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This is mainly for Zomp, but I guess that it can be for other people who have thier worlds worked out. I was wondering how you create the names for your countries/continents/regions. Are there any special meanings behind them? I'm asking this mainly because I've been having trouble thinking up names for my continents/countries/regions and also because I was trying to look up some of the Almean names in the lexicon and didn't come up with anything.

Well, lots of the names I pull out of nowhere, as I do with the lexicon for my languages, although not all the time. Many of the larger cities in Derōn (a country in my conworld) are named after animals (for example Gadan, "bear," Usēmaw, "tiger," N'adi, "boar," etc.). A lot of other names also once meant something in the parent language of Derōniyad (Dr?unyadh T'sit). For example, the capital of Derōn is D'ulan, which in Dr?unyadh T'sit meant "fox." I wouldn't know how others do this though...

Avenir wrote:This is mainly for Zomp, but I guess that it can be for other people who have thier worlds worked out. I was wondering how you create the names for your countries/continents/regions. Are there any special meanings behind them? I'm asking this mainly because I've been having trouble thinking up names for my continents/countries/regions and also because I was trying to look up some of the Almean names in the lexicon and didn't come up with anything.

Well, there's Dracn?e, the 'Dragon Kingdom'...

This might help... this is part of a guide for creating geographical names, part of an ongoing project.

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Start with geographical terms, which are not only useful for labelling your map in your own language (?Z?i Mishicama? instead of ?Mishicama Ocean?), but to name cities and regions (?Great mountain?, ?Seatown?, ?Yellow River?, ?Clear Lake?, ?Ox Pond?, ?Deer Crossing?, etc.). Indeed, some towns are nothing but one of these terms (Detroit = ?Straits?; Le Havre = ?the Port?; Ostrov = ?Island?).

One of the most popular names for cities is ?New town?, which is the meaning of Newton, Neustadt, Neuveville, Naples, Nyborg, Novgorod, Villanueva, Yenisehir, and Xincheng.

Other ideas for naming cities:

* after the founder or patron (Jacksonville, Baltimore, Washington, Stalingrad)
* after the god or saint it?s dedicated to (San Francisco, Salvador)
* after the people who once lived there (Paris? after the Parisii; Washington? the British town, after the Washings, the followers of Wasa; Andaluc?a? after the Vandals)
* expressions of thanksgiving or hope
* evocations of the virtues (Concord, Resolution, La Paz, Uni?o)
* after a propitious existing city (Lima, Ohio; Paris, Texas; New Amsterdam; Versailles, Argentina)
* how far you are from somewhere interesting (Half Day Road, Ventimiglia)

Geographical names often preserve a region?s linguistic history: Amerindian names in the U.S. and Latin America; Spanish and French names in the American West; Celtic names across Europe; Latin and Greek names in the Mediterranean; Bantu names in South Africa; Maori names in New Zealand. The U.S., for instance, is littered with morphemes of the same meaning: city, -town, -ton, -ville, -berg, -burg, -polis, -by.

So the older places in your land should be named by whoever got there first, adapted to the language spoken there now. Since these are likely to be chief features of the land? rivers, lakes, mountain ranges, big cities? this is an argument for working out at least two languages (at least to the extent of defining some of the terms in this section) before you get too far with your map.

(Most of the names on the Almean maps do mean something, but you have to look in the right lexicon. The map of Eretald, for instance, includes Verdurian, Cadhinor, Methaiun, and Cu?zi names.)

Zomp, is this guide to naming places part of some World Construction Kit you're putting together to go with your Language Construction Kit?

Hope it is !

zompist wrote:One of the most popular names for cities is ?New town?, which is the meaning of Newton, Neustadt, Neuveville, Naples, Nyborg, Novgorod, Villanueva, Yenisehir, and Xincheng.

Carthage, too!

Aidan wrote:

zompist wrote:One of the most popular names for cities is ?New town?, which is the meaning of Newton, Neustadt, Neuveville, Naples, Nyborg, Novgorod, Villanueva, Yenisehir, and Xincheng.

Carthage, too!

And, of course, Cartagena, Spain, from the Latin Carthago Nova, "New Carthage" (i.e. "New New Town").

In Indiana we have quite a few French names; this of course comes from the old fur and pioneer days. LaPorte is the most famous, but we also have Gnaw Bone--which, at first glance, doesn't seem French. It has a funny folk etymology, but likely comes fom Narbonne--which, when spoken by a Frenchman and heard by a Hoosier, could very easily become Gnaw Bone.

jburke wrote:In Indiana we have quite a few French names; this of course comes from the old fur and pioneer days. LaPorte is the most famous, but we also have Gnaw Bone--which, at first glance, doesn't seem French. It has a funny folk etymology, but likely comes fom Narbonne--which, when spoken by a Frenchman and heard by a Hoosier, could very easily become Gnaw Bone.

We have at least one of those in Washington State where I grew up--in the southwest corner of the state there's a little town called Pe Ell. Apparently it comes from a mispronounciation of the French name Pierre. I believe there's also a Loop Loop somewhere in Washington, supposedly distorted from the French loup ("wolf").

I think my favorite Washington place name is Humptulips (which is Native American, probably from one of the Salish languages...I have no idea what it means.)

A German city of which I always wondered how they could ever make such a name for it, is M?lheim (trash-home). Or Karlsruhe (Chales' rest).
In the Netherlands is Amsterdam, which has an interesting history: the city started around a damb (dam) in the river the Amstel. And Holland, meaning hollow land (because it lies lower than sea level).

Hmmm. the cities and regions in my con-country don't have names yet, maybe I should think of some...

Aidan wrote:

zompist wrote:One of the most popular names for cities is ?New town?, which is the meaning of Newton, Neustadt, Neuveville, Naples, Nyborg, Novgorod, Villanueva, Yenisehir, and Xincheng.

Carthage, too!

A question that's been bugging me for a while: of qrt h.d?t, which is 'city'?

There's Baton Rouge (here in Louisiana), which means 'Red Stick' in a Native American language, thought it sounds oddly French to me...maybe it is French. I don't remember. But I don't guess that's a geographic term, unless it was maybe referring to red trees in the area....

DarkFantasy wrote:There's Baton Rouge (here in Louisiana), which means 'Red Stick' in a Native American language, thought it sounds oddly French to me...maybe it is French. I don't remember. But I don't guess that's a geographic term, unless it was maybe referring to red trees in the area....

"Baton Rouge" definitely isn't Indian and definitely is French.

From Made in America by Bill Bryson, on the subject of American toponyms of French origin:

Baton Rouge was evidently so called because in 1700 a party of explorers came upon a red stake - a baton rouge - marking the boundary between two Indian hunting-grounds and built a trading post there, but Coeur d'Alene, the city in Idaho, is utterly baffling. It translates as "heart of awl", and quite what the founders had in mind by that is anybody's guess.

(How anyone could mistake Baton Rouge for anything other than French is beyond me. After all, both words exist in English, albeit with slightly more specific meanings.)

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And a few paragraphs on

Bill Bryson wrote:Often, as with Los Angeles and Santa Fe, these names left behind by the French and Spanish had to be shortened, re-spelled or otherwise modified to make them sit more comfortably on English-speaking tongues. Thus L'Eau Froid ("cold water"), a lake in Arkansas, was turned into Low Freight. Monk Beau, North Carolina, evolved into Monbo. Les Monts Verts became Lemon Fair. Simalarly the Siskiyou mountains may be an adaptation of French six cailloux, "six stones". Waco, Texas, began as the Spanish Hueco, while Key West was corrupted from Cayo Hesco. Bob Ruly, Michigan, started life as Bois Brul?. More often the English-speaking settlers kept the spelling bet adapted its pronunciation. Des Moines, Detroit, St Louis and Illinois are obvious examples of French words with non-French pronunciations, but there are countless lesser-known ones, like Bois d'Arc, Missouri, pronounced "bodark", and De Blieux, Fortier, and Breazale, pronounced respectively "double-you", "foshee" and "brazil".

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Drydic_guy wrote:

Aidan wrote:

zompist wrote:One of the most popular names for cities is ?New town?, which is the meaning of Newton, Neustadt, Neuveville, Naples, Nyborg, Novgorod, Villanueva, Yenisehir, and Xincheng.

Carthage, too!

A question that's been bugging me for a while: of qrt h.d?t, which is 'city'?

I've always thought "qrt" was "city," but I can't quite recall what that's based on, now.

Baton Rouge was evidently so called because in 1700 a party of explorers came upon a red stake - a baton rouge - marking the boundary between two Indian hunting-grounds and built a trading post there, but Coeur d'Alene, the city in Idaho, is utterly baffling. It translates as "heart of awl", and quite what the founders had in mind by that is anybody's guess.

The name to me seems best understood not as "heart of awl," but rather "heart like an awl." A pointed heart is a classic Iroquois idiom for trickery or shrewdness; and it seems likely that the Coeur d'Alene Indian tribe was named by French-speaking Iroquois (on several grounds, including that idiom). It's not uncommon for bilingual speakers to overlay the thought and grammatical patterns of their native language onto new languages; and such oddities can persist across generations. In Mohawk (an Iroquois language) "like" or "as" is expressed via relationals; so coeur d'alene to a bilingual Iroquois (or a descedant of a bilingual Iroquois) might well have idiomatically meant "heart like an awl" and not "heart of awl."

jburke wrote: The name to me seems best understood not as "heart of awl," but rather "heart like an awl." A pointed heart is a classic Iroquois idiom for trickery or shrewdness; and it seems likely that the Coeur d'Alene Indian tribe was named by French-speaking Iroquois (on several grounds, including that idiom).

Sounds entirely reasonable. Thank you for clearing this up.

Des Moines, Detroit, St Louis and Illinois are obvious examples of French words with non-French pronunciations, but there are countless lesser-known ones, like Bois d'Arc, Missouri, pronounced "bodark", and De Blieux, Fortier, and Breazale, pronounced respectively "double-you", "foshee" and "brazil".

not to mention my own town, DuBois (do boys)

In my country all the places were originally named in Gaelic pretty simplisticly e.g. Srath Ban meaning white river or Dubh Lin meaning black lake. Following the English conquest they just converted the Gaelic names into the nearest sounding English. Srath Ban and Dubh Lin therefore became Strabane and Dublin. This happened across the entire country.
These days Dublin is called Baile Atha Cliath in official Irish, precisely because the other name sounds too much like the english name.

Yezhan Seru wrote:In my country all the places were originally named in Gaelic pretty simplisticly e.g. Srath Ban meaning white river or Dubh Lin meaning black lake. Following the English conquest they just converted the Gaelic names into the nearest sounding English. Srath Ban and Dubh Lin therefore became Strabane and Dublin. This happened across the entire country.
These days Dublin is called Baile Atha Cliath in official Irish, precisely because the other name sounds too much like the english name.

This also happened with a lot of Indian place names in the U.S. In Indiana, e.g, we have the Wabash and Salamonie Rivers, which come from Miami waabashiiki 'bright white' (referring to the river's limestone bed) and salaamonanii 'blood root'.

daan wrote:In the Netherlands is Amsterdam, which has an interesting history: the city started around a damb (dam) in the river the Amstel.

Other examples of a city being named after a feature of its river include Cambridge, at the "bridge on the River Cam."

And the Exe River flows through Exmoor, Exeter, and Exmouth.

I have no idea where any of these monosyllabic British river names come from, though. There's also "Ouse" and "Thames." And others.

nice of you to use Exeter as an example but i have seen it used elsewhere. there is also a village of exton on the river.

as for thames and ouse, i know that they are celtic names, Avon for example just means "river" but the meanings of thames and ouse seem to be aluding me off hand

At the risk of reviving an old topic, I have one more question to ask. I was just looking at the Cadhinorian Plain map, and noticed a town up to the northwest of Verduria called Funky. What language is that in and what might its meaning be?

Avenir wrote:At the risk of reviving an old topic, I have one more question to ask. I was just looking at the Cadhinorian Plain map, and noticed a town up to the northwest of Verduria called Funky. What language is that in and what might its meaning be?

Its full name is (Won't You Take Me To) Funky(town). But residents call it Funky for short.

Avenir wrote:At the risk of reviving an old topic, I have one more question to ask. I was just looking at the Cadhinorian Plain map, and noticed a town up to the northwest of Verduria called Funky. What language is that in and what might its meaning be?

I'm afraid I don't know yet. It'll be one of the Western languages, but I'm afraid I know very little about them yet. It's even possible that the name is English, used as a translation for a Western word.