Help with naming.

R

Royan

New Member
These two things are probably the biggest bane I have to worldbuilding. Creating people and filling the world with useful NPC's and wonderful characters? Done. Creating different layouts for towns and such? Okay I can do that. Lore, religion, way of life, concepts for languages and everything... I'm fine with all that. My biggest issue has always been naming anything. Coming up with the words to languages. Names for towns. Names for people. I don't get how people do this so easily? Any tips?
 
Honestly? Think about the physiology and culture of different things you've written! If you can draw a parallel to our world and see what cultures, religions, etc., it relates to! Using this, you can find a set of sounds that they would use (again, though, refer to their physiology as that's going to be massive!). From there, you need to think about their naming customs. Do they have first, middle, and last names? Do they operate on something different? How are these names determined? From there, think about the significance of names. Usually names originate from religious figures, occupations, and/or an attached meaning to the name. As for the exact terms? Think about how the sounds relate to the feeling of what it describes.

Hope this helps! If you have any follow-up questions or need clarification on my disorganized monologue, please shoot a reply!
 
Sesquipedalian Homoeroticism said:
Honestly? Think about the physiology and culture of different things you've written! If you can draw a parallel to our world and see what cultures, religions, etc., it relates to! Using this, you can find a set of sounds that they would use (again, though, refer to their physiology as that's going to be massive!). From there, you need to think about their naming customs. Do they have first, middle, and last names? Do they operate on something different? How are these names determined? From there, think about the significance of names. Usually names originate from religious figures, occupations, and/or an attached meaning to the name. As for the exact terms? Think about how the sounds relate to the feeling of what it describes.

Hope this helps! If you have any follow-up questions or need clarification on my disorganized monologue, please shoot a reply!
Click to expand...

I suppose it's just figuring out how to do such. Coming up with that feeling to it and filling in all the gaps. This does help however, thank you!
 
I get that feeling! I'm a massive fantasy writer and generally have to word build so much! something I do is make a religion or someone really famous in the world and put a bunch of random letters like sakAOJdaojdsjdbbd[a'insm and pick out something out of those random letters. I like the ending of those numbers so I would name that person or that language A'insm and pronounce it like {Ah-ain-sm}. I hope this helped! i also have trouble naming things so I also look to naming generators!
 
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