Guild Wars 2

I have only heard of firstborn and secondborn mentioned in books or ingame, but what about sylvari who are born just now? Surely they’re not referred to as One-hundred-and-twenty-sixth-born and so forth. :P

Since sylvari take note of what time of the day they are awakened, would it make sense to refer to a sylvari who was born during the dawn as Dawnborn for example?

Considering how many player characters there are in GW2 by now, single-word names are pretty difficult to come up with unless you’re typing complete gibberish or using titles… So it got me thinking about second names for sylvari. (I know Scarlet took the name Briar, but she hardly represents the sylvari culture.)

Once you get past the first/second/ maybe third, when you were born isn’t particularly noteworthy.

But if you want to refer to it as such, I think Dawnborn/Dusk etc seems feasible, really.

I believe Ghosts of Ascalon presented sylvari nomenclature with regard to cycles as “[Name], of the Cycle of [time of day]”. Then again, this was used more for purposes of introduction, and acts more like a title than anything.

My thinking is, if your sylvari was named something like [Name] Dawnborn, the surname would theoretically be shared with a quarter of the sylvari population.

^— Is right regarding how a Sylvari refer’s to their own or another’s cycle.

Regarding first names becoming scarce – Sylvari are presented with outside cultures while they’re inside their dream through the experiences of Sylvari out in the world – so they do get introduced to the other races naming practices. So definitely there will be some Sylvari who adopt multiple names. Although it’s worth pointing out that the actual Sylvari population (of in game players) should be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, so it’s not completely unfeasible that they could all have unique single names. But there’s nothing to say a Sylvari can’t use a name that someone else already has. The chance of them meeting another Sylvari with the same name probably isn’t too high, and even if they do it’s not a problem – it’s the same as meeting someone in the real world with the same name.

Regarding first and second borns.
The firstborn are obviously notable because they were the first Sylvari to be born of the tree and share a special connection with the Pale Tree and the Dream. The second born are identified as those Sylvari who were born 6 or 7 years after the firstborn.

Present day Tyria is 25 years after the firstborn came into being, and I imagine that Sylvari are no longer identified by the batch in which they were born. Second born are identified as such to distinguish them as older than most Sylvari, but not first born. With new Sylvari there isn’t really a distinction that needs to be made, and of course with the boom in population it would be difficult. Most Sylvari seem to identify themsevles by their Cycle, so I think that the Cycle has become more important within Sylvari society.

As I understand it, after 25 years of sylvari being produced, the gap between new generations has shortened so much that and there are so many of them that it’s much less important to identify exactly which they’re from. When the early generations were born, it was a big deal and wasn’t happening every day (nor even every year, I think), so they get special recognition.