What do you call male and female elves?

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Saintofm
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What do you call male and female elves?

Post by Saintofm »

So while posting a story on the Imperial Literature Website (a warhammer Fantasy and 40K fan fic site) I ran into a little problem. Apparently the male and female terms for humans (man and woman) which is so ingrained to the human species when I went to describe an old elvin man, a reader through I was talking about a human because of the word man.

What it says on the tin.

She elf and he elf doesn't seem right,

Male and female maybe but something better perhaps. Maybe take a Greek or Roman (Latin) word for them.

Or am I over thinking this?

Any and all help would be appreciated.
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Post by Nightcall »

I have not seen anything official in Druhir for the different sexes, but in any Warhammer Elf literature I have read, they have been referred to as just male or female. On occasion though, they have been described as a man or woman.
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Post by Slyde »

Agreed, I've only read male/female, man/woman, and the rare boy/girl.

I think that when it comes down to it, if there was confusion over to whom the "man" referred to, it was possibly a case of not enough description given about who is speaking (or spoken to). I wouldn't fret too much over gender identification confusion when it comes to fantasy races. Unless specified previously that "X" is the term for male of this race, and "Y" is the term for a female, a reader just needs association and male/female does the job well enough.

Just my two cents.
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Post by Drainial »

I agree that male/ female or she elf/ he elf lacks a certain elegance but I have never heard an alternative. Latin doesn't really work in my opinion; it doesn't fit the language tone.
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Saintofm
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Post by Saintofm »

thank you all
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Post by Calisson »

Words for male/female elves should not be any different for other Elves.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf
for several suggestions:
Originally ælf/elf and its plural ælfe were the masculine forms, while the corresponding feminine form (first found in eighth century glosses) was ælfen or elfen (with a possible feminine plural -ælfa, found in dunælfa) which became the Middle English elven, using the feminine suffix -en from the earlier -inn which derives from the Proto-Germanic *-innja).
If no better alternative, may I suggest elfinn for the female elf? Elf would remain both generic and male.
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Post by Carathyle maveric »

When I'm talking races, or introducing characters that are race bound different from humans, I always introduce them complete, how they look and everything, including the following.

From the darkened forest a figure appeared, it's femine forms were illustrated by the sunlight raining down on her body. Her ears were pointy, and stretched a bit to the back, her body was slender, her arms showed signs of training, yet maintained a female form. Her ash-colored long hair waved in the Northbound winds, as her shirt seemed to ignore it. Her skirt moved along side the wind, as she placed her elven fingers against her forehead and moved it gently toward her cheek, removing the strains of hair from her face behind her ear,


As you can see, I only drop the word Elf only once, but from the way I write it, you can nearly immediately tell it's a female, and the further you go, the more you notice the Elven traits. Obviously this is improvised from a different role-play I'm playing along friends.

It's purely how you see fit really, I like to introduce my characters clearly, so you only need to read the name to see the person in your mind immediately, where other simply put the name and don't go into detail if the character isn't important.

The section that Calisson covered is one of good interest, it's clear yet probably few know the difference between the two verbs, still a good way of clarifying.

Hope it helped. It's all in the way of how you write it down, and not what names you give to it.
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