Re: Inventing names

Carsten Becker wrote:

> 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,
The first Kash name I came up with, "çenji" = Shenji, was completely a
priori; as I worked on the dictionary I realized that it could be derived,
and so made çenjik 'stolid, stoic'; likewise other names used constantly in
example sentences: Mina (fem.), Mita (masc.) ~~ minda 'happy'; Erek (m.) <
ereken 'ship's captain/owner' according to my notes.

Family names are another matter, so far, as are country names.


> 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!
I say, why not!  True that Eur. names are short, words in general are
longish.  OTOH SE Asian names can be quite long, while the languages are
often mono- or disyllabic. All those Jayavarmans in Angkorean history, the
Thai Chulalongkorn royal family IIRC.  Javanese names beginning with su- are
all Sanskrit derived and mean  "beatiful/good/fair whatever"-- Suharto
"beatiful treasure", Sukarno "beatiful reason" etc. etc. (su- is cognate
with Greek eu-.)  There are also some very long Skt. names, which,
ironically, are often adopted by people of Chinese origin who want to
disguise a bit their Chinese-ness.  (Nobody is fooled :-(((  )

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),
Well that's logical... One of the oceans on Cindu is called _roçe aros_
'eastern ocean', I suppose because it was the first ocean to be crossed,
thanks to prevailing winds-- The Kash sailed east to go west, unlike poor
misguided Columbus.  Once you/I have some history or mythology figured out,
maybe we'll come up with equivalents of "Atlantic" or "Pacific"....

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