In the country outside Nightfall–and to a certain extent inside it as well–the people still follow the older naming customs of the Empire of the Sun.  The starsisters are slowly bleeding this practice out of succeeding generations, but they have not succeeded yet.

The naming practices in the empire were (and are) odd when compared to the rest of the cultures I’ve seen in the world of Khumkato.     Some peoples associate names with family lines, some with places, some with both.  My own nation gives names based on what an individual accomplishes in his or her life, and that leads to some impressive names for the most distinguished among us.  In the empire, it was all based on the length of the actual word–of all things!

Even there, they seemed to just do it differently just because they could:  The shorter the name, the higher the position in society.  That seems to defy all sense.  One would think that the longer, more flowery names would be for the rulers!  I had one of the zhuan of an outlying district controlled by Anhilynya explain it to me once:  The fewer the letters, the fewer possible attractive combinations that can be made of them.  At some point in their history, it became fashionable for the noble classes to reserve these for themselves, with the shortest names being reserved for the emperor himself.

Based on what I have gathered, the emperor usually took a one or two letter name–Li or Zu, for instance.  The higher nobles took three and four letter names (Lya, Maki, or Lian), with the class system unfolding from there.  Some of the peasants have absurdly long names that no one even bothers to try to pronounce completely in normal conversation (though they still have legal uses).  Apparently, there used to be a long and complex process pursued through the empire’s courts in order to shorten an individual’s name.

Of course, the irony is that in practice, the peasants use a shortened form of their name for convenience sake, and those nicknames are almost always three-to-five letters long.  They are careful, however, not to do so in front of the ruling classes.