It's hard to come up with good place names, be it for alien worlds in Sci-Fi or in your realms of fantasy. If you were to pick up a book these days and read about the Dark Lord residing in his Dark Tower trying to subjugate the world you'd probably gag. I know I would. So what's a person to do when all the good names (or at least the easy ones) have been taken? The Dark Tower has definitely become clich But I find I can get the same idea across with a little word smithing. I usually come up with a concept, such as Dark Tower, and then try to cast it in some kind of believable similitude. Language has roots, and digging at those roots can often find combinations that just look and sound right. There is a reason the dark forest in The Hobbit was called Mirkwood. Mirk just sounds sinister. So, for Dark Tower I might turn to my Norwegian/English dictionary and find the Norwegian for dark is mork, or morke. I also find the Norwegian for tower is tarn or heve seg. (Not being a Norwegian scholar, I beg forgiveness of any Norwegians in the crowd for butchering your language.) So now I have two root words to work with, Morke and Tarn. Bastardizing these I might come up with Morketarn for a place name. Or with further corruption of the original, Moraktorn. Has sort of a sinister sound to it, I think. But I'm not all that pleased with it, so I go to my Teach Yourself Icelandic book and find myrkur = dark (once again, hints of Mirkwood here). Then on to my Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic to find myrkr or myrkra for darkness. However I can find no entry for tower (it's an Old Icelandic dictionary not Old Icelandic/English English/Old Icelandic - so it's hard to find just what you want) but I do find some interesting alternatives. By working back and forth between sources I find klettur = rock from the Teach Yourself book, which leads me to klettr in the Old Icelandic Dictionary. So now I have Myrkra Klettur or Myrkeltur, which I think looks and sounds better. Or I can go with the Icelandic for valley, dalur. Myrkkra + dalur gives me Myrkka Dalur or Myrk Dalur, which to my mind sounds positively foreboding. Of course throwing in some diacritics can't hurt, giving me the final place name of Myrk Dalǘr. Placing this all in context with some dialog insures the meaning is not lost upon the reader. The fool! He's wandered into Myrk Dalǘr the ancient valley of death. I fear we will never see him again, the wizard lamented. Sometimes while rooting around in these obscure dictionaries I just come across a word I like the sound and feel of. For example, the Icelandic for evil, ovinur, just jumps out begging to be used. Simply by capitalizing it I get the evil Ovinur, the sinister agents of the dark powers of the world. You'll probably find them lurking in Myrk Dalǘr, so beware. By the way, any root language will do. I'm not trying to pick on Scandinavians here. :-) I've found Old Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, Turkish, Indonesian, and Hawaiian very useful for different purposes. jon

I think you should make this into a tutorial for the site. :) It's good information. :)

You really think so? As is, or does it need further expansion? It would be OK with me. But just how does one make it into a tutorial? I've done Free Stuff before, but have never done a tutorial. jon

Some fantasy authors go one step further (J.R.R. Tolkien being a famous example) and create their own languages, and then name things in those. For my novel Cantata in Coral and Ivory I needed a lot of linguistic elements and I didn't want to go to the work of inventing several inter-related languages, so I used real world languages to provide my vocabulary, and then sent everything through a sound switching routine that made everything sound very foriegn, but still retained the relationships of the real languages they were based on. When I submitted my tutorials I just uploaded HTML versions, in the requisite forms, and then waited for the okay. But then I've been handcoding web pages for years. I don't think it's any different if you upload text versions though.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/index.ez?viewLink=444

Worthy tutorial, btw. (pardon the inevitable self-focus) My own method is quite similar. But then, much like my names, I tend to change the spelling to go with the sound so that it makes you think just a bit... I have a little message at the top of about half of my notebooks: Familiar yet strange. Make it familiar to the reader, but play with it a bit. sorta my philosophy on things, I guess. lol

I look at what kind of culture I want and decide what the language sounds like. In my current novel, the characters start out in a city with some Russian characteristics so I put some sounds together that sound Russian to me. (I took 2 years of Russian in high school. I still know how to say in Russian, "After lunch, we pick mushrooms.") Is it actually Russian? Nope. But it keeps the names in that area consistant since I have an idea of what sounds to use. Another area has some Italian influence, so the names and places are very different than the first area, but have their own consistancy. I will admit, I have dictionary-surfed as well for people and town names. I go to used bookstores and get old copies of ___-Engish dictionaries just for that purpose. Hmmm ... speaking of which, I may name a few towns with a bastardization of "After lunch, we pick mushroms." Just because. ;-) Cheers!

I don't write fantasy so I don't have to come up with unusual names, but when I write, it's lately been about a place called Santa Clarissa, which is, in my mind, some place between Santa Barbara and San Diego. I wanted a real sounding place so I didn't distract from the stories that I set there that have a supernatural theme behind the reality base, but I wanted more flexibility in building my city than a real place would give. Not that it matters since none of these stories will be published, but it seemed important at the time. And because I dawdled, someone else has published mystery stories set there (though her Santa Clarissa is more north and near wine country than mine). What I don't like are too many incomprehensible names and place names in the same story. If you want me to keep track, take pity on an aging mind. I won't read beyond: "Myxty paused on the itkwdy banks of Rvl't River to look at the vivotran wagons slowly rolling down J'Ntlyplez Road to Ovrbblywrut 'taen." My brain gets tired just thinking of it.

I've got one that's just horrible for that kind of thing, I'm afriad. Introduction of the Principal Soloist To me had fallen the delicate task of informing the new Eplakil of his recent elevation. So when news arrived at the palace that his ship, the Borgo T'el, had docked at the nearby village of Foltoui, I set out at once to find him. When I emerged from the stifling dimness under the jungle canopy, the fierce sunlight revealed more than one ship bobbing about on the bright waters. I was not experienced in the ways of trading vessels, so I decended to the village, passing through the thornwall, and stopped to make inquiries. The first likely informant I found was an elder, engaged in mending the end of a rope. "Isde Ikhsior?" the old man responded, showing his nut-stained teeth. He seemed amused. "So Ikhsior rates as high now. That's appropriate," he set his rope aside, levered himself to his feet, and, as he was an elder, I carefully refrained from noticing the overly energetic way he brushed bits of treebark off the seat of his green cotton gisgir. "I'll take you to the Bedime of the Borgo T'el," he said. Everytime I try removing some of the "wierd words" I end up putting in different wierd words. [sigh!]