gansmaltz

#1 MIKE DAWSON FAN

@gansmaltz

ya missed, pal!

raise my hand and praise the day
break the spell, show me the way

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gansmaltz
@gansmaltz
belarius
@belarius
catstack-writing
@catstack-writing

creating an expansive sci-fi setting spanning a large portion of the galaxy kicked so much ass until i realized i have to actually name some of these planets.

belarius
@belarius

"Hey Jack, I hear the novel you're writing has a new setting! What's it called?"

(Looks down at manuscript)

"Oh, you know, I'm still working on it."

"Cool, cool. Thinking about sequels already, I bet."

(Glances at notepad of future ideas)

"...Yeah."

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in reply to @catstack-writing's post:

thaliarchus
@thaliarchus

You might not be looking for advice, and even if you are this might not be any help at all. In which case feel free to ignore this comment!

But just in case neither of those things are true: I'm a firm proponent of building little linguistic rules to generate sets of names for me. That gives you little clusters of names that don't directly emerge from present-day real-life culture and feel consistent within each cluster.

By having radically different sets of rules, you can whip up distinct-sounding, contrastive clusters of names to distinguish swathes of things (say, planets) named by different groups. And (it feels to me, at least) having some rules to lean on takes a lot of the work out of naming things. I don't think names up, which would be work, I play with constrained possibilities until I have something I like.

I tend to work with real-life words (examples here for robots and here for people), because I like to write with the conceit that what I'm writing represents a translation, but you can apply the same principle to developing a few simple and very different conlangs, and then letting the rules give you audibly distinct clusters of meaningless sounds.

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catstack-writing
@catstack-writing

Thanks, this might help but it's kinda tricky for me because my setting is based on the real world, and there's no aliens (probably?) and the age of interstellar exploration is all happening between, like, 100-1500 years from now. So I feel like things have to be at least rooted in real-world languages, but unfortunately I don't know many aside from English, and some German. I've already been using a little Germanic-based names (like a big generation ship called Van•de•rhyme that was originally spelled and pronounced Wan•der•hiem) but I feel like I can't just pretend English and German are the only two languages that exist, and I should have cool names for things that come from other languages...

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thaliarchus
@thaliarchus

Hmm, yeah, I see what you mean. A few thoughts.

Because proper names tend (tend) to be relatively stable, one often stands at least a better chance of not sounding stupid when assigning a name in a tongue one doesn't know by taking that language's rendering of a widely-shared entity. So, for instance, thinking of classes of thing that worlds might get named after, the Polish for Hephaestus is Hefajstos. Which would probably look like a plausible planet name to anyone in the know, and to anyone who isn't in the know would still be orthographically consistent with any other names you wanted to derive from Polish.

You know the details of your setting's history, and I don't, but you could also consider whether there might be, say, crude strata of naming based on familiarity and extent of contact. Maybe,

  • Planets visited and surveyed but uninhabited or only a little inhabited are known by a translingual number designation that astronomers a century hence have agreed on. So all such planets could have number names, or alphanumeric names, but those names could be numbers in languages other than English, which could in turn be transmuted by use into short forms.
  • Worlds with more substantial populations have names which originate in the naming habits of particular explorers or particular groups, and those habits might run in different directions (frontierist optimism or the pragmatic noting of resources, say). Locals might have their own names for these that differ from the exonyms applied by more widespread groups/cultures/corporations/whatever.
  • Major population centres have names originating in real-life languages of today, but long mutated by frequent use and also possibly laundering through several different languages. Just as a hypothetical Roman wrenched forward to the present day would be hard pressed to see much connection between Eboracum and York, which has been washed by Old Norse and then lots and lots and lots of English. Still less would an early Briton be able to see the connection back to the etymon from which Eboracum came. So with these, maybe you are talking just combinations of sounds which are technically meaningless to us but need to cluster in consistent ways? Or, if we're dealing with shorter time periods after discovery, I still wouldn't rule out a significant amount of casualisation and mutation. The USA is littered with names which have already significantly changed through extensive use in just two centuries or so.

None of those ideas may be useful, of course! They might not fit. But maybe the mode of thought is some help.

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in reply to @belarius's post:

PC36
@PC36

My go-to way for naming something is to translate what it is or one of its main qualities to a different language, and then maybe modify it a bit. Of course, you could go the real-life route of naming your important planets after gods, and then naming most of them with an alphanumeric designation.

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