Project History

Once upon a time in the 90s, I was hacking some Perl with friends: we were playing with cryptography and examining letter frequencies in different languages at different historical times. Our curiosity (I dare not say "hypothesis") had us wondering if character frequencies could indicate source language in old encryption styles, and the Perl code helped us explore this space quickly, examining letter frequencies over time.

A short time later, I had the idea of using this code to assist users in a site I maintained. I ran middlearth.net as a PHPNuke site (hey, we all have dark secrets; I'm just being honest about mine) and to assist with those who wanted to create a Tolkien-like name for themselves, I wrote a PHP script that generated names for any of the given races, based on the Perl code.

Later, I migrated the site to Zope and then later, Plone CMS, converting the script to Python. And finally, in 2003, I just wanted to be able to use the tool as a command-line utility, whence this library.

The library was maintained and used actively in projects until 2012. In 2018, it was added to the Hexagram30 suite of tools (which included a project rename) and ported to Clojure.

Old Name

Quasi-originally called PyWordGen (I forget the very first name), the project has been renamed to something more interesting and far less easy to remember: anamyéter. This name is really more a case of playfulness with Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Celtic (with a touch of decidedly non-poetic license) than an actual word. Here's the story:

The reconstructed word for "names" in PIE is *h₁néh₃mō. One of the patterns in PIE for making nouns into verbs (denominative) is the addition of an ablauting thematic suffix: *-yé/ó-. Finally, PIE has as agentive suffixes *-t(e)r- and *-t(o)r- (hysterokinetic and amphikinetic. respectively). So what does all this mean? Namely, this:

• *h₁néh₃mō - names (nominative plural)

• *h₁néh₃mōyó - to give names

• *h₁néh₃mōyótor - one who gives names

But can you imagine that last one for a project name? Nah, I couldn't either. So, I skipped a couple thousand years, and looked at Proto-Celtic instead:

• anman - name (nominative singular)

• anmanyé - to name

• anmanyéter - one who names

That last one was nice, but still a little awkward to pronounce. So I just messed with it a bit, and we have "anamyéter" :-)