Re: Naming the conlang

Scotto Hlad wrote:

>Hello everyone. I am just joining this group and look forward to talking
>with others with similar interests.
>Ok I'm sure that here is another topic that has been discussed so many times
>that everyone is groaning yet again. That being said, I have fraternal twin
>conlangs being developed, one a Romance language and the second an a-priori
>languge.
   Hello! I look forward to hearing about those languages. Yes, I do read
this stuff, even if I rarely post anymore.

>I am the parent of 4 children and recall well the delight of volleying back
>and forth with the mother of my children over names. There would be no list
>that one can reference anywhere online that gives the latest names that
>people a chosing for their infant conlangs.
   There are plenty of conlang names listed on langmaker.com ... but It's
not the same as baby names: probably best to choose something that *isn't*
already a language.

>My question is how have others named their languages? Dare I ask what the
>derivation of the names of various languages is. The first conlang I ever
>developed (sometime in the last millenium) was called "Kadingu" which meant
>"the tongue."  I understand as well that at least some of the aboriginal
>languages of North American are simply derived from the word for "people." I
>believe that Dene is an example: Dene just means "the people."
   There are also a lot of conlangs with names meaning "language" or
"people" or "people's language" etc. I don't have any of those, but there
may be a common root in the names Ishtol and Tolbor; there is a Tolborese
word |tul| "man" which *might* be related, but it isn't used for "people" of
both sexes the way "man(kind)" is in English.

>I'd really like to see how other colangers have wrestled with this and
>arrived at their conclusions.
   All the languages I've made have been named for the people who speak
them, and most of those names are geographical.
   For the first couple of years, the Rhean language had no name. It was
mostly gibberish meant to give a certain "look" to signs, billboards etc
that appeared in the background of a comic. Eventually, that gibberish grew
into a language with grammar. The country needed a name, and I wanted
something that sounded like a plausible name for a country (that world still
has a lot of place names ending in -a or -ia, just to satisfy my own
anglophone bias). "Rhea" sounds familiar -- it's a woman's name, but not too
common -- and the English name of the language then had to be "Rhean". The
native name is "Rheava Izka".
   The dead language Omurax is named for a place in the south of the Ossican
desert that at the time was called the Omur. There's a modern language
descended from it (I don't know anything about it yet) called "Oirenax";
"oiren(s)" means "without-home".
   Tolborese is the anglicised name for kèTolbor. There are still Tolbors,
but no more such place as ancient Tolboria.
   Lidric is spoken in Lidri, but I'm still not sure what they call themselves.
   The Ishtol Republic has a language called Ishtol. Go figure. There's also
a language called "Republicese" which is the "English" spoken in the comic.

   My advice is to make the name up from scratch, and figure out an excuse
for it afterwards.

M