Well, after looking at each name and what they mean, I am convinced that it isn't coincidence that they are what they are.

1. Peter: Stone, Rock. I guess you could come at this in two ways, one is that you could view him as the rock or anchor of the children, we see this especially in the LWW. You could also see it as him being the most warlike, hardened and deadly of the four when they are grown up. Now, I am really split, because I always saw Edmond as the rock of the four, not Peter (mostly in the VoftheDT and PC), but in the first book, which is obviously when he would have been deciding the names, Edmond was definitely NOT the rock, Peter was hands down the one. So, all that said, I am going to hold with the first possibility.

2. Susan: Lily, Rose or Lotis (depending on which language you are going off). I think this was picked for the fact that she was always the 'beautiful' one of the four children, maybe a bit more vain than the rest, especially more so than Lucy (as we saw in HHB book).

3. Edmond: Wealth, Fortune, Protection. I don't necessarily understand how wealth/protection would play into his character, yet I think that protection would speak to the title he earned in the golden age, King Edmond the Just. I can see that him being very just, grave and thoughtful, as the book describes him as being, would make him into a natural protector/guardian of the weak.

4: Lucy: Light. This one is easy, not that any of the four were just downers, but she was the ray of sunshine in the group, the most fun loving, the most innocent. I think this is why she saw Aslan the most out of everybody and was the first to discover Narnia.

Child of the King, SonofStone

I know that aslan is Turkish for "lion" and jadis is Turkish for "witch".

I also learned recently through the Lamp-post Listener podcast that gloze (as in Glozelle) is a Middle English verb that means "to flatter".

Posted by: @reepicheep775

I know that aslan is Turkish for "lion" and jadis is Turkish for "witch".

I also learned recently through the Lamp-post Listener podcast that gloze (as in Glozelle) is a Middle English verb that means "to flatter".

So cool! I'd never given much thought to the meaning of the Telmarine names... this makes me curious what Sopespian might mean.

I have heard that Tash is Turkish for "stone." Very appropriate, I think.

Posted by: @the-mad-poet

I have heard that Tash is Turkish for "stone." Very appropriate, I think.

      I think could reference back to Deuteronomy 4:28 'And there you will serve gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.' Lewis might be trying to emphasis the Aslan is the real ruler and Tash is simply the stone (fake) imposter. Good thoughts y'all guys, this is really enlightening and interesting!

Child of the King: SonofStone 

@reepicheep775

Its cool that both these names, major roles originate from the language Turkish. I wonder why C.S Lewis chose that language to origin his main characters name. It's also coincidental that the food Edmund requested for was Turkish delight! 

Out of curiosity — after all these years of hearing that Aslan is the Turkish word for "lion" — I've finally put it through Google Translate (not necessarily the best authority, but usually fine for single words). And yes, it really is!

(AND, at least going by the probably-computer-generated audio, Lewis was correct in what he once stated about the pronunciation. It's Ass-lan. Not Az-lan.)

I hadn't heard about Tash meaning "stone" in Turkish, but it turns out that's correct too. (Written as taş in Turkish spelling, but pronounced as "tash".)

Posted by: @sonofstone

I think could reference back to Deuteronomy 4:28 'And there you will serve gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.' Lewis might be trying to emphasis the Aslan is the real ruler and Tash is simply the stone (fake) imposter.

I like that idea! Mind you, it also might just be coincidence — Lewis may just have liked the sound of the name "Tash" for an evil god / demon and not realised that it meant something in Turkish as well. Unless he made some statement about it somewhere, we'll probably never know for sure.

Posted by: @courtenay

 

I like that idea! Mind you, it also might just be coincidence — Lewis may just have liked the sound of the name "Tash" for an evil god / demon and not realised that it meant something in Turkish as well. Unless he made some statement about it somewhere, we'll probably never know for sure.

 I agree it's a bit uncertain if Tash was named with a meaning in mind, but I guess it's just the fact that both Aslan and Jadis have hidden Turkish meanings which makes some suspect that Lewis did it here with Tash as well. 

I believe it was Kathryn Lindskoog who suggested that the name of Lady Prunaprismia was a reference to the phrase "prunes and prisms," used by Victorian ladies to practice molding their mouths into a more "ladylike" shape. (I guess it sort of makes sense if Prunaprismia is supposed to be a painfully prim-and-proper person). 

Posted by: @the-mad-poet

I agree it's a bit uncertain if Tash was named with a meaning in mind, but I guess it's just the fact that both Aslan and Jadis have hidden Turkish meanings which makes some suspect that Lewis did it here with Tash as well. 

That's right, I forgot to look up whether Jadis does mean "witch" in Turkish...

According to Google Translate, "witch" in Turkish is cadı — pronounced something like "juh-duh". So there is some similarity there, but it's not quite the same word, unlike Aslan and Tash.

I've always assumed that the name Jadis has some connection with "jade" — as well as the gemstone, the term "jade" also traditionally means a woman who is beautiful but cold and heartless, which suits Jadis exactly. But the Turkish connection is possible too, even if it's not exact this time. Maybe Lewis had already found the word Aslan in a Turkish-English dictionary and decided to look up the word for "witch" as well, but changed the "c" to a "j" to make the pronunciation more obvious in English and added an "s" to the end for some reason... we may never know.

      That is a really interesting observation about the term "jade". I can't recall that I have ever heard the term used in that way, yet it totally works and I could see it's use in that way. It also works for her (the White Which), and I like the idea that he didn't just take the Turkish word for witch, but changed the term so it would be a bit more original for her. 

      I also did a little snooping online, and it terms out that the name Cornelius (seeing as Dr. Cornelius is one of my favorite characters in the whole series) is possibly a derogative of the latin word for horn, "cornu". I know something about latin, and to my knowledge this isn't necessarily the kind of horn you blow on, but more the one, say, on a rhino... I know this is a bit crazy, but maybe this is a reference to his finding the magic horn of queen Susan? I get it, this is a stretch, but I think it isn't to unlikely.

Child of the King: SonofStone

Posted by: @courtenay

I've always assumed that the name Jadis has some connection with "jade" — as well as the gemstone, the term "jade" also traditionally means a woman who is beautiful but cold and heartless, which suits Jadis exactly. But the Turkish connection is possible too, even if it's not exact this time. Maybe Lewis had already found the word Aslan in a Turkish-English dictionary and decided to look up the word for "witch" as well, but changed the "c" to a "j" to make the pronunciation more obvious in English and added an "s" to the end for some reason... we may never know.

I put in the name "Jadis" in Google Translate and found that in the language French it means "long ago" I am wondering if that has some connection to who she is as a person. She is from the country of Charn which was a very old world based on MN. It was already ending before Narnia even started! It may also be referring to the fact that the Battle of Beruna with the White Witch was very long ago, and many things had yet to come of Narnia. 

Posted by: @kingedthejust  

I put in the name "Jadis" in Google Translate and found that in the language French it means "long ago" I am wondering if that has some connection to who she is as a person. She is from the country of Charn which was a very old world based on MN. It was already ending before Narnia even started! It may also be referring to the fact that the Battle of Beruna with the White Witch was very long ago, and many things had yet to come of Narnia. 

Lewis actually uses the name Jadis for the White Witch just once in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — in Maugrim's notice that he leaves after arresting Tumnus, which refers to "her Imperial Majesty Jadis, Queen of Narnia..."

That of course was several years before he wrote The Magician's Nephew, and he doesn't seem to have thought of the full "backstory" of Charn and so on at the time he wrote LWW. (In fact, most of what we're told about the White Witch's background and origins in LWW is inconsistent with what we see in MN, but that's going a bit off the topic of this thread.) So I don't think the name Jadis can have been directly connected with Charn at the time Lewis first thought of the name.

I'm still guessing that it's more likely connected with "jade", as I said before, or possibly derived from the Turkish word for "witch", as we've been discussing. Or maybe the name just came to Lewis in his imagination and he liked the sound of it, without intending for it to have any deeper meaning? Lewis wasn't anywhere near as meticulous a world-builder as Tolkien, and although some of his choices of names do have deliberate reasons behind them, I'm not sure all of them do.

Vertumnus is the Roman god of the seasons. He is also associated with plants, growth, and change. He could be the origin of the name Tumnus, seeing as how important the change of seasons is to the story of LWW.

Posted by: @kingedthejust

@reepicheep775

Its cool that both these names, major roles originate from the language Turkish. I wonder why C.S Lewis chose that language to origin his main characters name. It's also coincidental that the food Edmund requested for was Turkish delight! 

I think it's because most English-speaking readers don't speak Turkish, so the names (which sound nothing like their English counterpart) would be unfamiliar.  Like if the Lion's name were León, and the Witch's were Bruja, Spanish-speaking people who read it would laugh (or groan) as how silly and generic those names are.  But Aslan and Jadis are so different we still don't know how to pronounce them today (I've never heard about the hard S in Aslan, and I've heard the Witch's name pronounces as JAH-dis, JADE-is, and the dwarf in the Walden series said something like jah-DEECE).  Not that we should overthink pronunciation too much tho - despite being based on Turkish IRL, they're both characters from other worlds - how did they pronounce Jadis in Charn  (Charnese?  Charnian?  Charnic?  lol idk).  😀

Hey while we're talking about names, the YouTube channel "Into the Wardrobe" just did an interesting on on Mr. Tumnus.