Testing, testing… Yes!!
Holos UTEP: this will probably be my first (or one of my first) posts in the new forums platform. And to get started on it, I bring something that has been waiting a really long time. More than a year ago now, unfortunately: my RL events stepped in right after I had concluded the data collection. It all began on 26th December 2021, when I got the idea to ask the following RP question in the Urth RP server’s #world-building channel:
@Worldbuilding what is your country named after? If you don’t have an IC etymology or origin, you can answer with your OOC process of choosing the name
In fact, if possible, quote both your OOC and IC origins
A day later, I created an Excel sheet and sorted all the answers into different categories of IC and OOC origins, to see which name origins had been the most common. The results were diverse: some etymologies had a single and clear category assigned, some others could belong in different categories, some categories turned to be very common, such as (OOC) “Phonaesthetics/‘Name I Like’”, the more expectable “RL Concepts and Words” and (IC) “Geography”. On the contrary, some others were certainly not as expected: such is the case of “Came to me in a dream”. Last, I placed the different categories into a graph, so the results were more clearly visible.
The potential this experiment had made me think about expanding it to TEP’s other RP: Valsora. So I did some weeks later, if I recall correctly, and the results were even more interesting, if possible: while the OOC results were similar to Urth’s, the IC ones differed significantly. Urth nations showed a very evident geographical preference, while Valsora nations had “People” and “Mythology and Religion” as more common name origins. “Geography”, on the other hand, was not much more common than any other category in Valsora.
The next and final step I took was extending this study to the people whose NS nations were not placed either on Urth or Valsora. “RL Concepts and Words” was, once again, the main OOC category here, while I had to create a new category for this area: “Fictional Locations”, which turned to be the second largest category. ICly, non-RP results visibly agreed with Valsora’s results: “People” was the most common category, while “Geography”, Urth’s main, was one of the less common ones.
This is more an interpretation of the data themselves rather than a proper analysis of the results. I, however, would like to open the ground for debate after this post or in Discord: in my current view, and also back in the start, we can take multiple conclusions from this study. Now I’ll leave the Excel sheet below this lines, so you all follow my interpretation looking at it and so you all can take your own conclusions. I can’t wait to hear what you all have to say!!