The etymology and meanings of Eldritch & Eponym!

The reason for my choosing of these two words together came about because of their really unique definitions that oddly enough; with a good imagination fit together very well! This is purely speculation on my part based on the trailer for FFXIV where the word Eldritch is used to describe the land; "Eorzea" in which FFXIV will take place! There are many places around the net that describe the word Eldritch and they all agree that it means (“foreign, strange, weird or uncanny”) the most, but its also noted as “of a strange country, pertaining to the Otherworld” and "in a foreign land, exiled". This explains the land of Eorzea very well from what we know thus far which is very little.

The 2nd word Eponym is used to describe a place, or thing named after the person whom discovered it, and again this is pure speculation and a theory derived by my imagination from the FFXIV Trailer. I'm going out on a limb and suggesting that the land of "Eorzea" will end up having been named after an elf or tribe of elves or even one of the gods that are there!

So my theory behind the name Eldritch Eponym means a foreign land named after some elf or god "Eorzea". Yeah its very different but its really unique and sounds exciting to me! I wanted to try and come up with a name that had ties to the lore of FFXIV and has never been used before as a guild/LS name from everything else that's already out there and I think I have succeeded!




Eldritch:

Quote :

The meanings of the early attestations of the Scots word eldritch are given in the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (hereafter DOST) as 'Belonging to, or resembling, the elves or similar beings' and 'Connected with, proceeding from, suggestive of, elves or supernatural beings; weird, strange, uncanny' (s.v. Elriche). (1) However, although eldritch has entered English usage more generally since C.S. Lewis appropriated it as a critical term, its etymology remains uncertain. The Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), and later DOST, cautiously derived eldritch from Old English *aelf-rice ('elf' + 'dominion, sphere of influence'). In 1985, however, Martin Puhvel suggested in a brief note that the etymology is rather *ael-rice~el-rice, the first element meaning 'foreign, strange; from elsewhere', and the whole therefore meaning 'other world'. (2) His case seems not to have been absorbed into scholarship on Scottish literature, which has tentatively maintained the traditional association with aelf. (3) The purpose of the present note, then, is twofold. Firstly, I argue that Puhvel's idea is almost certainly correct, but not for the reasons which he suggested: Puhvel saw the lack of an f in the Older Scots forms of eldritch as an impediment to the etymology *aelf-rice, whereas in fact the loss of this f would be a common sound change. The variant vowels to which DOST's citations attest, however, do militate against *aelf-rice and in favour of *ael-rice. My second point is that the putative origin of eldritch in yell- seems to have influenced the definitions of eldritch given both in DOST and in more recent scholarship: its connotations of elves and elvishness have in some circumstances been overplayed, and the more general meaning of 'otherworldly' is to be preferred.

Eponym:

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An eponym is the name of a person, whether real or fictitious, which has (or is thought to have) given rise to the name of a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item. An eponymous person is the person referred to by the eponym. In contemporary English, the term "eponymous" is often used to mean self-titled, as in "Metallica's eponymous 'black album'". The word "eponym" is often used for the thing titled. Stigler's law of eponymy suggests that "Eponyms are usually false," i.e., things are rarely named after the person who discovered or invented them. An aitiology is a "reverse eponym" in the sense that a legendary character is invented in order to explain a term. Although in actual usage there is some overlap, an eponym may be distinguished from a namesake in that a namesake usually includes a "" connection to the source name whereas an eponym name merely is derived from a source name without an additional sake connection.

very interesting and creative =o!

hehe a few of our guesses earlier weren't far off then :) Interesting speculation concerning the origins of the name "Eorzea".