Naming Names

[hrj]

Worked on the name-set for the novel this evening. I've got a working list that I've rung the phonological changes on, although I want to do some tweaking to adjust the look-and-feel. Next step is to start matching up names for the current characters that need them (as well as for the known characters that haven't been introduced yet). Next up is place-names, noble titles, and forms of address for all possible combinations of rank, status, and formality of addressor and addressee. Then I'll be ready to do a serious revision pass on Part I.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Names matter: good to read about someone else worrying over feel.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Names are my "thing" -- if I didn't get the names in my own fiction right, how can I pontificate about it to others?

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Are there any good online resources to help with this process? It's just that once this first draft is finished, I need to do some serious world building for the new novel, including name generation. I have at least 3 countries/cultures and I want them to have a different feel.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I know there are some online resources to help with general language generation. The "language construction kit" at Zompist (http://www.zompist.com/) has been recommended by others, although I don't have practical familiarity with it myself. I've poked into other suggested tools, but often they seem a bit slap-dash to me and there aren't others I recall liking well enough to recommend.

In some ways, historic names are easier (because you can find actual resources on them), in other ways invented culture names are easier (because there's no "correct" version).

For what I'm currently doing, I wanted something that was recognizably related to the real-world European name pool ca. 1800 and that evolved in an alternate Romance-speaking culture with some Germanic root input, but that was quite obviously (even to the non-specialist) not any real-world culture. But then, I have it easy since I have the linguistics background.

I'd say the hardest thing for the average person in creating names for an entirely invented culture is not knowing how to get outside the box. Not knowing just how different different can be. (But then, conversely, forgetting that "too different" trips the reader.) Once you have a notion of what types of sound inventories, phonological constraints, and so forth are possible, it becomes fairly trivial to generate things that match your rules.

In my current case, the rules run something like this:
* move stress to the first syllable
* eliminate initial consonant clusters by epenthesis
* erode inflectional suffixes
* raise unstressed vowels, if possible, except in the final syllable
* devoice syllable-initial and word-final stops, also original "t" in those positions becomes "z"

So that gives you a notion of the sort of process I use. (This is for rules being applied to an existing body of original forms, not a case of pure invention.) There are also a couple of rules that only affect spelling that I'm still tweaking to get the "look" I want on the page.

When working entirely from scratch (like the names and language used in my skin-singer stories in Sword & Sorceress), I tend to start out by generating a bunch of text off the top of my head (sort of an "automatic writing" process), then coming up with a rough translation for it, working backwards to come up with a linguistic analysis of how it would match that meaning, coming up with some descriptive rules that match what I've generated so far, and then using those rules to generate new words/names that match the same patterns.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That's very useful. I've saved your reply for later reference.

At the moment, to say my world building is "sketchy" would be being generous!

All I know is that I have not-Britain, not-France and not-Moorish Spain/North Africa. By which I mean that though the countries in my novel are not those countries, they have something of the feel of those countries at certain points in their history, at least insofar as those countries exist in my head. They don't necessarily bear any resemblance to the real places.