Tyo Solo - That's a neat way of using a cipher! I've only used a cipher once in world-building myself, but it was fun to take the results and mess around with it some to create names/word/place-names and so on.
Tyo Solo - That's a neat way of using a cipher! I've only used a cipher once in world-building myself, but it was fun to take the results and mess around with it some to create names/word/place-names and so on.
In terms of coming up with names quickly, something I often find myself doing as a gamemaster as well as in fantasy/sci-fi cartography, I find simply reading foreign languages that I do not know aloud helps me get into a mode for slinging out names. If I want a Hungarian feel, I'll read a half a book in Hungarian, since I don't know any Hungarian, my mind tends to lock in on the sounds and string them together. What comes out on the other end has the feel of the original language but is absolute gibberish.
For my storyworld, which I'm still trying to figure out a good name for ironically enough, each culture/country is more or less based vaguely off of the a subgroup of folklegends. I tend to base the names and words in general off of what would be a feasible linguistic progression if contact were made between the different languages of the folklegends, or general bastardizations of prevelant parts of the folklegends. (Yesh, I'm a MAJOR linguistics nerd... ConLangs and all) For example the continent where the majority of my stories are set at the moment, the Maelyarian, is based off of mostly Celto-Franco-Ibero legends and so most of the real names for those countries are based off of those languages... Although does anyone else use placemark names if they can't think of one that's completely right at a time? IE inserting a completely obvious stock fantasy-name until you can come up with one that fits better?
With my gaming group we tend to use silly names, make them up as we go along, and yes - we do use "placemark" names. Such as the necromancer's tower, which was referred to simply as "the tower" and "the necromancer's tower" and a bit later as "my tower" by the necromancer PC ... this actually replicates the way we use names in the real-world. Referring to the nearby big city as "the City", the big river becomes "the river" and so on.
I've taken to the habit of "translating" many names out of whatever fictional language would make sense in the world and rendering it in English or in some borrowed word. So, rather than write out the invented word saiphele (which would be essentially meaningless to real people)and place it on one of my maps, I render that as "the Golden Bazaar" and use that instead as that is a fairly close rendering of that word. That said, I do prefer to leave proper names more or less alone to give things a bit of flavor. In that case I often work out a brief sketch of a sound system of the language or languages of the people and places I am mapping and run with that. This is why my city map I am working on has a number of things named after 'saints' with unreasonably cumbersome names like Teuthezol.
I tend to use anagrams of whatever is around me at the time. Often i'll look at the books on my shelves for interesting combinations of letters and then rearrange them until they fit the feel for whatever region I'm working on. Whatever I'm currently obsessed with will be alluded to frequently if you can get inside my mind.
My current world is called Illistera which comes from the word "Yliaster." This is a term for the primeval substance that begot all other substances and was coined by a 16th century alchemist named Paracelsus. Yliaster was also known as the Prima Materia (prime material), so i thought it fit nicely with D&D. I was really into Full Metal Alchemist when I came up with this.
The continent the campaign focuses on is Sorradar. There is a heavy dragon influence in my game, so i went online and stumbled across a draconic translator. I think the continent looks like a fetal dragon, so I started plugging words in like child, baby, youth, dragon, etc. According to the translator, Suorra Darastrix means "dragon child." Names are frequently changed and simplified over time, so in the 4000 years it's been inhabited, this changed to Sorradar.
I'm glad i'm not the only one that thinks about these things
Last edited by miinstrel; 03-05-2012 at 01:14 PM.
I use my conlangs to name my worlds, or cities or places. Sometimes though, I'll just randomly create words on my notepad or while I'm out and then when I get back home, I get on my PC and start creating a conlang for that one word I made up, or the list of words if that's the case.
Its very fun, and makes my worlds feel a little more alive. xD
The fantasy world I'm working on has no name yet, but when I do name it, it will probably be something along the lines of 'earth'; just something pertaining to the very fundaments of nature on which human and humanlike cultures depend. Then I might translate this into the different tongues of the world.
The nations, however, have names. Weird names just enter my head, and if I like the sound of them, I use them for whatever region they suit. A few of the languages in my world are under development and they are never based solely on one real world language, so pretty much everything sounds pretty 'foreign' and yet, at times, familiar (since I don't really try to invent new phonemes, haha). At any rate, most of these names popped up before any of the languages had been defined at all, so I retroactively give them meaning, using the names to 'activate' the vocabularies.
Also, the larger or more important a region is, the more likely is it that I will try sticking to names that are easy to remember and to pronounce, while truly complex names still are viable for less 'central' locations.
Apart from that, I'm highly 'simulationist' in that I really don't care whether English speakers or (as in the case with most of my friends) Swedish speakers find the names challenging.
To illustrate my perspective: I have a hard time pronouncing (or merely grasping the fundamental ortography of) for example Romanian, even though it is an Indo-European language with a lot in common with, for example, Italian, French and Latin (all of which are languages we come across frequently for a number of reasons). On a completely different level we have the vast majority of languages that aren't even remotely related to English or Swedish.
Thus, I believe that in a 'realistic' fantasy world it is nigh inconceivable that all of the place names would be easy to grasp for the average person.
Personally, I feel that for example Al-Qahirah is much preferrable to Cairo (one and the same). I have names like this in my world (not Arabic, but distinctly non-European). The Q represents a phoneme in its own right and to replace this with something more 'Germanic-friendly' makes zero sense in a fantasy world, I think.
I didn't mean for this devolve into a linguistic discussion but there you have the basis of my perspective.
If I want a name to convey a 'cold' feel, I don't have to look to ancient Norse or Greenlandic, because the very sounds of a name (that I can make up instead of assembling from real world names) can convey it. If, on the other hand, I specifically wanted to convey an unmistakably ancient Norse feel, well... I wouldn't.
I do think that naming is part of the appeal when making maps or writing books. After all, some of the names I create are either based off words I hear in my head or based off of known locations in fantasy fiction.
In one of my biggest story projects, I had to name the world I was making Midgard, primarily it is the most prominent world name in history.
When it came to towns and regions, it wasn't as hard. One method is the most common I have seen in this forum; using real locations and reworking them. However, one method I use more prominently is that I try to base my regions off of known words in the language I am fluent in; English.
On the other hand, one word I am having a hard time on how I created; Taerak. A village that lies at the base of the Sapphire Mount and contains one of the world's Marids (something based on Arabic word of genie).
As much easier (or maybe not) as it might be, I find that I just cannot allow myself to choose a random series of letters that sound nice as a name for a location. I guess I just have this insurmountable instinct that such names are meaningless; at best one can design a language around existing names to give them meaning after using such an arbitrary approach. While I have taken a linguistics course or two, I don't feel that I have the know how (and likely as much the inspiration) to create my own language from scratch, so I guess I tend to use culturally or geographically relevant names. This may not be a good thing however, as it means I end up borrowing a bunch of (albeit lesser-known) region/settlement names from Earth history/latin phrases (ex. Lusitania, Solis Orientalis), and for examples of the latter, Bogwatch, Glenwood, Montfort, the like... though all of those of course would only appear in a distinctly medieval European setting. I don't know... I guess in all honesty despite my self-satisfaction in having a "meaningful" name, I still end up with something generic-sounding for that. There's definitely a balance to be struck; with random letter combinations you run the risk of "Yeah, let's go to 'fantasy name that I predictably cannot pronounce'", whereas with a more pragmatic approach you may end up a bit too mundane. Of course, with regard to this trade-off, a lot has to do with the character of your world- historical or high fantasy?
Last edited by Scipio; 03-14-2012 at 10:39 PM.
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