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alexseanchai) wrote2019-03-22 01:03 pm
alexseanchai) wrote2019-03-22 01:03 pm
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I'm trying to source the name origins for Nino Lahiffe in vague hope of identifying his ethnic background. Behind The Name says "Nino" is short for Italian names such as Antonino and Giannino, except when it's a feminine Georgian name. I'd thought it was Spanish—I mean, "Colleen" is Anglicized Irish for "girl"†—but it turns out the word I'm thinking of is "niño" and, aside from how that is not (at least in the English dub) how it's pronounced, Behind The Name doesn't admit that's a name at all. DuckDuckGo, meanwhile, sent me to Wiktionary, which thinks "Níno" is a Serbo-Croatian diminutive of Nikolas, no option for Italian and nothing else on the Nino page. (Which isn't where "Níno" should be in the first place.) Wiktionary also calls "Niño" a Cebuano given name (nothing else on the page), which, okay, I can't rule that out of Nino's family tree? But that's an ethnic minority in the Philippines, a former Spanish conquest where people mostly don't speak French, and somehow it sounds more plausible that Nino is actually, you know, Spanish! (Also I'm astonished Wiktionary didn't simply redirect me to El Niño!)
Meanwhile Behind The Name Surnames says "Lahiffe" is Irish, but it's a user-submitted name; veracity therefore potentially dubious. DuckDuckGo points me at the Wiki page for one Robert Lahiffe, a dead Irish politician, so I'll buy it's an Irish name—but it must be a pretty rare one? Robert is the fifth result. Second is names dot org, which thinks "Lahiffe" is a given name; fourth is ancestry dot com. And with the possible exception of Pooh's Adventures Wiki—I don't know the actual purpose of this site but the preview text here is definitely to do with the ML character—the rest of the top ten are about the Miraculous Ladybug character!
Gaaaaack.
† One (or two?) of Mom's petty annoyances is she and Dad had picked out two girl names before I was born, Dad chose which at the hospital, and oldest sister got the other one later. Oldest sister is brunette, I am redheaded, and her name is distinctly Irish and what my parents gave me is distinctly not; this is a betrayal of all our Irish ancestors, or something. This also wouldn't have come up if Mom's oldest brother's middle child, who is a few months older than I am, had been (or, you know, appeared to be) a boy. My uncle and aunt sniped the name "Colleen" for that cousin, you see.
Meanwhile Behind The Name Surnames says "Lahiffe" is Irish, but it's a user-submitted name; veracity therefore potentially dubious. DuckDuckGo points me at the Wiki page for one Robert Lahiffe, a dead Irish politician, so I'll buy it's an Irish name—but it must be a pretty rare one? Robert is the fifth result. Second is names dot org, which thinks "Lahiffe" is a given name; fourth is ancestry dot com. And with the possible exception of Pooh's Adventures Wiki—I don't know the actual purpose of this site but the preview text here is definitely to do with the ML character—the rest of the top ten are about the Miraculous Ladybug character!
Gaaaaack.
† One (or two?) of Mom's petty annoyances is she and Dad had picked out two girl names before I was born, Dad chose which at the hospital, and oldest sister got the other one later. Oldest sister is brunette, I am redheaded, and her name is distinctly Irish and what my parents gave me is distinctly not; this is a betrayal of all our Irish ancestors, or something. This also wouldn't have come up if Mom's oldest brother's middle child, who is a few months older than I am, had been (or, you know, appeared to be) a boy. My uncle and aunt sniped the name "Colleen" for that cousin, you see.
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Thing is, though. Word of Astruc is also (1) either Alya's or Nino's family is from Réunion (2) Alya's family is from Martinique. If I search DuckDuckGo for "sapotis Martinique -ladybug", I get approximately fuck-all of use, but I do get a Worldcat record of a book of fables from Martinique and nearby locales (also: Worldcat site hasn't met best practices for mobile usability), so I am confident in the canonicity of Alya's family being from Martinique.
...There's an awful lot of Africa between Morocco and Réunion. Neither remark suggests Nino's parents come from different directions. And "Lahiffe" is still an Irish name.
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If I'm remembering right, and I may well not be, versions of the spider stories using the name Anansi for the title character are Caribbean, so further evidence for Alya's family being from Martinique. Which leaves Nino's family... well, his folks *could* be from two different places, further back along family lines if not immediately. And Lahiffe does at least look like it could be a francophone variation on an Arabic surname...
Any idea about Alix's family origins, speaking of names and surnames? I'm going entirely off names here, since I haven't got the first clue what anyone looks like beyond what's said aloud in canon or stated in fic, but the name Jalil, especially, makes me wonder if the Kubdels are of northern African extraction? With Jalil's particular interest in ancient Egypt--oh wow, now I'm wondering if someone in that family wasn't an Egyptian political dissident who had to get the heck out of sight back in the '70's. More recently, even, if the ML 'verse had an equivalent of Mubarak.
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Fanon is the Kubdels are northern African of some description, possibly Coptic or Berber. Or Egyptian, yes; I discount that possibility more because, given Jalil's and M. Kubdel's line of work, it sounds viciously stereotypical.
...That said, "Kung Food" happened and Sabine dresses, I understand, for a funeral—it's a visual detail and I would never have spotted it, but the collar of her top should look like the lowercase letter y, because of how one puts such clothing on for everyday versus for mourning, and it is the mirror image of that. It is entirely likely that, in thinking the Kubdels aren't Egyptian, I am giving ML creative too much credit.
(ETA: I had to look up Anansi to get more precise than "Africa? Probably imported to the Caribbean with the triangle trade?", which is probably why this didn't occur to me before: They themed two of the five Césaire akumas to date, encompassing three of the six Césaires, after folk stories in Martinique; I am not sure what sapotis are supposed to be in RL terms, but the impression I have from ML is mischief demons— obviously unflattering. They themed two of the said five akumas after animals; Anansi is a deity, but Cernunnos and Herakles have come up in canon-adjacent official material as Miraculous wielders, without apparent acknowledgement of the shitstorm that would arise if they did the precise same thing with Jesus Christ. White folks are often happy to assert, confirm, accept, whatever, the divine status of Celtic and Greek deities; those from brown places... And the two remaining Césaire akumas were both, in part or in whole, Alya, who as a key secondary character has an actual personality instead of a character trait or two. I am giving ML creative too much credit.)
Anyway, "Jalil" is an Arabic name. "Alix" is French, sourced from Germanic "Adalheidis" (Adelaide, Alice), or else a variant spelling of "Alex", which, variants and descendants of "Alexander" are everywhere Europeans have been since Alexander the Great; the second possibility is therefore not much use in narrowing it down. Their father's given name is unknown, and "Kubdel" looks straight up invented? I mean it might be a legit family name from a culture that hasn't indicated this on the internet, but...
I don't know enough history to comment on that notion but it sounds cool so I support it!
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I take it, wherever her family is from, that Alix is not hijabi? That's not commentary, it's me not having a clue as to visual details again.
Re surnames, it was the name Kubdel that kept tripping me up when trying to figure out where they might be from! I kept going... that doesn't quite scan...
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In other news, someone apparently asked the creator if there were plans to include a hijabi minor character, because Muslim rep, and he—in this show that has Notre Dame Cathedral in the background of several scenes, and that has had two Christmas-themed episodes—said there are no plans for this show to address religion ever. Even though there are, in fact, Muslims in Paris who cover their hair and might like to see one of their own on the show. And even though Muslim identity and various PoC backgrounds have a high correlation, and of Caline Bustier's fifteen students, five are visibly of color. (Marinette, Alya, Nino, Max, Kim. Not sure about Alix or Lila. Or, come to think, Nathaniel Kurtzberg.)
Also, either Alix is an example of anime characters don't need to abide by RL-standard notions of natural hair, or she dyes it all pink. Because everyone else with non-RL-standard hair color obviously does dye it, except Marinette and Sabine but hold that thought, I'm going with Alix dyes it all pink.
Juleka has black hair with purple bangs and streaks. Jagged Stone has black hair with purple tips, and Luka black with teal tips. Nathalie has black hair with a red streak. Mylène I think is a golden blonde naturally, but her hair is four colors of curls under a bandana; I'm guessing which one is natural based on how the others are pink, green, and blue. These all look like dye jobs, not like "oh, Mizuno Ami's hair is naturally blue". Alya's hair is multicolored too, but I don't think she dyes it? I think it was all that lighter copper in Martinique, and then she moved to the rather less sunny Paris, whereupon her natural deeper copper reasserted itself in absence of the sun bleaching effect. Marinette and Sabine have distinctly blue hair, but black hair apparently used to be hell to animate, and rather than have it look black and be without detail, French animation tradition went with making it detailed and blue. Animation quality has since improved, but the convention stuck, so French audiences understand Marinette and Sabine to have black hair.
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Re hijabi characters: Oh for frak's sake, showrunners! :( Okay, I'd already intended a multicultural cast of minor characters in the Not Alone series, but this makes me even more determined.
... Aha, re characters of color. Max Kanté, Mory Kante*, west Africa. Got it. I'm used to seeing that surname without the accent mark, darn English.
My headcanon is that Nathaniel is Jewish and quietly proud of the fact. Ivan could be too; I need to double check which spelling of Bruel (there's also Bruhl) is more commonly Jewish. Then again, there is at least one RL instance of that exact surname getting a spelling change on forged papers during the war, the better to allow a Jewish woman to avoid Nazi detection. Successfully, if I remember correctly.
And no, Alix's skating helmet does not count! ^^
*flipping excellent musician, IMO
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Dunno if Max's folks are from west Africa or sub-Saharan or what, but the top DuckDuckGo result for the surname is a French soccer player whose parents are from Mali, so I totally buy west Africa. Anyway he's got the darkest skin on the show, I think. Certainly the darkest of anyone with lines.
I suspect Nathaniel is Ashkenazi Jewish by ethnic background, at least on the Kurtzberg side—oh by the way his hair is a vivid and somewhat orange red; dunno if natural or dyed—but we have no info on his religion, except he doesn't dress like he's Orthodox. Ivan neither, and I wouldn't have thought Ivan Jewish at all (Russian, maybe, but not Jewish) except now I find there's a French singer of that surname who's of Algerian Jewish descent. The surname also might be straight up French.
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Re Ivan, my apologies, the name that got altered for the sake of avoiding Nazi evil during the war was Brulle/Bruhl, and I somehow looped Bruel into that. Of the alterations, I know that one version was a more well-known French spelling, the other distinct as a Jewish spelling, but darned if I can remember which--eeeeek, I'm pretty sure it was Albert Camus's wife! I just remembered. Fairly sure the story was featured in a lecture I attended at the UW once, in the section illustrating part of his Résistance activities during the war. Which is a roundabout and how way of musing that Ivan could be Jewish? I kind of like the idea of him as someone actively, genuinely interested in the betterment of the world and the lives of the people around him, whether or not he can express that in spoken words. Darn endearing metalhead bruiser with a heart of gold. XD
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Mylène is a natural blonde; there's more gold in her hair than pink, green, and blue put together, particularly what of her roots we can see under the edge of the bandana.
Prince Ali's chaperone, who has lines but no name, covers her hair. Ali's homeland is fictional but I think we're supposed to be thinking Saudi Arabia or the like?
ETA a month and a half later: (1) wtf that typo (2) Butler Jean has purple hair
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