About the Vilani converter
Loren Wiseman, editor of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society (an online magazine devoted to the science-fiction roleplaying game Traveller, in all its incarnations) pointed out Robert's Vilani conversion system in a recent issue of JTAS, mentioning that the system is "neat, but it would be even neater if some kind soul would automate it for us." This Web page is an attempt at automating Robert's very clever Vilani conversion system.
I say "attempt" because the system used in Your Name In
Vilani is really intended as a paper-and-pencil system, requiring a lot of
decision-making from a human being during the conversion process. For example,
part of the conversion calls for replacing the letter l with any
of ag, ir, uk, aag, or
iir. This means that for each l in the original
name, there are five different possibilities; combined with other letter
replacements, the conversion system can create a bewildering number of possible
combinations. This is a strength of the system; it allows you a lot of
flexibility in creating a Vilani name that you can be proud of (or at least
stand half a chance of pronouncing).
Unfortunately, a simple computer program cannot make aesthetic judgements about what the best replacements for certain letters should be (an advanced AI project best left to someone working on a post-doctoral thesis on machine intelligence, rather than a hobbyist like myself). The program could randomly make decisions at various parts of the name-convolution process, but I thought it would be rather obnoxious to make you repeatedly hit your browser's reload button until you find a name you like. The other extreme, which is to generate every single permutation possible for a given name, could potentially require enough processing time that the kind folks at Dreamhost, who provide me with space for this Web site, would have some very pointed questions for me regarding why my little script is hogging all their server's processor.
So, this converter produces a list of different possible
Vilani names, but I've cut a few corners from Robert's original algorithm in
order to prevent the list from becoming ridiculously long. If you play around
with the converter enough, you'll find that some names produce more Vilani
output than others; in particular, any name with a lot of l's in
it will have a lot of different permutations. Also, my code chops the
name into family and given names at an arbitrary point two-thirds of the way
into the name, avoiding separating legal consonant combinations like
rk and kh; feel free to move the separation further
forward or back as you see fit.
In the future, I may put together a more interactive version of Vilani by Lonnie that allows you to work through the conversion process a step at a time, providing you with minute control over the entire process (although at that point, you might as well just get out the paper and pencil). If you have any comments or suggestions (or, heaven forbid, bug reports), please send them to me at the address listed below. Happy name mangling!
Credits
I would like to thank Robert Eaglestone for his wonderful Vilani conversion system, without which this page would not be possible. Other thanks go to Loren Wiseman for printing the link to Robert's Your Name In Vilani page in JTAS. A special thank you goes to Mark Shurtleff for suggesting the far-too-clever "Vilani by Lonnie" title for this page.
