Name help please?

Shail said:

I'm struggling to find trustworthy resources for building a consistant group of names in my fantasy.

Suggestions for resources that would help me keep my names consistant would be much appreciated --

Or even just suggestions on how to 'make up' fantasy naming conventions.

Keep in mind - I have never studied any language other than American English (grammer), so 'constructing' a fantasy language (and fantastical names that make sense together as a group) is outside my scope of ablity.

If the question is lacking clarity or detail let me know. I'll be happy to ammend.

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The sky's the limit, really. If you want names that consistently follow some set of rules or guidelines, just make them up for yourself and stick to them.

First idea: American English, as one example, is a language that seems to find that names ending in vowels (A, E, etc) are more feminine sounding (Maria, Shiela, and so on). Take that and flip it on its head so that all males end in vowels and females don't.

Second idea: Consider adding a prefix or suffix to names for one gender or the other. Just to borrow from R. Jordan (and this was not his rule, I'm only borrowing for my own purposes): Rand al-Thor. Something in that vein for one gender or group might be worth using.

Third idea: Another bit of idea borrowing, this time from Weis & Hickman's DragonLance books. Elves in that particular series have a very long name (something on the lines of 10-15 letters long), and a shorter version for common usage. Perhaps some ethnic groups or genders use a variation of this idea.

Hope that helps a little. I'm not sure where to direct you for established resources for this sort of thing -- most seem to make up that sort of thing out of whole cloth from my experience.

Shail said:

Suggestions for resources that would help me keep my names consistant would be much appreciated --

Or even just suggestions on how to 'make up' fantasy naming conventions.

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You could do a couple of things:

1) Take names from a real cultural sphere and change some of them slightly. Kind of like Martin in A Song of Fire and Ice. Jon, Eddard, whoever. Or you could take a less known culture like, Alexsi, Karki, Ukkonen (Finnish, from here), or Babylonian names, Assyrian names, Arabic, whatever.

2) Or, you could name characters after objects or animals: Pin, Knife (heh, Blade, anyone?), Stone, Hawk, Cat, whatever. You could link different groups of people to different types of names. Maybe vary it by gender, or tribe, or age.

3) You could use names that you like from real life, then translate the meaning of the name instead of the way it's written: Owen becomes Old One,
Peter becomes Rock, Malee becomes Jasmine. (My wife's name translated like this means 'Lines of Falling Rain').

Hope those help.

I'll just toss this out there and expect the flames to rain down: don't get caught up in the fantastical names of fantasy. Based on both feedback from my beta readers/writing groups, and my personal preference, the hyper-foreign fantasy names are overdone and don't add to your story.

I have never heard a reader say "You know, that book was great, but I just wish all of the names would've been eighteen syllables long and included vowel clusters I'd need a masters in fictional language to pronounce. Then I would've been immersed in the story..."

You create a list of syllables that you think might be good in names and combine two or three for each name. You could start with given names that you know. You could even start it as a mental game going from one name syllable to another name: Mary> Ryan> Annette> Ted> Theo>>>

Something I've done that actually works pretty well is to use alphabet soup. Take a handful of random letters and put them together in a pleasantly pronounceable way. (Discard any that don't fit.) From ITYURHPUPHJ you might get Jiryt or Pyrhu or Thuji.

After a few iterations you'll get a feel for the tone of what you're looking for, so your names start to feel like they're from a specific culture.

If I'm not actually devising a phonology/morphology for a language...and a nomenclature to go with it...I like this site a lot: http://www.behindthename.com/

It has a pretty decent compilation of names from various part of the world.

If you don't want to go really indepth with building names what you could do is make a list of suffixes. For example:

-son
-ski
-an

This way iyou have consistancy. However I would suggest (like I do with most of my posts) Holly Lisle's "Create a Language Clinic". It is extremely simple, and this is coming from someone who consistantly botched French tests his entire educational career. I made a language in about 4 hours (over the course of a few days so more like 30-40 minutes a day). A lot of people don't seem to like her clinic's, but this is by far the best of them.

It's your choice though, the first way would be sufficient.

The Package said:

However I would suggest (like I do with most of my posts) Holly Lisle's "Create a Language Clinic".

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Here ya go:

http://hollylisle.com/index.php/Read-Chapters/holly-lisles-create-a-language-clinic.html

I suggest the Bible. There are so many chapters that are nothing but long lists of cool sounding names.

Shail said:

I'm struggling to find trustworthy resources for building a consistant group of names in my fantasy.

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What's your world-building like?

Names tend to mean things; they may describe kinship or social roles, and nothing more (3rd child of main line, First heir), they may be based on roots with meanings (most first names in English are Biblical in nature, though they may be a specific language groups attempt to emulate sounds of a name like James, which in Gaelic becomes Seamus) or all sorts of other options.

World-building is often a good doorway to naming conventions.

It's been a while since I visited the site, but I remember fantasist.net having a name generator. You could tell it what kind of feel you wanted to the list of names (Sumerian, Chinese, etc.) and it would give you a huge list of possible names to choose from. This was invaluable to me as I could just pick and choose from the provided list or tweak the names into something I liked better while retaining the 'feeling' for the entire group I was working on.

Reziac said:

Here ya go:

http://hollylisle.com/index.php/Read-Chapters/holly-lisles-create-a-language-clinic.html

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Ignore the part about the snow. That's wrong. Soooo verrryyy wrong. I'll let a linguist rant about it.

Medievalist said:

What's your world-building like?

Names tend to mean things; they may describe kinship or social roles, and nothing more (3rd child of main line, First heir), they may be based on roots with meanings (most first names in English are Biblical in nature, though they may be a specific language groups attempt to emulate sounds of a name like James, which in Gaelic becomes Seamus) or all sorts of other options.

World-building is often a good doorway to naming conventions.

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I second the world build first, figure out naming structure later. If the system is matriarchal and not partiarchal, or patrilineal v. Matrilineal, an agricultural group v. a Forager group, etc. These will all have influences. How much war do you expect? If there is a lot of it, it might be that you have a lot of names like, "Great warrior."

Also look up naming systems. And renaming systems. What is in a name?

I should note that Behind the name.com is good for mostly European names. It's kind of lousy for anything outside of Europe--you need additional sources and naming systems for that.

I like to google " (insert ethnicity) names", and write down a few variations of them. One group may have Hebrew inspired names, another Russian, etc. With enough variations, they begin to barely even resemble the original language, while still resembling each other.

As others have already mentioned, let your world-building/setting suggest the kinds of names the characters might have.

You might also want to create an alphabet first. This way you'll have a consistent "pool" of sounds to draw from.

Rachel Udin said:

Ignore the part about the snow. That's wrong. Soooo verrryyy wrong. I'll let a linguist rant about it.

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I'll admit not being a fan of Holly's little money-machine, but I've always thought she had some useful stuff for beginners. My respect for her has dropped another notch after reading that snow crap. In fact, English has more root words for snow than the Aleut language family does. It's just that the way Aleut handles morphology is different than English, so people who don't know what they're talking about say dumb shit like "Eskimos have over [insertnumber] words for snow." That's not to say Holly's kit won't be useful if you really want to shell out cash for something you can find for free in a million places online.

Holly's "clinic" does involve a lot of simplification, so it's good if you want to throw together a vocab list and a phonology, but otherwise it's mediocre.

I'd recommend taking a look at the Zompist Language Construction Kit instead. It's completely free, it's got just as much or more info on language construction, including names, and it comes with a forum where you can ask specific questions of hundreds of serious conlangers.

I second the world build first, figure out naming structure later. If the system is matriarchal and not partiarchal, or patrilineal v. Matrilineal, an agricultural group v. a Forager group, etc. These will all have influences. How much war do you expect? If there is a lot of it, it might be that you have a lot of names like, "Great warrior."

Also look up naming systems. And renaming systems. What is in a name?

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I did a post in the surnames thread about different ways names are formed, and a lot of it applies here as well.

I should note that Behind the name.com is good for mostly European names. It's kind of lousy for anything outside of Europe--you need additional sources and naming systems for that.

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Behind the name.com is good for looking at lists of real names, but I wouldn't trust the etymologies it gives too much. If all you're looking for are ideas for name etymologies, though, it and the other 1000 name sites on the web can inspire some interesting ideas.

Liosse de Velishaf said:

I'd recommend taking a look at the Zompist Language Construction Kit instead. It's completely free, it's got just as much or more info on language construction, including names, and it comes with a forum where you can ask specific questions of hundreds of serious conlangers.

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And for the Google-challenged <g>
http://www.zompist.com/kit.html

GregS said:

I have never heard a reader say "You know, that book was great, but I just wish all of the names would've been eighteen syllables long and included vowel clusters I'd need a masters in fictional language to pronounce. Then I would've been immersed in the story..."

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I can't agree with this hard enough!

I like names that are pronounceable and my name generation usually includes many of the suggestions here.

I try to imagine what type of language my characters will speak based on geographic location and culture then google search names from cultures that speak that language. I won't necessarily use those names but I can get a feel for their preferences.
I particularly like prefix or suffixes for surnames Magnus VerMagnuson is just a damned cool name.
Mac-, Mc-, O'-, De,- le-, blank -ovna, -ovich, -ski,

Then it's just shoving things around it:
Pronounceable DeBlankovich - sounds namey enough for me.

I also like using online translators. How do you say beautiful in Estonian?
Flowers make good names, or sometimes

Heck, go to wikipedia, pick your favorite plant /animal and look at the genis / species. You'll get cool words like Tyto, Neoavis, Loxodonta

generally it just involves wandering aimlessly through the internet...

Liosse de Velishaf said:

I'll admit not being a fan of Holly's little money-machine, but I've always thought she had some useful stuff for beginners. My respect for her has dropped another notch after reading that snow crap. In fact, English has more root words for snow than the Aleut language family does. It's just that the way Aleut handles morphology is different than English, so people who don't know what they're talking about say dumb shit like "Eskimos have over [insertnumber] words for snow." That's not to say Holly's kit won't be useful if you really want to shell out cash for something you can find for free in a million places online.

Holly's "clinic" does involve a lot of simplification, so it's good if you want to throw together a vocab list and a phonology, but otherwise it's mediocre.

I'd recommend taking a look at the Zompist Language Construction Kit instead. It's completely free, it's got just as much or more info on language construction, including names, and it comes with a forum where you can ask specific questions of hundreds of serious conlangers.

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I second that on the language kit. Far better and intense resource. Though I would have liked a bit more on the cultural linguistics side--but I'm clearly biased.

Also Eskimo is the wrong name for the group--there was no such group. It was supposed to refer the the Inuit, but calling the "Eskimo" is kind of insulting since 1. It's not their own language. 2. It means "Seal eater." That would be like Hindus calling Christians, "Those bloody beef eaters." Or in more relatable context, calling Japanese "Orientals." The place where the sun rises? Really? We live on a flat world?

Also, what's in a word anyway? If you have agglutinating language or polysynthetic, then you have to count the conjugations as separate words? I don't think so. Define word in the first place. Over 500? 1,000? 2? Infinite? Amount of words really doesn't help to analyze a language--it's a really bad measurement.

Rhubix said:

I can't agree with this hard enough!

I like names that are pronounceable and my name generation usually includes many of the suggestions here.

I try to imagine what type of language my characters will speak based on geographic location and culture then google search names from cultures that speak that language. I won't necessarily use those names but I can get a feel for their preferences.
I particularly like prefix or suffixes for surnames Magnus VerMagnuson is just a damned cool name.
Mac-, Mc-, O'-, De,- le-, blank -ovna, -ovich, -ski,

Then it's just shoving things around it:
Pronounceable DeBlankovich - sounds namey enough for me.

I also like using online translators. How do you say beautiful in Estonian?
Flowers make good names, or sometimes

Heck, go to wikipedia, pick your favorite plant /animal and look at the genis / species. You'll get cool words like Tyto, Neoavis, Loxodonta

generally it just involves wandering aimlessly through the internet...

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Just saying, but doesn't that screw over some of the languages that fantasy could be written in that doesn't have your perfectly pronounceable names to YOU? It is rather relative. For example, Rachel in Japanese would be hard to pronounce. Granted, we are writing for an English-speaking audience, but I have to point out that the audience isn't limited to the European descendants (And if I were to be more cynical, the White European Middle Class descendants.). Maybe someone out there is Thai. Fillipinos, Indians, Singaporeans, etc also speak English too as well as the trounced upon Native American populations. Doesn't authenticity win out then? Or are you going to name a character "John" in a Black Foot pre-colonialization world?

Laoghair and Celtic names like it would also get screwed over.

To me, names have more resonance if they mean something. Consider the context of your world, are your main characters peaceful, martial, spiritual, artistic?

Try to think of objects (or creatures or whatever) that are similar. That may give you a framework from which you can weave names. As a very basic example, a community of farmers: Deep Plow village, inhabited by the Turnipseeds (Root, Bloom and their boy Bucket); the Straws (Stick, Apple and daughters Berry, Honey and Lavender); the Wheats (Staff and his brother Harrow); etc.

As I mentioned, the example above was basic. You easily make names more exotic by tweaking letters a bit, and yet the names will still retain some sense of their original meaning. (Rute ... Appel ... Baerie.)

Good luck with your work!

Rachel Udin said:

For example, Rachel in Japanese would be hard to pronounce.

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I've always been surprised at how many anime/manga series use names that aren't actually pronounceable in Japanese. Rachel, Edward, Light, L, Isaac....then there are translation arguments about what the name is actually supposed to be. Kallen from Code Geass is called Karen in some translations. /tangent

I usually come up with names first and then fit them to a coherent system later. Baby name websites are great because I can pick a culture/language system similar to what I have in mind and go from there. I've also taken ordinary English words and used them as names (ex. Requiem) or just tweaked common names a little bit so that they don't sound exactly the same (ex. Samithall- Sam for short).

Satchan said:

I've always been surprised at how many anime/manga series use names that aren't actually pronounceable in Japanese. Rachel, Edward, Light, L, Isaac....then there are translation arguments about what the name is actually supposed to be. Kallen from Code Geass is called Karen in some translations. /tangent

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Similarly off-topic, there's a new anime out called Gosick, and the main character's real name has been a huge topic of debate. The Japanese pronunciation is "bikutorika", and about half the sub groups argued for Victorique, and the other half for Victorica.

Pronouncability, and spelling specifically can be very tough on fantasy names.

Rachel Udin said:

Just saying, but doesn't that screw over some of the languages that fantasy could be written in that doesn't have your perfectly pronounceable names to YOU? It is rather relative. For example, Rachel in Japanese would be hard to pronounce. Granted, we are writing for an English-speaking audience, but I have to point out that the audience isn't limited to the European descendants (And if I were to be more cynical, the White European Middle Class descendants.). Maybe someone out there is Thai. Fillipinos, Indians, Singaporeans, etc also speak English too as well as the trounced upon Native American populations. Doesn't authenticity win out then? Or are you going to name a character "John" in a Black Foot pre-colonialization world?

Laoghair and Celtic names like it would also get screwed over.

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It's just my preference. I find names I can't pronounce hard to remember.
I live in a very multicultural city, so I have colleagues who's names I could never hope to pronounce, thankfully they have Americanized versions for chumps like me.
Laoghair- I would just read phonetically, though I am aware it is wildly incorrect.
Personally I don't see an advantage to using[FONT=Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, san-serif] Fionnghuala[/FONT] when [FONT=Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, san-serif]Finola[/FONT] will do.
Again, a preference.

Cwm said:

As I mentioned, the example above was basic. You easily make names more exotic by tweaking letters a bit, and yet the names will still retain some sense of their original meaning. (Rute ... Appel ... Baerie.)

Good luck with your work!

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Exotic is an ethnocentric word for unfamiliar.

Unfamiliar is relative.

To me, a good high fantasy/Science Fiction defeats words like "exotic," "normal," "ordinary" and especially the word "primitive." Instead with tight world building it recreates the meaning of these words to show their error.

Names can be a gateway to doing this--yes, but trying to keep it "exotic" without contextualizing it as one writers probably hurts in the long run... (You get one-dimensional cultures.)

Rachel Udin said:

Exotic is an ethnocentric word for unfamiliar.

Unfamiliar is relative.

To me, a good high fantasy/Science Fiction defeats words like "exotic," "normal," "ordinary" and especially the word "primitive." Instead with tight world building it recreates the meaning of these words to show their error.

Names can be a gateway to doing this--yes, but trying to keep it "exotic" without contextualizing it as one writers probably hurts in the long run... (You get one-dimensional cultures.)

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Perhaps in your neck of the woods, 'exotic' is rigidly defined as 'an ethnocentric word for unfamiliar.'

However, where I come from, it can mean mysterious or colorful or alluring.

The creation of language, culture and worlds that are mysterious, colorful and alluring are, to me, the basis for good High Fantasy, not the other way around.

I guess we will just have to agree to disagree.