In the description of Solaria, two levels of naming coexist: exonyms, used in Earth sources, and endonyms, belonging to the internal languages and cultures of the Solarian world.
An exonym is a name attributed 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 Earth 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 readers 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 by which one of the main cities of Solaria is indicated in Earth sources. The term derives from Sanskrit yantra, which can indicate an instrument, a device, an apparatus or a machine. This choice is not accidental: the Earth 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 an Earth 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 an Earth exonym, probably built from the Greek root téchnē, from which words like technique and technology derive. The Earth name thus highlights the most immediately recognizable trait of this culture: its relationship with technical art, operational knowledge, construction and applied ingenuity.
The endonym is instead Kudamef. The term is formed from the root kudam, meaning technique, and ef, meaning territory. Kudamef 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 an Earth root comprehensible to the reader, Kudamef 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. In the oldest attestations, the form Uklanef recurs, built in the same way on the archaic variant uklan of the same root.
The name of the language is formed by the same process. What Earth sources call Theknusian is, for those who speak it, Kudamaf: kudam, technique, and -af, a suffix deriving from afar, language. The language is described in Kudamaf.
Narrator
The presence of exonyms and endonyms should not be considered a mere nominal duplication. Rather, it reveals the distance between the way Solaria is made accessible to the Earth 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 a broader question, not yet fully resolved: the role of the Earth narrator. It is not yet clear 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 Earth world and the Solarian one.