Just discovered a potential plothole, and its a pretty major one. Basically, in my Colonial Mystery, my main character is French and comes from a French background. His birth-name is 'Aimon'. Non-French calls him 'Amos'. As one of my friends pointed out, it's kind of silly they'd give him a different name if the one he has is short and simple enough to pronounce. Be like everyone calling me Tom instead of John. I suppose I have few options here: (1) Change 'Amos' to 'Aimon' and that's his canon name from now on. (2) Since I'm still so attached to 'Amos', maybe he's an orphan British kid living with a kindly French family? And yes, they're kind. None of this Dursley crap. : (3) Or simply change the family from French to British. Trouble is, I rather like the French heritage thing they got going on. His father's from Quebec, and he and his brother (the uncle) served under the French banner during the French and Indian War/Seven Years War. Hmm...
It's not necessarily that likely, but I don't see why he can't develop the nickname Aimos. Thomas is not a hard name to pronounce or that long but Tom is still a nickname, and the Harry is the same number of letters just arbitrarily different to Henry. And I can easily imagine Anglicising occurring, it occurs quite a lot. In the early 17th century Anna Oldenburg became Queen of England in addition to Scotland and she was known as Anne instead of Anna in England, because that was the English version of the name.
Well, unless it has some relevance to the story, say having some background reason why he picked up the nickname, then it's a confusing distraction for the reader. They're far enough apart in sound that the reader could begin to get confused on who you were talking about. Best to just stick with a single name, and if you have an a.k.a. then it needs to be something attached to him for a reason, otherwise the writing for that is just a kind of dead weight.
No it's not. It's more like people calling someone Bob instead of Robert. You're not changing the name completely, you're just abridging it, that's not the same.
I don't think it's silly that nonfrench characters changed his name. Is he in America? Britain? In the old days, when people came to America, they Americanized their names. Even if it was easy to say, they wanted to disassociate themselves sometimes from their own country, or they were hiding, OR ass-holes just WANTED to call them an American name vs just calling them by a non-american name. (I took a Genealogy class last semester, and these issues popped up in research)
