Talk:Tintin (character)

origin of the name and more

This passage and the following excerpt from the French WP should be added:

Le nom de Tintin serait le fruit de sonorités communes entre le personnage de Totor (cf. Victor), créé par Hergé en 1926, et les diminutifs des prénoms en vogue à l'époque comme Martin, Corentin ou Augustin ; mais Hergé est toujours resté vague sur l'origine du nom. Un personnage d'une œuvre de R. M. De Nizerolles (pseudonyme de Marcel Priollet), Justin Blanchard, était surnommé Tintin, le petit Parisien. Ce Tintin avait une petite sœur appelée Yvonne et était entouré d'un savant et d'un capitaine. Créé entre 1911 et 1913, ce jeune personnage est allé sur la Lune et a visité d'autres planètes dans les Aventuriers du Ciel et les Voyages aériens d'un petit Parisien à travers le monde. --Espoo (talk) 13:33, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Lest it be thought that the formation of diminutives of endearment based on alliterative reduplication of a syllable taken from a person's name (e.g. Arthur becomes Turtur) was a fad of the 1920s: it remains to this day a very common practice among Francophones and it is immediately obvious to native speakers of French that Tintin is an instance of this class; this is relevant as Tintin books are still enormously popular in France. There is a double joke here because tin-tin is also a common onomatopoeia for the sound of a bell or a glass being tapped. The reduplication formula is mostly used for pets and small children, but adults who have been friends since childhood sometimes use these forms as an in-joke, to celebrate the long friendship. (Reduplication has a wider use in French, e.g. cucul from cul (arse) meaning "twee.") I surmise Hergé remained vague because it is always unpleasant to have to explain a light-hearted joke. This being a encyclopedia, I now will proceed to tediously and ponderously explain it. We know the name Tintin primarily from the speech of the dog Milou, who speaks French to us readers but makes the usual barking noise for the denizens of the comic's universe (we the readers see Milou saying things like "don't trust him! this way, you idiot!" while the characters say things like "I wonder what that dog wants? Not now, Milou!"). It is natural for Milou to call his master (who apparently is called Martin, Corentin, or Augustin) Tintin. Perhaps it is implied that our hero calls himself "ton Tintin" when addressing the dog. A further incongruity is that Tintin is apparently known under this name by all other human characters (we do not often see Tintin introducing himself as such). Readers would not really be bothered by this because they already know him as Tintin from Milou's running monologue, commenting ironically on Tintin's adventures and mishaps, which was especially prominent in the earlier stories. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:3453:7AF8:7F0:AFDF (talk) 18:09, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

While I agree that the reduplication is still common (e.g. "Juju" for Julian Alaphilippe, or earlier Poupou for Raymond Poulidor), the remainder of your post is WP:OR: it seems to me much more likely that Hergé either simply liked such reduplicated names (see also Popol a few years later), or thought it perfect for children. Placing the origin with Milou ignores the similarity with "Totor", who was earlier and didn't have a dog (IIRC). There are countless possible explanations and origins, and likely it is a combination of a number of them, which lead to the name "Tintin", and I can perfectly imagine that even Hergé didn't recall why he settled on that name and not another, and didn't have an "origin story" or other explanation for it. We'll never know, but we should make sure that only well-sourced speculation makes it into the article, and not our own. Fram (talk) 07:52, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

References