Tag: names

Everyone has a name. Most people have more than one. Every year, thousands of expecting mothers buy books listing baby names, their meanings, and their origins. Entire websites (my favorite is Behind the Name) are dedicated to the same thing. Unlike place names, people’s names truly are personal.

Authors of fantasy and fiction have a few options in their quest for distinctive names. A lot of them take the easy route of using real-world names, and that’s fine. Equally valid is the Tolkien method of constructing an elaborate cultural and linguistic framework, and making names out of that. But we can also take a middle approach with a naming language.

Making a name for yourself

Given names (“first” names, for Westerners) are the oldest. For a long time, most people were known only by their given names. Surnames (“last” names) probably originated as a way to distinguish between people with the same given name.

How parents name their children depends very much on their culture and their language. Surnames can be passed down from father—or mother, in a matriarchal society—to child, or they can be derived from a parent’s name, as in Iceland. Given names can come from just about anywhere, and many of their origins are lost to time. But plenty of them are traceable, as the baby-book authors well know.

The last shall be first

Let’s start with surnames, for the same reason I focused on English place names last week: they’re easier to analyze. Quite a few surnames, in fact, are place names. On my mother’s side are the Hatfields—yes, them—whose ancestors, at some point in history, lived in a place called Hatfield. In general, that’s going to be the case with “toponymic” surnames. Somebody took (or was given) the name of his home town/village/kingdom as his own.

Occupations are another common way of getting a surname. My last name, Potter, surely means that someone in my family tree made pottery for a living. He then passed the name, but not the occupation, to his son, and thus a family name was born. The same is true for a hundred other common surnames, from Smith (any kind will do) to Cooper (a barrel maker) to Fuller (a wool worker) to Shoemaker (that one’s easy). A great many of these come from fields long obsolete, which gives you an idea of how old they are.

Some cultures create a surname from a parent’s given name. That’s closer to the norm in Iceland, but it occurs in other places, too. Even in English, we have names like Johnson, Danielson, and so on.

Other possibilities include simply using first names as last names, reusing historical or religious names (St. John), taking names of associated animals or plants, and almost anything else you can think of.

What’s your name?

For given names, occupations and places don’t crop up nearly as much. Instead, these names were originally intended to reflect things like qualities and deeds. When given to a child, they were a kind of hopeful association. You don’t name a boy “high lord” because he is one, but because you want him to be one.

Again, cultural factors play a huge role. Many English names come from old Anglo-Saxon ones, but just as many derive from the Bible, the most important book in England for about a millennium. Biblical influences changed the name game all over Europe, in fact. (Christianity didn’t wipe out the old names, though. Variants of Thor are still popular.)

Other parts of the world have their own naming conventions. In Japan, for instance, Ichiro is a name given to firstborn sons, and that’s essentially its meaning: “first”. And many of those Bible names, from Michael (mine!) and Mary to Hezekiah and Ezekiel, they all have connotations that don’t nicely translate into our terms. Some of them, thanks to Semitic morphology, encompass what would be whole sentences in English.

Foreign names are often imported, usually as people move around. In modern times, with the greater mobility of the average person, names are leaving their native regions and spreading everywhere. They move as their host cultures do; colonization brought European names to indigenous people—when it didn’t wipe those people out.

All for you

The culture is going to play a big role in what names you make. How do your people think? What is important to them? A very pious people will have a lot more names containing religious elements (e.g., Godwin, Christopher). A subjugated culture will import names from its oppressors, whether on its own or by decree.

Language plays a factor, as well. Look at the difference between Chinese names (Guan, Lu, Chiang) and Japanese (Fujiwara, Shinzo, Nagano). There’s a lot of culture overlap due to history, but the names are completely different.

Also, the phonology and syllable structure of a language will affect the names it creates. With a restricted set of potential syllables, it’s more natural to make names longer, so they’ll be more distinct. (Chinese, obviously, is an exception, but polysyllabic Chinese names are a lot more common in modern times.) Names can be short or long in any language, however. That part’s up to you.

As with place names, you’ll want a good stock of “building blocks”. These will include more adjectives than the place-name set, especially positive traits (“strong”, “high”, “beautiful”). The noun set will also represent those same qualities, especially the selection of animals: “wolf” and “bear” are common in Anglo-Saxon names, for example. Occupational terms (agent nouns) will come in handy for surnames, as will your collection of place names.

Finally, personal names will change over time. They’ll evolve with their languages. And they’ll adapt when they’re borrowed. That’s how we go from old Greek Petros to English Peter, French Pierre, Spanish Pedro, and Russian Pyotr.

To finish this post off, here are some Isian names. First, the surnames:

• Modafo “of the hill” (modas “hill” + fo “from”)
• Ostanas “hunter” (ostani “to hunt” + -nas)
• Samajo “man of the west” (sam “man” + jo “west”)
• Raysencat “red stone” (ray “red” + sencat “stone”)

Now, some given names:

• Lukadomo “bright lord” (luka “bright” + domo “lord”)
• Iche “beautiful girl” (reduced ichi “beautiful” + eshe “girl”)
• Tonseca “sword arm” (ton “arm” + seca “sword”)
• Otasida “bearer of the sun” (otasi “to hold” + sida “sun”)

In Isian, names follow the Western ordering, so one can imagine speakers named Tonseca Samajo or Iche Modafo. What names will you make?

Once you have the bare skeleton of a conlang necessary for making names, you’ll probably want to start making them. In my view, most names can be divided into two broad categories: place names and personal names. Sure, these aren’t the only ones out there, but they’re the two most important kinds. Historically, however, they follow different rules, so we’ll treat them separately. Place names are, in my opinion, easier to study, so they’ll come first.

Building blocks

The absolute best part of the world for the study of place names has to be England. Most conlangers speak English, most conlanging materials are in English, and most places in England are named in English. Even better, many English places have names that are wonderfully transparent in their formation, and that gives us a leg up on our own efforts. Thus, I’ll be using examples from England in this post. (A lot of American names tend to copy English ones in style and form, but there are also plenty that come from other languages, and not all of them Indo-European. That makes things much harder, so we’ll stick to English simplicity.)

The first thing to realize when looking at place names, or toponyms, is that they reflect a place’s history. As I’m writing this, I have Google Maps opened up to show southern England, and I can already find a few easy examples: Oxford, Newport, Ashford, Cambridge, and Bournemouth. For most of these, it should be obvious how they got their names (“ford of the oxen”, “the new port”, “ford near ash trees”), while others need a little bit of puzzling out (“bridge at the Cam river” and “mouth of the bourne”—a bourne was a small stream or brook).

These few examples show the basic method of making place names. First, you need a number of words in a few classes. Geographical features (“river”, “sea”, “forest”, etc.) are one of the main ones. Another covers human constructs (“town”, “hamlet”, “village”, “fort”, “mill”, “bridge”, and a thousand others). Animal names can come into play, too, as in “Oxford”. Also, a few descriptive adjectives, such as color terms, are immensely helpful, and you can even throw in some prepositions, too.

Just putting these together in the English style—but using the words and rules of your naming language—nets you a large number of place names. For example, here are some place names in Isian, an ongoing conlang of my Let’s make a language series:

• Raymodas, “red hill” (ray “red” + modas “hill”)
• Ekheblon, “new city” (ekho “new” + eblon “city”)
• Jadalod, “on the sea” (jadal “sea” + od “on”)
• Lishos, “sweet water” (lishe “sweet” + shos “water”)
• Omislakho “king’s island” (omis “island” + lakh “king” + o “of”)

Notice that a few of these have had their constituent parts modified slightly. This can be for reasons of euphony (e.g., vowels merging) or evolution. Also, places with names meaning the exact same thing can be found in the real world. The historical city of Carthage derives its name from the Phoenician for “new city”, and there’s a Sweetwater not too far from where I live.

Changing the names

While most place names are derived in the above fashion, some of them don’t seem to be. But if you look closer, you can find their roots. Those roots often paint a picture of the life of a place, and they can even be a tool in the archaeologist’s toolbox. The way some English place names changed, for instance, illustrates the pattern of invasions across that country. Viking invasions gave York its name, as they did with a number of towns ending in -by. Celtic influences can be found if you look hard enough; “Thames” most likely comes from that family. And don’t forget the Romans.

Of course, names are words or combinations of words, and they are just as susceptible to linguistic evolution. That’s how we get to Lyon from Lugdunum and Marseilles from Massalia, but it works on smaller scales, too. One of the most common changes that affects names is a reduction in unstressed syllables, as in the popular element -ton, derived from town. (The English, admittedly, take this a little too far. If you didn’t know how Worcester and Leicester were pronounced, could you ever guess?)

Names can also be borrowed from languages, just like any other word. This happened extensively in North America, where native names were picked up (and mangled) by European settlers. This is especially noticeable to me, given where I live. Sale Creek, my current home, is purely English and obvious. But I moved here from nearby Soddy, and no one can seem to agree on an etymology for that name. The nearest “big city” of Chattanooga derives from the Muskogean language, while the state’s name, Tennessee, comes from a Cherokee name that they borrowed from earlier inhabitants.

What this means is that some of your names don’t have to be analyzable. If you find a sequence of sounds you like, but you can’t find a way to fit it into your naming language, no problem. Say it’s a foreign or ancient name, and nobody will complain. That’s basically how our world works: some names can be broken down, others are black boxes. This can even give you a bit of a hook for worldbuilding. Why is there an oddball name there? Is it a regional thing, maybe from some barbarian invasion a thousand years ago? Or was it named after a forgotten emperor?

Onward

Next week, we’ll close out this miniseries of posts by looking at the names of people. These are intimately related to the names of places, but they deserve their own time in the spotlight. Until then, draw a map and put some names on it!

A naming language is the second-simplest kind of constructed language. (The simplest conlang is what’s sometimes called a “relex”, basically a form of English with all the words changed, but with the same grammar.) If all you need is a way to productively create alien-sounding names for people and places in a setting, with little regard to grammatical, syntactic, or naturalistic concerns, then a naming language is a good compromise between throwing some sounds together and creating a whole conlang.

Elements of a naming language

First and foremost, a naming language isn’t a full language. You can get away with cutting so many corners that you’re left with a circle. Throw out stuff like subordinate clauses and subjunctive moods. You won’t need them. True, some cultures have names that are complete sentences, but those are rarely the kind of complex structures requiring a whole conlanging effort. No, for naming languages, we can strip things down to the bare necessities.

One thing we’ll need is a phonology, a sound inventory. This can be whatever you like, whatever you think sounds best. Since we won’t have a lot of the grammatical cues of a full conlang, the phonology is going to determine the basic feel of our naming language. If you’re working with aliens, try to think of the sounds they would make, and then think of how a human would interpret them. For human cultures, look for inspiration in the languages of those cultures you want to emulate.

Next, you can work out a way to turn those sounds into syllables, then into words. Once again, use appropriate human languages as a guide, but not a straitjacket. At this stage, you can go ahead and make some simple words that you think might come in handy. Names for people and places follow different rules, and I’ll do a post for each in the coming weeks, but think of common objects, terrain features, activities, and occupations. Those are a good start.

Third, naming languages do need a little bit of grammar. It’s nothing close to what a “real” language would have, though. Your primary concern is making names, so you really only need the grammar necessary to make them. Simple combinations of nouns and adjectives work just fine for many cases; all you have to decide is what order they go in. You can throw in verbs, too, but don’t worry too much about case or mood or things like that. Those are only distractions.

Lastly, remember that languages change. Names change, too, but under different conditions. Place names tend to follow the phonological changes of their “host” cultures more closely than personal names, but the latter certainly aren’t immune to evolution. And some names pick up (or lose) connotations as their languages and cultures change. This is especially common for personal names. Boys’ names become girls’ names, and vice versa. Names fall out of fashion (Puritan names like “Increase” don’t find much traction today) while new ones arise from cultural shifts (witness the current popularity of fantasy names like Daenerys).

Place names can change, too, but this usually requires a massive shift in the cultural or political situation. For real-world examples, look at Burma/Myanmar, or the mass renaming of cities in India, or the changing of American place names in the pursuit of political correctness.

To be continued

In the next two weeks, I’ll go into more detail about each of the two main types of names. Next week, we’ll look at place names, because I think they’re easier and more transparent. After that will be personal names, with some closing thoughts on making “alien” names.