt’ when he was a kid, which I think is a common Welsh nickname but in all honesty I never asked about it so if someone can enlighten me that would be great! My brother’s name is actually Ieuan but I thought this would be too difficult for non-Welsh readers to understand due to all the vowels, as is Ianto, so I just swapped out the ‘I’ for a ‘Y’ to make it more readable. Carida – This is the name of Tarley’s mum and a very slight anagram for the Welsh word for ‘love’ which is ‘cariad.’ This character is full to the brim of love and it’s her driving force in life so I felt this was the perfect name for her. Hyd/Haf – If you’ve read the book you may have noticed that my characters are never called ‘Mr,’ ‘Miss,’ ‘Mrs’ etc. and that is a very contrived decision on my part because I truly hate the idea that women’s titles are dependent on their relationship to a man and if you’re making up your own world why not change a few things? Therefore, ‘Hyd’ is taken from the Welsh word for autumn which is ‘hydref’ and ‘Haf’ is the Welsh word for summer. In The Arben Bridge all men have the title of Hyd and all women have the title of Haf. If you’re wondering why I chose those seasons it’s because summer is my favourite (so I had to give this to the ladies) and autumn is the season I was born in.
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