What's in a (made up) name?

PyriteFool · May 19, 2016

Greetings all! As SFF writers, I'm sure a lot of us deal with made up people/places/cultures, so my question is what are some tricks you use to keep your names from sounding made up?

As a reader, this is one of my biggest pet peeves. When I can look at a name and I see the author at their computer thinking up a "fantasy name" it takes me right out of the story. I think people are easier to name, as you can pretty easily use real names that are either altered slightly or used as is from the culture whose language you want to emulate. Places are harder though, since in most cases you can't use real names.

I think some works do this very well. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is great at this. So are the Dark Souls games. Tolkien was a linguist who invented languages, so I'm not holding myself or anyone else to his standards.

So, what are some tips/techniques you guys have in your arsenal?

Maryn · May 19, 2016

I don't write this genre, but I read it some. I take issue with scifi or fantasy names with unpronounceable consonant combinations and/or plentiful apostrophes. Or with characters other than those that make up English. I find I cannot remember those names, as a rule, soon start mixing up characters, and usually quit reading before page 50.

Maryn--but you can call her kp'$r2tg

rwm4768 · May 19, 2016

For me, it's a matter of getting a feel for a language with the names. You don't have to be a linguist like Tolkien to have consistency in your naming patterns. I'm personally not a huge fan of Earth names showing up in fantasy. I've done it in one of my series, but that's because it is actually set in our distant future, and many of our names have survived. I still have a few made up names as well.

zanzjan · May 19, 2016

rwm4768 said:
For me, it's a matter of getting a feel for a language with the names. You don't have to be a linguist like Tolkien to have consistency in your naming patterns.

^This. If it all feels part of the same matching set, made-up names can be perfectly fine. But if your character named GzBrong'Bro comes from Dudleyville, most readers will definitely balk.

Roxxsmom · May 19, 2016

It's rare for names to be deal breakers for me in a story, but they can be a small irritant that can contribute to less satisfaction with the book.

Peeves include:

Completely anachronistic names. This would be mostly relevant to historical fantasies, but even in made up worlds, names from our own world that don't fit the fantasy cultural context will stand out. For instance, names that come from (or evoke) real-world cultures that don't fit together at all or are mixed together randomly for no apparent reason, as if we were looking at the role sheet of a modern US school superimposed on an small backwater town in a part of the fantasy world that feels vaguely (for instance) Norse.

Or really mundane and common modern names floating in a sea of mostly made-up fantasy names without any rhyme or reason. "And here we have my brothers Falandor, Enarosa, and Fred.

Names that randomly throw accents, apostrophes, umlauts and so on that don't in any way assist or inform pronunciation.

I don't object to names that don't fit the normal pattern of English letter combos, though. There's no reason names in a fantasy world (or taking place in a real-world foreign country) would or should all incorporate sounds and letter combos that are approachable to modern English speakers. But I live in a state where half my students each semester have names I find rather challenging to pronounce and remember. It's probably a matter of degree, though.

Kjbartolotta · May 19, 2016

Oh god, I'm in the middle of some pretty deep conlang hell right now, so don't get me started on this. My girlfriend's worried.

Two schools as I see them. Either you translate, meaning you pick names that have some sort of resonance (so, let's say, a Gallic-themed culture, you have lots of Remys and Claudettes, and the country is called something like 'Lyonesse' or some nonsense). Or you conlang, and I'm sure lots of people on this board can tell you more than I can how that goes. I think you can mix the two, to a point, but even a little too much and it throws the whole thing off. Dragon Age is, for me, an example of this in an higher-quality media.

Personally, my own tastes run to the conlang, and I'll die before I let some creep named Henry hang out with Riisi and Gozi and Dovro. This is MY approach, not anyone else's, and frankly if it's a good story I'll but my own attitudes aside pretty easily. I think in terms of 'fantasy name generation' (the problem that led me to finally buckling down and conlanging), it does help to look into linguistics a bit, even if you're not gonna go the whole way having some parameters for the language and how the names go is helpful. The other thing that's good is getting a bit more orthography in there, as long as you're consistent and careful about it a grave or circumflex can really spice things up. At this point though, if an elven name has an apostrophe in it I'm pretty much gonna put the book down.

Straka · May 19, 2016

Being dyslexic I struggle with coming up with new names. I tend to see complex words as images and can't really sound them out.

I tend to stick with preexisting ones, or ones with a familiar cultural context, like Saxon names, but never Welsh as it's an impossible language.

Roxxsmom · May 19, 2016

Kjbartolotta said:
Personally, my own tastes run to the conlang, and I'll die before I let some creep named Henry hang out with Riisi and Gozi and Dovro. This is MY approach, not anyone else's, and frankly if it's a good story I'll but my own attitudes aside pretty easily. I think in terms of 'fantasy name generation' (the problem that led me to finally buckling down and conlanging), it does help to look into linguistics a bit, even if you're not gonna go the whole way having some parameters for the language and how the names go is helpful.

This pretty much sums up my own approach, but I'll admit that my confidence in my own linguistic acumen is not great. I like generators that let the user input the vowel consonant, syllables, and letter combos and so on, but even so, some results must be ruthlessly culled.

Curlz · May 19, 2016

PyriteFool said:
what are some tricks you use to keep your names from sounding made up?

I don't find anything wrong with "made up names", but to answer your question - looking up geographical names from different countries is one trick some writers use. Maybe change the name slightly afterwards, but towns/villages etc can be agreat source of interesting and exotic sounding names.

Kjbartolotta · May 19, 2016

Can I add as an aside that I personally HATE George RR Martin's names. I mean, they're consistent, and that's good I'd say about them. Planky Town? Aenys? Dickon Manwoody!? Anyhow, take enough time mooning over the guy, thought I'd throw some snark at him.

PyriteFool · May 19, 2016

Kjbartolotta said:
Oh god, I'm in the middle of some pretty deep conlang hell right now, so don't get me started on this. My girlfriend's worried.

Two schools as I see them. Either you translate, meaning you pick names that have some sort of resonance (so, let's say, a Gallic-themed culture, you have lots of Remys and Claudettes, and the country is called something like 'Lyonesse' or some nonsense). Or you conlang, and I'm sure lots of people on this board can tell you more than I can how that goes. I think you can mix the two, to a point, but even a little too much and it throws the whole thing off. Dragon Age is, for me, an example of this in an higher-quality media.

Personally, my own tastes run to the conlang, and I'll die before I let some creep named Henry hang out with Riisi and Gozi and Dovro. This is MY approach, not anyone else's, and frankly if it's a good story I'll but my own attitudes aside pretty easily. I think in terms of 'fantasy name generation' (the problem that led me to finally buckling down and conlanging), it does help to look into linguistics a bit, even if you're not gonna go the whole way having some parameters for the language and how the names go is helpful. The other thing that's good is getting a bit more orthography in there, as long as you're consistent and careful about it a grave or circumflex can really spice things up. At this point though, if an elven name has an apostrophe in it I'm pretty much gonna put the book down.

I'm sorry. I hope you can assuage her worries.

I have serious difficulty conlang-ing, though this might be because too many instances of it being done badly have made me paranoid. Honestly, if my other options are "Riisi, Gosi, and Dovro" I will happily take "Henry" any day. I do agree that Dragon Age walks the line well, for the most part.

Curlz said:
I don't find anything wrong with "made up names", but to answer your question - looking up geographical names from different countries is one trick some writers use. Maybe change the name slightly afterwards, but towns/villages etc can be agreat source of interesting and exotic sounding names.

I have done the geographic look up trick before, and it's yielded some good results. Same with baby-name generators. My current WIP is in a largely Ottoman-inspired setting, so I'm using a combination of Turkish and Arabic names, for the most part. I will say that it means the inherent inaccuracy of baby name sites does work in my favor. It's not the real world, so I can get away with using obscure names.

snafu1056 · May 19, 2016

I try to use a real language as inspiration and then tweak it enough to make it fictional. Turkish (as mentioned) is a good language for that. It has a lot of superficial similarities to English, so there aren't too many confounding consonant/vowel combinations (The Turkish word for wolf, for example--kurt. Hardly a tongue-twister). The Turkish PM's name is Erdogan. You can do lots of things with that--Ordegun, Urdakan, Ertakin, etc. They sound strange, but hardly unpronounceable. I might even shorten it to Degun or Dakan, because too many syllables start to confuse people. For consistency I might pick some elements of the name to repeat. I might name Ertakin's brother Mortakin. Different enough, but they sound like the same language.

Just try to stay away from language nuggets that are instantly recognizable. Any name that ends in "ov" sounds Russian. Anything with an "ng" in it sounds Chinese. Anything with "ashi" in it sounds Japanese. Unless of course that's the desired effect.

jjdebenedictis · May 19, 2016

Just want to ditto the OP on saying George R. R. Martin is great at this, and I appreciate that fact because I have a rough time remembering names (both in books and real life). Despite GRRM's hundreds of characters, I can generally keep the people in his books straight in my head.

Neddard. Cersei. Bran. Brienne. Jaime. Those names are all similar enough to existing, familiar monikers to stick in my brain as a name, while still being different enough to not make me wonder why Europeans got transplanted to an alien world with wonky seasons (not that the references to cherries and olives don't do that anyway).

As a counter example, I really enjoy some of Lynn Flewelling's books, but she seems to choose names that just do not stick in my brain. I can usually keep the main characters straight, but mentions of secondary characters often leave me frowning at the page for several seconds trying to remember who the hell this person is again.

I think, in Flewelling's case, it's that she chooses pleasing collections of letters or sounds, and my brain doesn't necessarily peg those collections as being a name. Thus, when I see that collection again, I might recognize it being as a name from context, but I haven't attached it to a character because my brain didn't make the first connection (letter-salad = name) so it hasn't made the second connection (name = that dude) either.

I've used slightly tweaked versions of Russian names, and I think that worked well, because they sounded (to me) like names. I've also used a set pattern for names, e.g. all women's names end in vowel-double-consonant-e, like "Bethelle" and "Winenne", in hope that readers would rapidly recognize that particular form of letter-salad as a name.

As an aside, when my students have Indian names, like Manpreet, I find those much easier to remember than when my students have Chinese names, like Xiaoyou. I think it's because my brain doesn't immediately know how to pronounce the latter, where it does know how to pronounce the former. So again, my grey matter is just a bit quicker to make the connection between that collection of letters and the concept of a name. In the second case, El Braino is still busy puzzling out how those letters go together, so it doesn't get to the next conclusion as quickly.

Roxxsmom · May 20, 2016

Kjbartolotta said:
Can I add as an aside that I personally HATE George RR Martin's names. I mean, they're consistent, and that's good I'd say about them. Planky Town? Aenys? Dickon Manwoody!? Anyhow, take enough time mooning over the guy, thought I'd throw some snark at him.

I'm with you. Not a big fan of his approach (I like other things about his stories, but not his names). But there's always that trade off between world building and accessibility, and some people swing one way and some the other in terms of preference.

Bolero · May 20, 2016

The other thing to check with made up names is run an internet search to see what pops up. I remember seeing an online complaint about a character's made up name being "penis" in another language. (Maybe a relative of Dickon Manwoody of course.)
Also - love the Fionnovar Trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay - but there is one name blooper. Old King is Aillell. His oldest son is Aileron. All fine and good - except an aileron is part of an aircraft....

Weirdmage · May 20, 2016

I'm Norwegian, I can read and understand Danish, Swedish, and obviously English to a fluent level too. I also know a little bit of French and German, and the odd word in several other languages.
Nothing throws me out of a Fantasy world than purely English sounding names. Personally I find that incredibly lazy, and also borderline offensive.

To be brutally honest, I don't think anyone who is monolingual has the tools to construct languages without doing plenty of research.
I'd also advice against listening to anyone monolingual about what sounds "wrong" when it comes to language. They really do not have the experience to know what they talk about.
An example of the latter is that a handful of people, in Yorkshire where I live, have said to me that I sound exactly like a Romanian/Polish guy they know...what they really mean is that they can't tell the difference. -I have some Eastern European friends, and we laugh at this. To us, our accents are light-years apart.

Consistency is really the key though. Tolkien was great at that, because he was a linguist. (There's a case to be made for him overprocrastinating about ilanguage though...)

The advice about checking what your made up words mean in other languages is a good one. But to that I would add that you should never use only machine translation when checking those words. Check with a native of that language. The smaller the language the less reliable machine translations are. (They often depend on crowdsourcing, and smaller languages have a smaller crowd to source from.) Google translate will sometime leave Norwegian newspaper articles souding like gibberish. -There's not much more than 5 million people speaking the language.

themindstream · May 20, 2016

I'm currently going the route of mangling names from obscure languages (Currently Welsh/Irish for one group and Ancient Egyptian smushed with obfusicated Arabic and a smattering of Polynesian for another). BehindTheName.com is my favorite place to mine from right now, they've even got a random generator for when I need something for an incidental cameo character. I will modify spellings at leisure to be easier on the English ear and tongue and am okay with this since these aren't actually supposed to be Welsh/Irish/Egyptian speaking people...though I'm nowhere near a point where I'm willing or able to do an entire conlang. For main characters I'm one of those people who likes names to mean something so I tend to search by word meaning first.

I've also got one outright anagram for an otherworldly character - stuck it in an anagram generator and picked the result that seemed the most like a plausible name..

zanzjan · May 20, 2016

Weirdmage said:
I'd also advice against listening to anyone monolingual about what sounds "wrong" when it comes to language. They really do not have the experience to know what they talk about

As a note, I find ^this rather offensive. Having an ear for the flow of sounds is its own skill. Learning other languages helps, but is neither necessary for nor a guarantee of success.

jjdebenedictis · May 20, 2016

Weirdmage said:
An example of the latter is that a handful of people, in Yorkshire where I live, have said to me that I sound exactly like a Romanian/Polish guy they know...what they really mean is that they can't tell the difference. -I have some Eastern European friends, and we laugh at this. To us, our accents are light-years apart.

Heh. I'd be exactly that doofus, had I not the self-awareness to shut up about it; I have trouble telling Australian and English accents apart. :gone:

snafu1056 · May 20, 2016

A possibly useful link for people who want inspiration

Dictionary of Medieval Russian Names

PyriteFool · May 20, 2016

jjdebenedictis said:
As a counter example, I really enjoy some of Lynn Flewelling's books, but she seems to choose names that just do not stick in my brain. I can usually keep the main characters straight, but mentions of secondary characters often leave me frowning at the page for several seconds trying to remember who the hell this person is again.

I think, in Flewelling's case, it's that she chooses pleasing collections of letters or sounds, and my brain doesn't necessarily peg those collections as being a name. Thus, when I see that collection again, I might recognize it being as a name from context, but I haven't attached it to a character because my brain didn't make the first connection (letter-salad = name) so it hasn't made the second connection (name = that dude) either.

This is actually an aspect of the issue I hadn't consciously thought of, but when you pointed it out I realized that makes a lot of sense. One of the perils of smeerps, I suppose. Is that name a person? Place? Folk dance? I also have difficulty remembering names, so if I can't at least identify something as a name, it's going to give me trouble.

snafu1056 said:
A possibly useful link for people who want inspiration

Dictionary of Medieval Russian Names

Nice. This looks useful.

jjdebenedictis said:
Heh. I'd be exactly that doofus, had I not the self-awareness to shut up about it; I have trouble telling Australian and English accents apart.

Yes, I am so this person. It's not even that I haven't traveled/studied languages. I have done these things. Still can't identify accents.

Weirdmage · May 20, 2016

zanzjan said:
As a note, I find ^this rather offensive. Having an ear for the flow of sounds is its own skill. Learning other languages helps, but is neither necessary for nor a guarantee of success.

You can't judge "flow of sounds" if you only speak/understand one language, except from the very narrow viewpoint of that one language.
There is plenty of English, French, German, etc words that do not have good flow if I only think in Norwegian. That does not mean those words does not have a good, or natural flow. The same goes from any one language I know to other languages.

Being monolingual means you can only judge flow from a very narrow* experience.
So, yes, I would reiterate advicing against listening to monlingual people when it comes to flow of language.
Someone who speaks more than one language aren't going to be gurus on language, as far as I know there is over 5,000 human languages on this planet. But, someone who knows two languages has twice the language experience of someone who speaks only one.
I don't see why it would be offensive to advice someone to consult someone who has at least twice the experience of others.

*Even English or Mandarin are narrow if we are talking languages.

Sakura Mazaki · May 20, 2016

I tend to look for names that have a meaning: Clancy (Klancy) for red warrior. But I try to make sure the names aren't too hard to say/understand when reading it.

PyriteFool · May 20, 2016

I tend to lean away from giving characters' names based off of their specific meanings, but that's a personal thing. I have not objection to other people doing it. My main worry is that a reader would catch me doing it and find it trite. And honestly, real world people's personalities have nothing to do with their names (except by coincidence) so I see no reason to do it when writing. Obviously YMMV. It could be a nice Easter egg. It is fiction, after all.

eskay · May 20, 2016

I read this thread with a bizarre sense of deja vu, since I was thinking didn't we JUST have a thread on this? But I couldn't find it.

Lo and behold, it was in Basic Writing Questions. Some good discussion there.

What's in a (made up) name?

PyriteFool

Maryn

At Sea

rwm4768

practical experience, FTW

zanzjan

killin' all teh werds

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido

Kjbartolotta

Potentially has/is dog

Straka

Bored Fanatic

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido

Curlz

cutsie-pie

Kjbartolotta

Potentially has/is dog

PyriteFool

snafu1056

jjdebenedictis

is watching you via her avatar

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido

Bolero

Weirdmage

themindstream

zanzjan

killin' all teh werds

jjdebenedictis

is watching you via her avatar

snafu1056

PyriteFool

Weirdmage

Sakura Mazaki

PyriteFool

eskay