There's a limited number of vocal sounds we can make, and an even more limited number of one to three syllable combinations of sounds that add up to an effective name. With every passing decade more solid fictional names become "permanently reserved" by the churn of IP and culture so that you can't get away with using them for anything else; just try naming any character in your games Frodo, or any part of your world Dune, and see the reaction.
You also have to check if your "made up" name means something funny or shocking in other languages, further shrinking the pool.
Lately I've really struggled with naming stuff and I wonder if anyone else has the same feeling. I know this seems like a rather comical thing to fret about, but I really hate it when I accidentally use a name I think is new but players recognize from somewhere else and it breaks the effect.
Use real languages. Google Translate is your friend.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;863400You also have to check if your "made up" name means something funny or shocking in other languages, further shrinking the pool.
Why?
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;863400You also have to check if your "made up" name means something funny or shocking in other languages, further shrinking the pool.
t.
This I don't really get. That happens all the time. Many existing names in English mean horrible things in other languages, and vice versa. That is largely hard to avoid and it is pretty obvious to everyone involved, no offense is meant. Limited number of sounds in the world, they are going to have different meanings across different languages. I can see if a person is deliberately doing that. But otherwise, not sure I see the concern.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;863400There's a limited number of vocal sounds we can make, and an even more limited number of one to three syllable combinations of sounds that add up to an effective name. With every passing decade more solid fictional names become "permanently reserved" by the churn of IP and culture so that you can't get away with using them for anything else; just try naming any character in your games Frodo, or any part of your world Dune, and see the reaction.
You also have to check if your "made up" name means something funny or shocking in other languages, further shrinking the pool.
Lately I've really struggled with naming stuff and I wonder if anyone else has the same feeling. I know this seems like a rather comical thing to fret about, but I really hate it when I accidentally use a name I think is new but players recognize from somewhere else and it breaks the effect.
One solution may be to just use historical names from a particular time and place (or variations of them).
My go-to method has long been 'take an existing name and swap/add a letter'. Seems to work ok, for both domestic and foreign names.
The familiarity of a name can work in your favour, too. One of my players was terrible at remembering NPC names, but he never had trouble with Gotthard Goebbels :rolleyes:
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;863400Lately I've really struggled with naming stuff and I wonder if anyone else has the same feeling.
I will soon begin writing a science-fantasy novel, and cannot find satisfying names for the main protagonists. :mad:
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;863400Lately I've really struggled with naming stuff and I wonder if anyone else has the same feeling. I know this seems like a rather comical thing to fret about, but I really hate it when I accidentally use a name I think is new but players recognize from somewhere else and it breaks the effect.
I’ve never felt that there was an insufficiency of names. It is true that for years I created long hand written lists of names from fantasy and science fiction stories I read. I used these lists when running those types of settings. Having hundreds of names to choose from helped prevent overuse. Also the names tended to be grouped by origin or sound e.g. Mallorean names, names from various invented langugages, etc. After a while I noticed that published authors ended up overlapping some names, sometimes intentionally. I find that so long as I avoid main characters and don’t keep the same appearance and personality that an author used, players seldom notice the similarity and when they do, they feel a little bit smarter because they recognized the name. I find the players feeling smart now and then is a good thing.
For games set in historical settings, there are lots of name lists available that one can use. I never really felt the need for Call of Cthulhu, but I use them often for my Honor+Intrigue game. I talked about this in a past post (http://honorandintrigue.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-name-of-game.html) and included some of the links I use and a name lists I created for 1620s Europe.
One piece of advice: don't worry so much. As long as you don't use names of really well known characters like Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker, James Bond, or Driz'zle Drool'Urden or whatever his name is... most players won't care and few will even notice. After all, Tolkien stole a bunch of names from Norse mythology. Gandalf and the names of nearly every one of his dwarves being the most notable examples. But only the most annoying of pedants would get upset about the Professor ripping off the Völuspá.
One other thing, glottal stops indicated by apostrophe's are overdone (see Driz'zle).
If it doesn't have a looming evocation immediately, then I'm not going to worry about an obscure one -- because probably nobody else will, either.
Quote from: Bren;863437One other thing, glottal stops indicated by apostrophe's are overdone (see Driz'zle).
Personally I am a fan, as long as they actually represent a glottal stop. Especially if the language they're in is inspired by a real world language with glottal stops as a frequent sound (Arabic for example). When they are random, or just weirdly placed, that is when I think they are a problem. Also a lot of people just seem to put them there without really assigning any particular sound meaning to them.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;863400You also have to check if your "made up" name means something funny or shocking in other languages, further shrinking the pool.
The first PC I made for my current Pathfinder group was named Yolo.
After the mocking laughter and annoyed stares died down they explained it to me... because I'm thoroughly out of touch with hipster youth-culture (I kept the name though).
Meanwhile, the same group currently has two PCs named Thomas.
In Quenya (one of Tolkien's Elvish tongues), the name for Middle-Earth is Endor. That's familiar from the Bible, from the story of the witch of Endor (who summoned Samuel's spirit for Saul). Yet I don't find that strong prior evocation swamping Tolkien's use.
Moorcock's Elric (a medieval form of Anglo-Saxon Aelfric, "elf power" but perhaps also evocative of Alaric, meaning "everyone's ruler", most famously the name of a couple of Visigothic kings) calls on a demon prince Arioch (named for a king of Ellasar, an Elamite name meaning "servant of the moon god"). I would have no problem using either -- but I would not use (by any name) a gaunt albino wielding a soul-thirsting black sword!
Cherryh's Morgana (like Morgan Le Fey or Fata Morgana) is another white-haired elfin warrior bearing a weird black blade, but I don't think there's any confusing them in full context.
That's unpossible. Even with your strange "three-syllable max" limiter. Especially with the amount of potential for combining consonants at the beginning and/or end of each syllable.
You're not trying hard enough, or more reasonably, you and your table have limited phonemic breadth and capacity for pronunciation.
Give me your setting's cultural tropes and perceived attitude inflections and I can generate simple phonemic and syntactical guidelines for you. And I am not a linguist by trade. The data's out there to even DIY.
(This would be like an artist telling me the 12 hues of color theory are not enough, even when we have shades, tints, and tones to add "inflection." The coloring in only 3" square would be unusual though...)
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;863400You also have to check if your "made up" name means something funny or shocking in other languages, further shrinking the pool.
You mean like "Gropecunt Lane?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane)
A silly or shocking name is often perfectly appropriate.
Quote from: BedrockBrendan;863404This I don't really get. That happens all the time. Many existing names in English mean horrible things in other languages, and vice versa. That is largely hard to avoid and it is pretty obvious to everyone involved, no offense is meant. Limited number of sounds in the world, they are going to have different meanings across different languages. I can see if a person is deliberately doing that. But otherwise, not sure I see the concern.
Which recalls to my mind, how the actor Fess Parker was received in France.
Quote from: BedrockBrendan;863458Personally I am a fan, as long as they actually represent a glottal stop. Especially if the language they're in is inspired by a real world language with glottal stops as a frequent sound (Arabic for example). When they are random, or just weirdly placed, that is when I think they are a problem. Also a lot of people just seem to put them there without really assigning any particular sound meaning to them.
By overdone I meant more or less what you said above.
Running out of names? Not remotely close.
First off, I use a variant of Butcher's notion. Wikipedia is your friend here, and all you need to do is (for example) pull up a list of provinces of Moldova. Hm, I see on this page a list of all the municipalities (//List%20of%20localities%20in%20Moldova) down to the village level, all 1681 of them. Must be able to find some interesting names to call that village. I think I'll call it Vranesti (a teensy village on the Romanian border, as it happens).
Secondly, I don't remotely feel the need to come up with a unique name for every NPC I've ever created. As in the real world, I've got a list of common names, both female and male, and at this point I've got variant lists for different cultures. About 5-6 names in each list are the freaking common ones that are my world's equivalent of "Joe" and "Mary," 25 are pretty common, 70-75 are uncommon, and about 150 are unusual but not unheard of -- the moral equivalent of "Xavier" or "Clarinda." Something I keep to hand is a chart where if I use a name as a throwaway during a session, I do it in rotation between the four sections, then strike it out ... obviously, I have multiple lines through Columns A and B! The practice has given rise to a catchphrase: "Nath, Naghan, Larghos and Ortyg," being among the most common male names in my world, has come to mean a bunch of faceless mooks.
Yes, this means that long-term players encounter the same name for key people more than once, but I don't think they're entitled to find this any more jarring than that they happen to know multiple people (or have multiple relatives) named "Anne" or "Bob." It certainly isn't any weirder than that -- true fact -- the lead long-term characters of my first and second wives both are named "Elena" and "Elaina" respectively.
Lastly, just pick up a foreign dictionary. I've had Finnish:English, Sanskrit:English and Gaelic:English ones for decades for just this purpose. I don't even worry about finding the meaning of a word. Hm, I think I'll call this rare find the "Tome of Sellainen." And this is so much easier now with the Internet -- no need to BUY a book for the purpose.
I also raise an eyebrow over the "bad word in foreign language" question: why, exactly? I certainly don't lose sleep over whether any of my players have idiomatic commands of Finnish or Sanskrit.
Ravenwsing's is good. When it comes to world-building, pull a Tolkien and assign a real-world language as an "approximation" for nations whose language you don't want to consruct (which, in my case, is all of them). This is how he assigned Middle English to the Riders of Rohan, for instance.
Since I'm a fan of the fantasy classics and I like archetypal stuff -- not to mention hugely influenced by Birthright -- my worldbuilding generally looks like this.
- I usually give Welsh to the paladins-and-princesses Western European High Medieval realm, for a good Arthurian vibe.
- Something vaguely Germanic, oscillating from Middle English to modern Swedish or Icelandic, to the fur-cloaked, iceborn barbarian types.
- The savvy merchant princes of the sun-kissed city-states at the opposite end of the map get a Romance language, which is tricky as fuck because my players and I speak a Romance language, but I find Occitan and Catalan just unusal enough (except when that one guy who lived in Barcelona is playing) for immersion purposes.
- Some Slavic language (I'm partial to Czech) for the horse-riding steppes tribes (yeah, I realize Slavs weren't Mongols or Seljuk Turks, but Medieval Russia and "Tatars" in my players' imagination lie close enough that I can get away with it).
- The desert folk with turbans and scimitars get Farsi or some other language of the satem branch of Indo-European. A Semitic language would probably carry more resonance, but I like the idea of all human languages sharing a common ancestor.
- For demihumans, screw everything and use the Tolkien constructs. Admittedly Dwarves and Hobbits haven't had a lot of unique language documented, but dwarven names follow a triconsonantal pattern commonly found in Semitic languages, and the Orthodox Jewish guy in our group hasn't played in ages, so Hebrew is fair game.
- Monster languages hopefully do not need a lot of attention, but for orcs and ogres, I like the guttural sound of Turkish and Telugu, and for goblinoids I like raspy and sibilant phonemes pillaged from Asian tonal langauges. I like to imagine the three different species of goblinkind speaking the same tonal language with different oropharyngeal anatomies, resulting in a lot of confusion and impromptu brawls.
For my next D&D campaign, in which the human population is an arena of civilizations from all over Earth history gathered by the gods for unfathomable purposes, I might stick to the original language of each population, with an overlying Common pidgin, and still use Tolkienesque-sounding stuff for demihumans.
Is it lazy as fuck? Yes. But it's worked for Howard, Tolkien, Martin, WFRP, 7th Sea, Birthright... sure, I sometimes wish I did a better job of making up new cultures and languages whole cloth, but who the hell am I fooling? I barely find the time to draw maps and stat NPCs.
Which incidentally is why my favorite published settings are weird stuff like Tékumel, Glorantha and Talislanta. They're coherent and yet exotic enough that I'd never come up with anything like them on my own. And also why I love setting games on fictional versions of our own Earth whenever possible. But I digress.
(nods to Butcher) Exactly. I tend to assign Earth languages to my "foreign" cultures in the same fashion -- there are a lot of immigrants from "Loh" to the area in which my campaign is set, and *poof*, that's where the Sanskrit names go.
I wind up doing the same thing with other cultural elements. Cuisine, for instance. The cultural bloc about 700 miles south of my main campaign (and with which there's a good bit of trade and cross-cultural connections) has something of an Indonesian-Burmese fusion of foods -- with copious help from the appropriate Wikipedia articles. There, lunch-time and fingerfoods tend to be "friks," which are tortillas made from rice, spread with various spiced fried meat slivers and spreads of vegetable pastes, and pan-fried in oil. A standard fancy evening meal borrows from the Indo-Dutch rijsttafel, which involves a number of small portions (served in individual teensy dishes) of various combinations of meats, vegetables and sauces served over a rice bed.
And so on.
If I'm going to use Welsh, I change the spelling to something more clearly phonetic in English. I may sometimes change sounds along the way. (This is the opposite of many "Celtic fantasy" writers, who seem to relish things that look nigh unpronounceable.)
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;863400There's a limited number of vocal sounds we can make, and an even more limited number of one to three syllable combinations of sounds that add up to an effective name.
Hmmm, I've just generated 1,2 and 3 syllable names using the 26 letters of the English alphabet, using alternating vowels and consonants and have over 26 million of them. If I used double vowels and consonants (E.g. ae, ou, ng, br) there would be considerably more.
Whether most of them would be suitable for names is another matter entirely, but I cannot imagine running out of names. Looking at them, they contain names such as Alan, David, Jonah, Simon, Simone, and many more.
The problem isn't running out of combinations, it is choosing combinations that sound like real names to us.
Heres a tool i use a lot when thinking up names. The Random Renamer (http://www.behindthename.com/random/)
I never find this to be a problem. There's just so many to choose from. As others have said look to real world language groups and use the names there. African names, Incan, Eskimo, Japanese, Chinese, Muslim.
And don't be afraid of repetition. I'm an amateur genealogist with an extensive family tree laid out. I have lots of Sarah, Elizabeth, Dorcas, Hannah, etc in my lists. Recently I was reading reviews of the new book about the Salem witch trials, The Witches. One aspect that makes the trials confounding to understand is that so many women are named the same: lots of "Anne", lots of "Sarah". People in small communities all intermarry so everyone is related to everyone else (I'm descended from a woman hanged in Salem as a witch and from some of the accusers.) Such intermingling also creates reasons to reuse the same names.
Keep in mind the basic sources of names: religious (Joseph, Moses, Mohammed), historical (isn't Kaizer a variation on Caesar?), geography (Woodman, Howell), profession (Bridgeman, Baker, Smith), descriptive (Lombard = Long Beard, Redface, Batman) and copying royalty or whoever else is famous at the time. People also adopt names of friends and other useful people. My father's middle name was the name of the doctor who delivered him.
Quote from: Doughdee222;863573... (Lombard = Long Beard, Redface, Batman)...
Wait, what!?
The Lombards were a group from northern Italy, I think. Maybe southern Gaul/France. Their name translates to "Long Beards".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombards
Some people have a name based on their appearances, like nicknames which stuck. "Redface" for a guy with a red face, maybe one who drinks often. Batman, well, because he looks like a bat and operates out of a cave.
Quote from: Doughdee222;863601The Lombards were a group from northern Italy, I think. Maybe southern Gaul/France. Their name translates to "Long Beards".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombards
Some people have a name based on their appearances, like nicknames which stuck. "Redface" for a guy with a red face, maybe one who drinks often. Batman, well, because he looks like a bat and operates out of a cave.
By day, he was Aripert Strongarm, wealthy noble and honored
gastaldi of Duke Ariches of Benevento. By night, he fought against evil as the masked avenger
Kwelanto ...
The best money I have spend in ages was on:
http://ebon.pyorre.net/
Quote from: Simlasa;863460The first PC I made for my current Pathfinder group was named Yolo.
After the mocking laughter and annoyed stares died down they explained it to me... because I'm thoroughly out of touch with hipster youth-culture (I kept the name though).
Meanwhile, the same group currently has two PCs named Thomas.
this reminds me of a username in a game i play
yolo swagins and the fellowship of da bling
Quote from: Doughdee222;863573I never find this to be a problem. There's just so many to choose from. As others have said look to real world language groups and use the names there. African names, Incan, Eskimo, Japanese, Chinese, Muslim.
And don't be afraid of repetition. I'm an amateur genealogist with an extensive family tree laid out. I have lots of Sarah, Elizabeth, Dorcas, Hannah, etc in my lists. Recently I was reading reviews of the new book about the Salem witch trials, The Witches. One aspect that makes the trials confounding to understand is that so many women are named the same: lots of "Anne", lots of "Sarah". People in small communities all intermarry so everyone is related to everyone else (I'm descended from a woman hanged in Salem as a witch and from some of the accusers.) Such intermingling also creates reasons to reuse the same names.
Keep in mind the basic sources of names: religious (Joseph, Moses, Mohammed), historical (isn't Kaizer a variation on Caesar?), geography (Woodman, Howell), profession (Bridgeman, Baker, Smith), descriptive (Lombard = Long Beard, Redface, Batman) and copying royalty or whoever else is famous at the time. People also adopt names of friends and other useful people. My father's middle name was the name of the doctor who delivered him.
yep you are right kaiser is in fact a corruption of Caesar
Quote from: BedrockBrendan;863405One solution may be to just use historical names from a particular time and place (or variations of them).
Arrows of Indra has long lists (table) of Male and Female names, complete with meaning.
Dark Albion has lists of Anglish, Scots, and Cymric names, male and female, which are based on the actual most popular English, Scottish and Welsh names of the 15th century.
I just take existing names for people/places/things, swap out syllables and/or vowels, and I'm all set. For example, I take Elric, swap syllables to form "Ricel", change the second "e" to an "o", then tidy things up with an extra
"c" so other people who read the name are less likely to mispronounce it and I have a quasi-Anglo-Saxon name that should fit the typical D&D setting: Riccol.
It works for other languages even if you don't read or speak them. In a mini-campaign I ran in an India-ish setting, I used names from a book about tigers who had taken up residence in the deserted Rathambore Palace and its surrounding territory. So I had a wizard named Thambore. By cutting, swapping and rearranging Indian names, I was able to create original names that sounded somewhat Indian.
As for names that might be taken the wrong way in other languages, I wouldn't worry. Only the most uptight of dorm revolutionaries gives more than a chuckle when a fictional character's name is a homophone for something offensive (like the Lone Ranger's sidekick -Tonto- having a name that means "stupid" or "moron" in Spanish). I had an NPC villain in my quasi-India campaign named Prince Madharshod. A classmate of mine who spoke Hindi told me that madar chod means "motherfucker".
I thought that was incredibly cool.
Quote from: Elfdart;865634As for names that might be taken the wrong way in other languages, I wouldn't worry. Only the most uptight of dorm revolutionaries gives more than a chuckle when a fictional character's name is a homophone for something offensive (like the Lone Ranger's sidekick -Tonto- having a name that means "stupid" or "moron" in Spanish). I had an NPC villain in my quasi-India campaign named Prince Madharshod. A classmate of mine who spoke Hindi told me that madar chod means "motherfucker".
I thought that was incredibly cool.
You insensitive beast! [More big vocabulary words here]
/frustrated crying run away
Cindy Runs Away (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5nhPflL7mg)
Has anyone mentioned The Namican?
http://www.lulu.com/shop/donald-jordan/the-namican-a-book-of-names-and-words-for-your-imaginary-settings/paperback/product-16366241.html
My thoughts on the book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sjwcl6zmBE
Hmm. I don't see the problem. Just shift things around or steal wholesale from other sources. Sometimes a name that reminds of something else can actually be useful (in Kushiel's Dart, the name for a place similar to Venice is La Serinissima, and Spain is Aragonia) Here's another idea. Take Latin names, maybe use the way they were actually pronounced (not an expert but roughly Cesar = Kaisar, Cicero = Kikero), and maybe swap some letters and shift emphasis : Kasair the Corsair, Kokeri the Bushman hunter. Sometimes it ends up funny but who cares :D
How can you run out of names? How?
I have a variety of naming sources. My favorite these days is Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names, which fits because I generally prefer real world names rather than made up names (at least for humans). That doesn't mean I don't make up the occasional name, and I used an old elvish name generator based on Tolkien from Different Worlds magazine to generate some elf names.
And re-use of names should actually happen. There's a lot of John Smiths in the real world (or pick your favorite super common name from any other culture). Yea, maybe try and keep names unique for important characters. On the other hand, imagine the fun confusion that could arise from some random NPC sharing the name of a significant villain...
Same goes for place names.
Quote from: The Butcher;863403Use real languages. Google Translate is your friend.
This. I use base languages for different cultures, translate from English, then shuffle things around 'til it makes a sound I like, for example:
Dwarves=Bulgarian
Live in the Iron Hills, which is "Zhelezni khulmove" (very close to Russian).
I go with Zhelkhumovay (which I butcher up as "zhel-khoo-MOH-vay"). I figure there's a lot of "Zhel-" this that and the other, this being dwarves, so now I have a pattern to follow...sort of...
Of course, the Elves call the iron hills "Burdmuin" [boord-mwin] (butchered Basque words meaning the same thing, in game terms).
Go to Donjon, enter your favorite names in their Markov Name Generator (https://donjon.bin.sh/name/markov.html), and um... Profit?
Seriously, if the world hasn't run out of names, how could your world?!