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TFE: Actual Gothic Names

"Gutarazda" (𐌲𐌿𐍄𐌰𐍂𐌰𐌶𐌳𐌰) is the Gothic term for "the Gothic language." It's the only significantly-attested East Germanic language, and was spoken by the Visigoths and Ostrogoths during the time period in which the Western Roman Empire collapsed. A form of the language is thought to have been spoken in some parts of Crimea as late as the 17th century. This mod aims to use what we know about the Goths and their language to make The Fallen Eagle a more immersive experience.

To the best of my ability, anyway.


The core of this mod is a large namelist of historically-attested and historically plausible Gothic character names, which, unlike the ones currently in TFE, are not Anglicized. These will occur for characters of the Gothic, Visigothic, Ostrogothic, and Gothonic cultures in TFE.

NOTE: Not all of these are actually attested. Like with many Germanic languages, attested Gothic naming is most often done by combining existing word-roots, allowing for a massive amount of variety in naming. This means that while many of the names on the namelist are not actually attested historically, they are historically plausible combinations of existing root-words.

Also note:This mod does NOT change the names of characters already existing at game start. I’m still figuring out how to modify that. UPDATE: just figured out how to, and changed the names of most Gothic and Ostrogothic starting characters to be more accurate.

Because there are, like, 4 actually attested Gothic dynastic names, I’ve taken the liberty of creating additional ones from names or words plus the “-ing” suffix (signifying descent or lineage.)

This mod also provides Gothic names for all title tiers (baron, count, duke, etc.), using either historically attested names or ones calqued from other Germanic languages. So, a Gothic count will be a grefja, while a Gothic-culture countess will be a grefjo, and their county will be a grefjinassus.

Many vanilla court positions have also been given Gothic versions - as a Gothic king, you won’t have a “marshal,” but instead a "marhaskalks". Court Chaplains also receive different titles based on your religion, with options built-in for Christian and Dualist faiths, as well as Germanic paganism, Judaism (fun fact: there are historically-attested Gothic Jews), Islam, and Zoroastrianism.

The Goths certainly weren’t the only East Germanic people of note, however. While Vandalic is very poorly-attested, this mod does aim to give them at least a modicum of somewhat plausible names - largely a mix of historically-attested ones and names borrowed from Gothic but modified to use attested Vandalic spelling variations.

For those curious on how to pronounce these, here’s an (extremely brief and oversimplified) guide to pronouncing Gothic:

• “ei” is pronounced like an English long e (/i/)
  
• “ai” is pronounced like an English short e (/ɛ/)
  
• “au” is generally pronounced like the o in “lord” (/ɔ/)
  
• “e” on its own is pronounced like an English long a (/e:/)
  
• Þ or þ is pronounced like the English “th” (/θ/)
  
• Q is pronounced exactly like in English (/kw/)

This is compatible with TFE, and should work with any other mod that doesn’t touch TFE’s localization and naming files. Be sure to load it AFTER TFE. It’s not gonna work with vanilla, though.

In the future, I really want to do province and title renames.

• u/Ubergold’s name list, which served as the starting point for this entire project. I’ve edited the list somewhat, but the overwhelming majority of the names are from here.
  
• The fine folks at the Gutmaþl Discord (and the Gothic-language revival community more generally), from whom I sourced a very large number of these names and titles. This is also where I got the thumbnail.
  
• Hunirix from the Geiseric Society, who compiled the list of attested Vandalic names that this mod uses.