Subject:
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Re: What's in a name, anyway?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.castle
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Date:
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Thu, 28 Feb 2002 01:00:03 GMT
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Viewed:
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822 times
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> In lugnet.castle, Dave Amos writes:
> > Hello hello! Ive been thinking long and hard for medieval names for towns,
> > cities and villages. Unfortunately, I seem to be having
> > city-name-writers-block! I tend to get some ideas from ancient Greece and
> > Star Wars planet names, but those'll only carry someone so far. :)
I did a lot of research in coming up with all the name elements I used.
First I sketched out a rough map of the Kingdom and the surrounding lands
(which I'm still working on turning into something that can go up on my
site) and divided the Kingdom into duchies.
Groups of adjacent duchies were assumed to have the same cultural and
linguistic backgrounds. Who went where was easy enough to determine by
correlating the characters and the history with the regions; certain people
had to be from certain places, so their names had to reflect the language of
their home region.
Because this is a fantasy realm, the languages I chose and the regions they
represent didn't have to all be from the same historical time period. Real
words just sounded better to me than made-up ones. The cultural identities
of the regions are mostly made up, but I found that they were influenced a
great deal by the languages I chose for them. Mostly I kept to the 5th
through 13th centuries.
The fallen empires from the "Golden Age" needed to seem older than
everything else, so they are all named using classical Latin. The middle of
the Kingdom is the area where the Kingdom was founded ~500 years ago by
people coming out of an age of barbarism. They conquered a lot of lands and
gave their names to those places as well. I used Gothic for most of this
area, with a bit of old German thrown in as well (the founding dynasty all
have gothic names, the current dynasty are all old low german). The south
is old french, the north is old czech, and there's a smattering of old
english in the east.
I found it easiest to start with less-inventive names. Many places are
named after terrain features, so I compiled a list of nouns and adjectives
and paired them in groups that I liked and set about translating them to fit
the regions. The common elements were all pretty obvious: field, town,
great, valley, good, winter, etc.
This practice yielded results such as:
Vaucelle-de-Rochois (old french, Valley of Stones)
Abrstains (gothic, Strong Stone)
Maine Larris (old french, Great Marsh)
Other places got more fanciful appellations, which will eventually be
detailed in the Legends of the Kingdom section I have yet to write:
Espee de Quens (old french, Sword of the Count)
The fields of Bluþrigns (gothic, Blood Rain, the "þ" is pronounced "th")
And some places just got named after Lego type things:
The bat lord lives in Netopirzehrad (old czech, Bat Castle)
and the kingdom itself is Gatimrja (gothic for "I build")
This was all very time consuming, but languages are a hobby of mine and I
really like doing research. There were two big library trips to look at
grammar books, and a long time spent in bars and coffe houses taking notes
with my gothic dictionary and copy of La chanson de Roland. (And there was
the really amusing night I was talking about the gothic language in a goth
club.)
Hopefully this will answer your question and give you some ideas to use as a
springboard.
-William Movish
http://home.earthlink.net/~ynpw/index.html
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: What's in a name, anyway?
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| (...) I like that indeed! (And the story about the Goth club)... Now I have a question that perhaps I should know the answer to already (but don't)... This thread (and others) suggests that a great many of us have deep and creative fictional worlds (...) (23 years ago, 28-Feb-02, to lugnet.castle)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: What's in a name, anyway?
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| im personally a big fan of maps, maps, and maps. I'd check out a map of medieval europe, middle east, and central asia. Those are the areas i personally like best. id also get a big version of Tolkien's Middle Earth for naming solutions; i know (...) (23 years ago, 27-Feb-02, to lugnet.castle)
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