In the description of Solaria, two levels of naming coexist: exonyms, used in terrestrial sources, and endonyms, belonging to the internal languages and cultures of the Solarian world.
An exonym is a name assigned from outside. It is the name by which a place, a people, a city, or a phenomenon are identified by those who do not directly belong to that culture. An endonym, on the other hand, is the internal name, that is, the name used by the inhabitants themselves or attested in their language.
In the case of Solaria, many names known to the terrestrial reader are exonyms assigned by the narrator. These names do not erase the local denominations, but function as tools of orientation, translation, and access. They allow the reader to quickly recognize a place or a concept, even when its original name belongs to an internal language, often older and more culturally stratified.
Examples
Yantra
A significant example is - Yantra.
Yantra is the exonym name by which one of Solaria’s main cities is indicated in terrestrial sources. The term derives from the Sanskrit yantra, which can indicate an instrument, a device, an apparatus, or a machine. This choice is not accidental: the terrestrial name evokes the idea of structure, device, functioning, and operational diagram.
The local name attested in ancient Theknusian is instead Kena, a toponymic form connected to the root ken, meaning “machine.” If the exonym Yantra translates the city through a terrestrial linguistic memory, the endonym Kena roots it in Theknusian culture, where the machine is not merely a technical object, but a cultural principle: transformation of energy, organization of matter, and cooperation of human labor.
Theknus
A similar case concerns Theknus. Theknus is also a terrestrial exonym, probably constructed from the Greek root téchnē, from which words such as technique and technology derive. The terrestrial name therefore highlights the most immediately recognizable trait of this culture: the relationship with technical art, operational knowledge, construction, and applied ingenuity.
The Theknusian endonym is instead Uklanef. The term is formed from the root uklan, meaning technique, and ef, meaning territory. Uklanef can therefore be understood as “territory of technique” or “land of technique.” Compared to the exonym Theknus, which translates the people and the culture through a terrestrial root comprehensible to the reader, Uklanef preserves an internal linguistic structure and shows how the inhabitants name their own territory not as a geographical abstraction, but as a space defined by a cultural vocation.
Narrator
The presence of exonyms and endonyms should not be considered a simple nominal duplication. Rather, it reveals the distance between the way Solaria is made accessible to the terrestrial reader and the way its inhabitants name themselves, their places, and their history. The exonym belongs to the level of narration and mediation; the endonym belongs to the internal level of the world.
This distinction opens up a broader question, still not fully resolved: the role of the terrestrial narrator: it is not yet clear, in fact, how he has access to Solaria, to its history, to its languages, and to its traditions. He could be an author, a translator, a witness, a cartographer, an interpreter, or an intermediate figure between the terrestrial world and the Solarian one.