What do the names of the 3 Goddesses mean?

Are they feminine forms of the Japanese words for the traits their supposed to embody, Power, Wisdom, Courage? or something else?

For some reason Din sounds to me like a word for Fire, which does also happen to fit?

I tried to google translate Din Farore and nayru from japanease to english.......didnt work :/

Din ディン (Din) translates straight to Din, which can mean a loud discordant confused noise or religion in general; the beliefs and obligations of Islam

Nayru ネール (Neru) translates to Nehru, which doesn't have a definition but coincidentally shares a name with Jawaharlal Nehru who is often referred to with the epithet of Panditji, was an Indian lawyer, politician and statesman who became the first Prime Minister of independent India. There could be some connection here since the story of Hyrule's creation states that Nayru poured her spirit onto the earth and gave a spirit of law to the world.

Farore フロル (Furoru) translates to Flor, which is prefix for floral (flower patterned, flowery) and floruit which shares similar meaning with flourished.


This was just from googling and sifting through the Zelda wiki pages for 20 minutes, so it's probably not 100% accurate.

^^^^^^^^^^^^
I think you did a lot more research than me good sir :L :L

I think Nayru's name is the prettiest. *^_^*

Thanks for the Info Soulofdiety.

All I know is Din means something like chaos...

Well Din I always translated as meaning 'Din', as in loud, powerful, chaotic. However, Din is also a translation of 'furor' in latin, which can mean anger, madness or strength. Now Furor sounds like Farore, does it not?

Also...'neru' translates to 'of nerve' in Latin, which is similar I guess yet one would think that her Triforce would therefore be Courage However 'naru' is Latin for 'of persons/people' which as a lawful, wise goddess, people are 'homo sapiens' or wise man.


Ah perhaps I'm clutching at straws....

Originally Posted by kamfira

Well Din I always translated as meaning 'Din', as in loud, powerful, chaotic. However, Din is also a translation of 'furor' in latin, which can mean anger, madness or strength. Now Furor sounds like Farore, does it not?

Also...'neru' translates to 'of nerve' in Latin, which is similar I guess yet one would think that her Triforce would therefore be Courage However 'naru' is Latin for 'of persons/people' which as a lawful, wise goddess, people are 'homo sapiens' or wise man.


Ah perhaps I'm clutching at straws....

Indeed, speculations on namesake can evoke extreme apophenia in cases like these given the little material evidence available to use as proof of legitimate authorial intention above inevitable coincidence resulting from the frequency of similar phonemes that carry unrelated meaning in different languages.

One rare certainty is that like most names in the Zelda franchise, the names of the goddesses were most assuredly conceptualized in English and later transliterated for Japanese use. The katakana renderings therefore reveal nothing about the meaning of the names, only their originally intended pronunciations (ie, they are not translations, but transliterations). Google Translate's rendering of Farore's Japanese name as 'flor' is simply the result of a transliteration algorithm struggling to interpret the katakana which it recognizes as gairaigo, a loan word that can be thought of as a reduced form of a foreign term which the machine translator attempts to reconstruct, sometimes choosing one of multiple potential original terms by best guess based on a limited lexicon, but here blindly based on phonology alone. Since we humans however have access to and understanding of the contextual meaning as well as the phonology, we can make much better informed guesses as to which of the possible reconstructions/interpretations are more likely than others.

Assuming that the creators chose the names for some semantic quality over simple phonetic aesthetic, the best first step to determine the root most likely used for a name is to correlate the potential roots with what we know about the qualities assigned by the creators to the entity for which they chose the name. For instance, I feel that the naming of Din, as a goddess of power, was possibly inspired by Odin, the powerful god king of the Norse pantheon. If this were to have been the case, it's interesting that the initial elision was later subjected to a contrary epenthesis forming 'Eldin', although the syllable is so universal that to attribute the semantic value associated with the Spanish masc. article or the even the Hebrew noun el (אל) meaning 'god' seems dangerously unsubstantiated however tempting. By a second step of evaluation concerning the renown of the root, I feel that influence from the Arabic dīn (دين) literally meaning merely 'religion' (or any of its Semitic, Turkic, or Austronesian cognates) is less likely given its greater obscurity.

Returning to the notion of machine transliteration, Google chooses 'Nehru' to represent ネール simply because the software identifies that the katakana most likely and/or most often refers to the Indian PM when the term is given out of conjunction with a full sentence. Recalling the aforementioned multiplicity of reduction/reconstruction, this transliteration also serves the role of gairaigo for the English term 'nail', as in 'fingernail'. However, if we'd like to stick with the subcontinental influence, I can offer a crack theory with relevance to the identity of Nayru, for incidentally there's a Sanskrit root nara meaning 'wisdom' such as in the term narada, a learned sage of Vishnu.

As for Farore, I will forever associate her name with the Italian Furore and accordingly pronounce it in three syllables. I've always considered this Latinate source a likely influence on the name considering that its connotations of 'furor' or 'passion' are marginally related to Farore's character as goddess of courage.

PS: do we have a thread on etymology for the other names in the games?

Well, Din means a loud noise in English. And Farore soundes like forest. God know that Nayru is supposed to be.

Originally Posted by NCF

Indeed, speculations on namesake can evoke extreme apophenia in cases like these given the little material evidence available to use as proof of legitimate authorial intention above inevitable coincidence resulting from the frequency of similar phonemes that carry unrelated meaning in different languages.

One rare certainty is that like most names in the Zelda franchise, the names of the goddesses were most assuredly conceptualized in English and later transliterated for Japanese use. The katakana renderings therefore reveal nothing about the meaning of the names, only their originally intended pronunciations (ie, they are not translations, but transliterations). Google Translate's rendering of Farore's Japanese name as 'flor' is simply the result of a transliteration algorithm struggling to interpret the katakana which it recognizes as gairaigo, a loan word that can be thought of as a reduced form of a foreign term which the machine translator attempts to reconstruct, sometimes choosing one of multiple potential original terms by best guess based on a limited lexicon, but here blindly based on phonology alone. Since we humans however have access to and understanding of the contextual meaning as well as the phonology, we can make much better informed guesses as to which of the possible reconstructions/interpretations are more likely than others.

Assuming that the creators chose the names for some semantic quality over simple phonetic aesthetic, the best first step to determine the root most likely used for a name is to correlate the potential roots with what we know about the qualities assigned by the creators to the entity for which they chose the name. For instance, I feel that the naming of Din, as a goddess of power, was possibly inspired by Odin, the powerful god king of the Norse pantheon. If this were to have been the case, it's interesting that the initial elision was later subjected to a contrary epenthesis forming 'Eldin', although the syllable is so universal that to attribute the semantic value associated with the Spanish masc. article or the even the Hebrew noun el (אל) meaning 'god' seems dangerously unsubstantiated however tempting. By a second step of evaluation concerning the renown of the root, I feel that influence from the Arabic dīn (دين) literally meaning merely 'religion' (or any of its Semitic, Turkic, or Austronesian cognates) is less likely given its greater obscurity.

Returning to the notion of machine transliteration, Google chooses 'Nehru' to represent ネール simply because the software identifies that the katakana most likely and/or most often refers to the Indian PM when the term is given out of conjunction with a full sentence. Recalling the aforementioned multiplicity of reduction/reconstruction, this transliteration also serves the role of gairaigo for the English term 'nail', as in 'fingernail'. However, if we'd like to stick with the subcontinental influence, I can offer a crack theory with relevance to the identity of Nayru, for incidentally there's a Sanskrit root nara meaning 'wisdom' such as in the term narada, a learned sage of Vishnu.

As for Farore, I will forever associate her name with the Italian Furore and accordingly pronounce it in three syllables. I've always considered this Latinate source a likely influence on the name considering that its connotations of 'furor' or 'passion' are marginally related to Farore's character as goddess of courage.

PS: do we have a thread on etymology for the other names in the games?

Something tells me you've studied linguistics!

I agree with you about Farore; as I'm sure you're aware 'Furore' of Italian is directly linked to 'furor' of Latin...I was just going a little bit further back into the roots of the derivation

I like your idea about Odin too, it would interesting if that was an inspiration!

And sorry it's taken me so long to reply...I've had a lot on!

Actually if you look up dyn it means power. I don't know anything about the others.

I kind of want to name one of my kids nayru or din!

No worries Kamfira, I've been too busy myself to browse these past weeks. I plan on writing something in response to your new posts in my other thread as soon as I can after this one!

Originally Posted by Elienkae

Actually if you look up dyn it means power. I don't know anything about the others.

That's from Greek, the upsilon here rendered as the letter wye, a traditional though phonologically ambiguous transliteration. I hadn't considered this root as English speakers tend to pronounce that vowel differently than that in 'din' when it appears in words such as 'dynamite' and 'dynasty' (both retaining the original sense of 'power' but hardly likely sources of inspiration).