reading earthsea has me thinking about magic based on Old Languages and True Names but also trying to build such things based on like, my own preferences and beliefs so i was working out a setup for this like "oh, what if instead of a single true name you had to just describe relationships between things? and that way, anything could have a dozen true names, it could have any true name, as long as you were accurately capturing its relationship to everything else in the spell or whatever, and you could have dozens of different magic languages and people would have preferences and get into arguments and oh god, oh no, i've invented programming, fuck"
