Entomology is bugs.
: Trow use a similar but opposite technique. Upper case
: beginning (Si), apostrophe ('), and lastly a lower
: case ending (anwon). So that makes up Si'anwon .
: Another example of this is found in the Myth map,
: where it labels Rhi'anon . (Of course Forrest has it
: listed as Rhi'Anon in the Legend's Encyclopedia, but
: he can't always be right, now can he.) The basic Trow
: names follow a different format, but why they do this
: I am not sure.
The Trow are modeled after the Romans, as are their names. Probably the names of the Trow cities that we're given aren't the real ones that the Trow themselves use; rather, they were thought up by exploring fir'Bolg or other aboriginal humans who espied them from a distance. The Trow aren't much for guided tours, so all knowledge of the Trow kingdom gained by humans over the last few millennia would have come from intrepid human explorers.
Interestingly, the names of the war colleges of the fir'Bolg combine the styles of fir'Bolg and bre'Unor personal names, with a lowercase--apostrophe--uppercase--hyphen--uppercase form, as in "ai'Kijin-Tak." This suggests that the fir'Bolg and bre'Unor languages are akin to one another. Perhaps the races themselves have a recent common ancestor, or perhaps the bre'Unor language was rudimentary or nonexistent before the coming of the fir'Bolg, whose language they then adopted. I'd hypothesize (without evidence) that in both languages the lower-case prefix is a surname, the upper-case word after the apostrophe is a given name, and the upper-case word after the hyphen is the father or mother. So you'd anglicize "ou'Kahn" as "Kahn Ou," "Tak-Thal" as "Tak son of Thal," and "ai'Kijin-Tak" as "Kijin Ai, son of Tak Ai." I'm assuming here that each college is named after its founder, and the "son of x" bit is added on to each founder's name so that everyone knows it's he who founded it, and not all the other ai'Kijins out there.
--SiliconDream
