Teleidoscope

Sun, Mar 04, 2007

Islamic Names

Posted at 12:40 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I haven't posted any fiction lately because I am trying to find some good sources on Islamic names. In particular, I need to create plausible names for Islamic characters in the Balkans a generation or two from now. Information about naming that I have found so far seems to only relate to the Christian population (there are some very good sites generated by the SCA and other historical groups).

I have seen one comment (on Iraqi names) indicating that Shia and Sunni names are recognizably different. But it didn't mention what the differences are, so all it provided was information that there were more ways than I had previously realized to get it wrong.

The one important Islamic character in the story that has been named so far is Turkmen, and has an odd family background. After 60 years of Soviet rule, followed by Turkmenbashi, I think Turkmen names may be ... diverse... so I think the name I have given him is plausible. His given name probably needs a spelling adjustment from Turkish to Turkmen, but should be close.

I would appreciate any pointers to good sources of information on Islamic names and naming, especially in Eastern Europe. (I'm going to post this question elsewhere on the web, too.)

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History of Bookbinding

Posted at 12:04 pm MST to Technology

One of the regular commenters at Making Light, who is a bookbinder, has posted a five-part history of bookbinding beginning here.

Wonderful stuff. I'm linking it here partly so I will be able to find it again easily.

I took a course on the history of books and printing my senior year at Wesleyan. The rare book room has copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the Bay Psalter, and many other keys items in the history of printing so we were not limited to looking at illustrations in textbooks. But most of what I remember of the class (30 years later) had to do with typefaces and formatting and printing technologies.

In those days, offset printing was bleeding edge.

In the early 80's one of my early tasks as a programmer was to adapt the brand new technology of the Xerox laser printer to use in word processing. Among other problems I ran into was the fact that the initial design of the laser printer was intended to replace a landscape mode lineprinter (the kind that usually printed on green and white striped paper. The printer interface code I wrote had to constantly remind the printer that it should be operating in portrait mode. We also needed to adjust the character set the printer provided because the ASCII character set that came standard did not have some of the characters our software needed.

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