Not to necro an older thread - but what a great topic!

Having made too many D&D adventures to bother counting them - mostly homebrrew - this topic was of particular interest.

Like some others, I employ a convention to base names - characters, places, and landscapes - on other real world languages. In addition to modern languages (mostly European), I'll delve into older, even extinct, languages as well: Latin, Greek, Old/Middle English being the most common exmaples. I've even used Aramaic, various North American Indian tribal languages, and old Norse.

But I use these as a starting point only. The internet is a wonderful thing (for example: it brought me here, to all you fine folks); it makes it easy to find translations from English to these other languages. From there, I can begin to meld words or parts of words together to fit the particular linguistics that I am looking for.

So that's what I do.

Like I said: what a great topic!