I'd suggest not reading unless you've read the first 5 chapters of The Village. There's also a few minor allusions to later scenes, but (I'm looking at Vanna) if you want to give it a shot anyway they're not major spoilers.

~

Curiosity spurted in Mordred's eyes again. "A manor, a title — and you left all that?"

Again, she shook her head. "It is not ours any longer. That has all gone into the past."

"It has all gone into the past, little Fianhge." Bardrick's hand stroking her shoulder, Bardrick's voice firm. "It was gone since you were a mere seven-ling. You are not a lady of Erahar anymore..."

- The Village, Chapter 5

~

You have a couple choices for how to read the excerpt above.

1. It's a horrific typo on my part that made it past five rounds of editing.

2. This is a goofy pet name generated possibly by a smol Bardrick attempting to pronounce "Fiona".

3. The unusual phonetic combination with which Bardrick addresses his youngest sister the night they flee their home is, in fact, Fiona's actual name.

And if you haven't already deduced it, I'm going to be a spoilsport and let you know that 3 is correct.

The Segelas family is very good-natured, non-confrontational, and eager to fit in. Which is why, as they traveled eastwards over the course of eleven months and listened to one foreigner after another botch their husky, guttural-sounded Eraharian names... they started to introduce themselves with the messed-up versions to save time. Having all been schooled in the common tongue, they practiced speaking that instead of their birth language, and using their accented names even between themselves.

You'll notice that throughout The Village, Fiona finds herself homesick for things about Erahar. She wants to appreciate the good in her new life, but she still misses things from the old. However, her family is bound by this tactic sort of agreement that... well, the past is in the past. Erahar was a previous chapter, Orden is a new one. We're in new rules and new cultures and we need to adapt. Peony, when she prematurely assumes Fiona's attraction to Fred, jumps instantly to the reassuring (?) justification that they're no longer nobles and Fiona is "at perfect liberty to marry any peasant you like". Retaining a little of their aristocratic attitude, they're nonetheless consciously obliterating any obvious distinctions between them and the people they now live among.

You catch the same mindset when Bardrick is complaining to Marcus about Mordred's poor job demeanor. "I do not act like a lord around these folk, and we are in fact of noble blood; I count myself as one of them. Why cannot he do the same?"

Bardrick is actually judging Mordred for (what he perceives as) a failure to adapt. Come on, says Bardrick. I did it, you can do it too.

So when Marcus, in one of the final chapters of the book, very deliberately and tenderly calls Fiona by the Eraharian word for "sister", you can imagine the impact that has on her emotionally. (heck, and on ME...)

So, what about the other Segelases?

Bardrick was named Bandrigh at birth. This is a good, stock Eraharian name meaning "sword-bearer".

Peony is actually Pianthe, meaning, charmingly enough, "flower".

And Marcus? The boi doesn't even keep his first initial. Emarchis, pronounced with both a hard "c" and a voiced "h", translates to "wheat" — perhaps there was a good harvest that year.

Fiona herself, or Fianghe, has a particularly lovely though not popular name in Eraharian culture, which is the word for "sea-water". Suits her equally lovely eyes.

In general, these names ought to be pronounced as as written, having been phonetically transcribed into English. For tonality guide, Eraharian is a very guttural language, relying on a lot of throat-noises, drawn-out vowel sounds, and frequent harsh, breathy overtones. Consonants are generally run into vowels and hard to distinguish for non-native speakers.

I hope you enjoyed this detour with me into the sad/happy story of the Segelas family. Sad because half of them don't appreciate their culture as much as I do and I kinda wanna chew out everybody in their travels who gave them weird looks and didn't even try to get their names right. Happy because author headcanon that Fiona tells her Eraharian name to Fred one day and he thinks it's astoundingly beautiful and repeats it over and over (even though he somehow never quite nails it) and he starts to call her by it regularly and she opens up with stories about her childhood instead of brushing over it and faces how much it meant to her and asdjkfl my ship ;-;