| [Discussion] What's in a name? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jan 13 2016, 09:51 PM (42 Views) | |
| Lightseer | Jan 13 2016, 09:51 PM Post #1 |
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There are potentially a lot of names to come up with for a fictional world. This could include names of planets, continents, oceans, seas, countries, towns, rivers, and whatever else is relevant. So, how do you end up choosing names? I like to do a mix of picking a theme and referencing real world name origins. For towns I tend to reference existing naming conventions because I think that it helps with some clarity of what type of location it is when it is first mentioned. I think that this is especially helpful if a town is mentioned but never traveled to within a work of fiction. With larger cities I am sometimes a bit more liberal with inspiration because I want them to be distinguishable as fantasy locations particular to the work. For countries sometimes I pick a theme and run with it. I don't always want the association with a fictional country to a real one but I still don't like just making something up (I actually do like it when other people do it, but when I do it for my own work it always just sounds like gibberish trash to me). In one of my projects the names of countries are all derived from their national symbols which are animals. I really like this theme because I can also use some name associations to subtly hint about which countries are related to one another in terms of history. It also makes inspiration come a bit easier, and otherwise I would dwell on what to name things forever. For earth or planet names, I tend to look at examples in different languages, including mythology, and sometimes I look to examples of what other people have done for some inspiration. A lot of them mean things earth, garden, yard, etc. (I'll try to get a list together of some examples if anyone is interested) When I finally choose on a planet name I'll probably post about that world more specifically for some feedback. |
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| Kirigishi | Jan 23 2016, 01:07 AM Post #2 |
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Hm, this is a pretty interesting topic. I'd say my first step in generating names (and this applies to character names as well) is usually choosing an alphabet for my world/country. Maybe that just stems from the Linguistics nerd in me, but I find it helpful in choosing the kinds of sound combinations I want to have in my names. Do I want harsh sounds like 'ki', 'pa', and 'ta', or softer sounds like 'so', 'phi', 'la'? The whole harsh vs. soft sounds thing usually correlates with the kind of flavor I want that location to have. Here's an example of the alphabet ("Corobix") I used for my fictional empire of Erundiel (the translations provided below each symbol are written in terms of the International Phonetic Alphabet): ![]() I don't always stick to real-world naming conventions, but usually my names fit into some kind of pattern. For example, when I was brainstorming location names with Deltan for the Draconian Federation, we decided "-um" would be the standard ending for the names of our administrative regions (Sekhernum, Aeternum, Fayuum, Khartum). All that said, I usually end up going with whatever sounds cool. ^^; |
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