Toponomy, or How to Name Places!

[Lukc]

Yup. There's a Devil's Bridge about 4 km from my house, altho', admittedly, I could just translate a bunch of place names around here and they'd sound a bit like fantasy.

Hm ... the German Charnel House, the Austrian War Cemetery, Italian Mausoleum, Dante's Cave, Napoleon's Bridge, Ox Fording, Holy Mountain, Goat's Fall, Vietnam Beach (ok, not so fantasy, but still), the Dry Marches, Bloody Peak, the Wedge, Three-heads, Bad Lunch (a village, really), Maple Church, Thorns by the River, Sickle Place, the Saw, Mill Place, Little Edge

... and of course, one of my favourites, Ass-crack Valley behind Three-heads mountain

(I guess it partly explains why all my D&D campaigns tend to be slightly (completely) tongue-in-cheek)

[rdanhenry]

With reasonable care, Death Valley is actually much safer than the City of Angels.

[jbgibson]

In a day & age of difficult transportation and poor knowledge outside one's area, there were a lot more duplicated names. If the closest "Bethel" was forty miles in either direction, who cared? Who even knew? If ten percent of the men were named John or Smith, then no surprise there were a bajillion Johnstowns and Smithvilles. It wouldn't hurt our maps to have a few non-unique towns. Natives, if they had to distinguish among them, might say Prentess-by-the-sea, Prentess-on-the-Thames, and Prentess-castle, but the map might just have three Prentesses alike.

At some point in the USA, to get a town a named post office, you had to petition the Postmaster in the capital. That worthy official would (sometimes) force a little restraint, in more ways than one. Close after the US Civil War, a spot near my home wanted to be named Jefferson Davis, after the president of the Confederacy. That name being extremely not politically correct in Washington DC just then, the Post Office's answer was NO. So they settled for a shortened and generic-ized "Jeff". Contrariwise, popular names got freely repeated - probably every US state has at least one Washington or Madison, popular founding fathers, or Lincoln (in the North :-) ).

Looking at a set of Civil War maps of Tennessee, I noticed some places that formerly I assumed to end in -s just because that was someone's name, or a plural, really were shortened versions of a possessive - 's. There were a Whole Bunch of Jackson's and Wilson's and Merritt's right next to little mill symbols and buildings at crossroads - no doubt fully-named Jackson's Mill and Merritt's Store and Wilson's Farm.

Surveyors literally emplacing new features (railroad stations, for instance) had a lot of freedom in naming them. Colorado for instance has or had a series of little towns named after the big Eastern universities the surveyors and civil engineers graduated from.

You can make a really pungent commentary on a fantasy nation's politics if you copy the one-time South American practice of General Whatizname's City and even the Generalissimo Somebody Railroad. I assume some of that was just labeling whose military command had responsibility for the area or enterprise, but some had to be grandstanding by ego-enhanced politicos.

[Feadel]

Another way to do things (for a more futuristic setting) is changing meanings of common slang to show linguistic drift.
My wife and I have done this with a campaign set on the Moon about 300 years in the future. I created a slang dictionary for common Lunarian phrases which seemed similar to current slang (for example a "California Girl" on Luna is usually not a female at all.)
While this was only vaguely extended to naming (We're just now getting around to making the map), some things referred to places. For example a "pink dome" or "pink zone" had certain connotations. A Lunarian would know what to expect, but a Terran wouldn't.
We decided the Moon had been colonized by a joint Russian/Japanese/American group and so the primary names are from those languages. 250 years after Luna gained it's independence from Earth, their naming conventions are still mired in the original languages. New domes built near a Japanese dome often have the suffix -ko (child) added to the name of the primary dome (Sakura Dome has Sakurako Dome near by.)
The Russian domes are named after composers; American domes after people (usually astronauts). The Orbital culture is loosely based on Gypsys (the stereotypical movie gypsys, no relation to real Romany Gypsys), with appropriate names for their habitats.

My other sci-fi space opera setting has a race descended from a lost colony ship of Militant Neo-Nazis. Their naming conventions are a mix of German and Latin/Greek (from their scientists) with a few slang terms left over from the aboriginal race they encountered and absorbed. They tend toward descriptive names based on battles or where the battles took place. Seven Winds is a desert planet with lots of breezy weather. A major battle over it's system gave the name a place in fleet names, the Emperor's title (Master of Seven Winds is one of them), and other places.

In fantasy settings I shamelessly use my copy of the Silmarillion for elvish names. We wasted half a gaming session one night when we wondered why all dwarves seem to have Scottish accents. This descended into hilarity and ended with Barrio Trolls (with bad Cheech Marin accents).

Language (and by extension accents) can be fun.

[Theo R Cwithin]

Like others, I tend to pick a real-world language to provide the base of an imaginary-world country/locale/era/whatever. Even with just a cheesy dictionary and couple off-the-cuff "grammar" and/or pronunciation rules, it becomes pretty straightforward to djinn up consistent sounding names by roughly translating a place description. Online translators make this almost trivial nowadays.

Bonus points if a "false friend" can be exploited, whereby two languages ascribe different meanings to a name that happens to sound like a real word in both languages. Lots of fun can be had when a place name means "Hills of Glittering Gold" in one language, but also means "The Pit of Gruesome Death" in another.

[Icialan]

What I'm going to do for my campaign, is actually ues the name of the band "Queens" and the names of their songs to come up with names for places. For instance, the game takes place on the Bohemian Peninsula (Like Bohemian Rhapsody). I'm sure someone could do something similar with other bands, or maybe painters, actors, and the like.

[Lukc]

Actually, the band famous for Bohemian Rhapsody is "Queen", singular, though I understand how Freddy's flamboyant stage appearance might cause a mix-up . A good band and good music too.

[lostatsea]

Old thread but really quite thought provoking. Helps out quite a bit on my own difficulties of keeping naming in a certain "FLAVOUR" to different areas of my world map.

[TristanGregory]

There's a funny passage in Steven Brust's The Phoenix Guards where he talks about the town of Bengloarafurd. Each part of the town's name, "Benglo," "Ara," and "Furd," means "ford" or "crossing" in another language. As different cultures got ahold of the place they would keep the town name and append their word for "ford" because it was an important river crossing.

[Thennn]

I like to either just make stuff up randomly, fiddle with a word till it sounds about right. Or i'll find existing place names, from the past or present, and change them around somehow. Or let half the name inspire the rest of the name.