world map assistance

[dolenore]

(Linguist here, I should some day write a tutorial on how to make a really exotic naming language...)

...There's an art to this kind of stuff.

I agree. I would love to see some new naming conventions to get ideas from.
In my world, the island are controlled by goblins who are not as weak or uncouth as your average monster manual variety... "yeahk" simply means "gathering", but in this case it refers to a city (or the largest gathering in their culture)... the individual names such as the aforementioned "Goska" and "Thraga" were attempts to further define the tone of their speech patterns... hard consonants ending in softer vowels. In the case of Yeahk Thraga, it was specifically named after a war hero (who was a player in a previous campaign), named Thrag (who was coincidentally a gnome, not a goblin, but their history books have left that bit out... the 'a' was added to follow their speech pattern).

Now that Ascension mentions it, I believe there was a "Rak Goska" in the Belgariad... any similarity is either purely coincidence or subconscious. The ruins in my world are only notable because that was the first city lost in the war mentioned above. No secret assassins live there, and its not a desert.

I may want to change that one... he's right. Oh well.

[Naeddyr]

... hard consonants ending in softer vowels.

I'm going to start my tutorial by telling the reader to THROW these terms out the window, they do not mean anything! Yes, I see I have much to show you. I will have you talking about voicedness and aspiration in no-time! We won't go into the boring bits like glottalisation and other things I've never figured out myself (because they are boring). Rule number one! Trying to quantify the euphonius quality of a language is unscientific! Your goblins are as likely to go "Hello~ oui are~ the Ro~mans~" as anything >:o And the reverse holds true, there ain't nothing in the book that says Elves can't speak with a lot of voiced back consonants! "Bu-bu-but Tolkien" schmolkien! Rule number two, Live By The Tolkien, Die By The Tolkien! No, I will not explain that one!


&tc &tc

it'll be all pretty much like that