Re: Inventing names

Staving Carsten Becker:
>Manisu!                                  [ Be greeted!
>Sira iltáyang nelnoin vaena!             [ I need your help!
>
>Before I'm starting to work on a conworld  I need names, I
>thought & decided. But how to come up with names? Shall I
>just make up (at least for now) random, meaningless names,
>or should I make up typical words that can appear in names
>(e.g. animals' names, gods' names, war, battle, rich, poor,
>nice, good, bad etc.)? Or shoudl I even mix both?! The
>problem with descriptive names, such as "Stormcloud" is
>that they're mostly at least trisyllabic and that way don't
>fit what I'm used to -- European names are rather short,
>only one or two syllables mostly. OTOH, when you're looking
>at Indian or generally SE-Asian names, three syllables are
>very short!
>Then there are the place names .. The same problem, the same
>question ... But descriptinve names are IMO normal, and
>many place names are polysyllabic, so this shouldn't be a
>that big problem. At last I could force my self to call the
>biggest ocean of the map of my conworld I've drawn some
>time ago "Radám Anana", which is Daléian for "The big
>ocean" (Ocean big.3sg), Ayeri would be sth like "Caron
>Nucárya" (Sea AGT.big).
I like names of my characters to have some meaning. Wizard's ritual names
are a reference to the act by which their latent magical powers were first
awakened. They can be quite long (e.g. Kæshroþrast "crystal-free". He found
himself forced to confront an evil warlock who could enslave people by
means of a magic crystal, which imprisoned their souls when they looked
into it. When he looked into it however, he fought back and thus awakened
his dormant magical powers. He threw the crystal to the ground, shattering
it and releasing the warlock's slaves from its power). However, a name that
has been in common use for a few centuries will probably have undergone
quite a bit of phonetic erosion, so that something that started out quite
long and descriptive might well have lost a couple of syllables.

Pete