City name

Myrddin

Well-Known Member
For a story I am writing, I need a fictional name for a city that I can use that at least roughly translates to Hell, or sounds like the word. I am having an awfully hard time trying to find something in that area that actually sounds like the name of a city. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. (Mythology based or Latin based, or a mix, even.)
 

RLynn

Active Member
For a story I am writing, I need a fictional name for a city that I can use that at least roughly translates to Hell, or sounds like the word. I am having an awfully hard time trying to find something in that area that actually sounds like the name of a city. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. (Mythology based or Latin based, or a mix, even.)
Gehenna
 

Alejandro

Active Member
What if you expanded Gehenna into closer to its original form(s): Gehinnom, or Ge-Bene-Hinnom... Wait... Maybe I'm not improving it at all :( Okay, how about, then, an English translation of one of those, like Hinnom Valley. (Ge-Bene-Hinnom = "Valley of the Sons of Hinnom," in case that's good for anything.)
 

Myrddin

Well-Known Member
What if you expanded Gehenna into closer to its original form(s): Gehinnom, or Ge-Bene-Hinnom... Wait... Maybe I'm not improving it at all :( Okay, how about, then, an English translation of one of those, like Hinnom Valley. (Ge-Bene-Hinnom = "Valley of the Sons of Hinnom," in case that's good for anything.)
Excellent! That gives me something to think on. I like that idea, too. (It can't be a valley though, as the city is to be right on Hudson Bay.)
 

RLynn

Active Member
Tophet is another name for Gehenna used in a couple of the prophetic books in the Old Testament. It is also used by John Milton in Paradise Lost and John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress. Tophetown? Tophetville? Tophetburg? Tophet City? Topheton?
 

Myrddin

Well-Known Member
Thank you for all your suggestions, I really like them a lot. I'm thinking though of maybe using Gehenna in some way, maybe just as is. What do you think? Jay-na? Sound okay? :)
 

RLynn

Active Member
Thank you for all your suggestions, I really like them a lot. I'm thinking though of maybe using Gehenna in some way, maybe just as is. What do you think? Jay-na? Sound okay? :)
Actually, the G in Gehenna is hard as in garden, not soft as in germ, and the h is aspirated as in habit, with the accent in the second syllable (guh-HEN-nah). Gehenna is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Gehinnom. גיהנום :) But whatever you think is what matters.
 

RLynn

Active Member
Google is not wrong, just inconsistent. The Greek transliteration (not the translation) of
גיהינה
was
γεένα
in the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. At that time, this was not a legitimate word in the Greek language. I believe the second epsilon in the Greek is supposed to be aspirated (or at least preceded by a glottal stop), so the English transliteration (again, not the translation) would be gehenna, which happily also happens to be an approximate English transliteration of the Hebrew, which is probably good enough, since no one knows exactly how ancient Hebrew was originally pronounced anyhow.

Leaving out the aspiration, I think something like Gayna or Genna might be suggestive enough of Gehenna. (The Greek letter gamma (g) is always hard. It never has a j sound.)

By the way, the Septuagint (Greek) translation of the Hebrew Bible was done for the Jews of that day, not the Greeks. Only the Jewish scholars could read Hebrew. Most of the Jews spoke Greek. Hebrew became a forgotten language, which is why we don't know exactly how it was originally pronounced. (Hope I have my history right. It has been many years since I studied it.)
 

RLynn

Active Member
At the beginning of the last post, I meant to write
גיהנום
not
גיהינה
which is not the original Hebrew word but a (totally unnecessary) transliteration of the Greek
γεένα.
I got confused by Google too! What a comedy of errors!
 

Myrddin

Well-Known Member
Good to know. Thank you.

You could write anything in Greek, and I wouldn't understand it. I can't say it's something I've ever studied. Honestly, they look pretty much the same to my untrained eyes.
 
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