The Two Strata Anything with a plate has a Latin name. Anything with a mouth has a plain one.
The language runs in two layers, and the gap between them is where the entire social order lives.
Ecclesiastical Latinate
Charters, institutions, orders, guilds, liturgy, law, machines of state — and anything at all that is inscribed.
virtues · Concordance, Vigilance, Temperance
ordinals · Septima, Nona, Tertia
superlatives · Clarissima, Maxima, Perpetua
Plain vernacular
Short vowels, hard consonants, trade and landscape words. People, streets, tools, bars, songs, food, weather — everything spoken rather than engraved.
surnames · Harrow, Stannage, Fettle, Brace
given · Pell, Bram, Ilse, Nance, Osric
illustrative — a bank to draw from
A name is the record
Naming here is an administrative act before it is a poetic one. To name a thing is to index it — to enter it into the world's memory and make it findable by the towers, the card engines and the halls. Which means the naming system and the political system are the same system, and everything else on this card follows from that one fact.
The gap is where class lives
Both registers are available to everybody, so choosing between them is always a move.
A guild secretary who says the full Latinate form of a thing in a public house is making a point. A lord who uses the street name is also making a point, and a more dangerous one.
The short form, and who may use it
Every enduring thing therefore carries two names in practice: the full form on the plate and the short form in the mouth. Bessie. The Sevens. The Old Concord.
The short form is the intimate form, and permission to use it is social currency. Who may call a thing by its short name tells you who belongs to it. Engine-keepers use short names for their own engines and formal names for everyone else's, and to use another crew's short name uninvited is a real insult with a real answer. For a city, the short form belongs to the people who live there; outsiders use the long one until they have earned otherwise.
Which is exactly why Lucerna Perpetua is unsayable in short. The people entitled to grant that intimacy are all dead.
The category guide
| People | Plain, short, vernacular. Given name plus an occupational or topographic surname. No accretion, ever. |
| Cities | Latinate charter name, accreting. Vernacular short name — fixed, intimate, earned. |
| Districts & streets | Vernacular almost without exception. Named for what was there, what fell down, or who died — which is why they carry a city's real history. Nobody ever bothered to make them official. |
| Guilds & orders | Latinate, ordinal-heavy, accreting. [proposed] each carries a founding number and a virtue, and the number is what people use. The Ninth means something specific in every city and something different in each. |
| Machines | Latinate, heavily accreted, with a vernacular pet name known only to the crew. The two have no relationship to each other and often contradict each other comically. |
| The Craft | No written names at all. Working names, spoken, never inscribed, changed as needed. In a civilisation where the name is the record they are the entries that do not exist — not secrecy, but the literal condition of what they are. |
| Events & dates | Partly settled. The base unit is one beat of the Pulse, so the units are not arbitrary and not ours. Latinate forms belong to the horologists, vernacular to everyone. Names still needed. |
| Bars, venues, songs | Open. Early instinct: venues are named like machines, because they are machines. |
| Units & measures | Open. Pressure, heat, torque, tension and time all need units, and they should not be ours. |
Reading the plate on the Short Measure
Mensura Brevis, Undecima Recomposita, in Scamno Quarto. The Short Measure, eleventh rebuilt, on the Fourth Bench. Three clauses, and every one of them is doing administrative work.
Mensura Brevis is the charter name, and it is a joke that outlived its teller — the house is named for a short measure in a city where every pour is weighed in public.
Undecima Recomposita is the accretion: rebuilt eleven times, each one added and none removed. You can date the house by that word alone.
In Scamno Quarto is an address that is not a place. A bench is an interval — four terraces below the working face — so the plate tells you the building's distance from the work, and it will be wrong in eleven years, and it will be recut.
Nobody on the Fourth Bench has said any of that aloud in living memory. They say the Short.