Language lessons: II All games need names
But don’t make a game out of naming!
by Katharine Kerr ©1983 Katharine Kerr

"You’re in the Temple of Florwaks in Shinebright City," says the
gamemaster.

"You see the Priestess Oolala and her barbarian bodyguard, Upchuk, who
serves the mighty god, uh, the god ... how do you say Smkznrf,
anyway?"

Does any of that sound familiar? All too often, role-playing games, to
say nothing of the lower reaches of fantasy and science-fiction writing,
are marred by the use of personal and place names rang- ing from the
merely silly to the utterly incomprehensible. Even some popular
published gaming campaigns are filled with banal random names.

Although most fantasy role-playing systems have elaborate rules for
determin- ing which game-world languages a player may know, when we come
right down to it, all their manifold tongues sound alike -- a species of
that truly common lan- guage, Gamer’s Exotica. It’s a pity, because the
proper use of strange- sounding names adds the feeling of a dif- ferent
reality that’s part of the pleasure of role-playing, whether your
game-world lies on a futuristic planet or in a past that never was.

The problem seems to be that many gamers forget that names are part of a
language, and that each language has a consistent character that sets it
apart from other languages. By and large, most role- playing games are
created and played by speakers of English, and American Eng- lish at
that. For centuries, English has been a linguistic melting pot, drawing
roots and words from many other tongues and in the process losing any
recogniza- ble purity of tone and sound, such as one finds in, for
example, Chinese or German.

In America, our cross-cultural society produces names drawn from all
over the world. I’ve known a Kevin Woo and a Heidi Sanchez, for instance
-- ethnic combinations of names that would be unthinkable elsewhere,
especially in a primitive, isolated society such as those in most FRP
games. As a result, when gamers create names, they start with the
assumption that anything goes, just as it does in American English.
Sometimes, in a desperate attempt to sound exotic, they fall back on
handfuls of consonants; more often, they mix and match from widely
different languages, with a healthy dose of just plain English thrown
in.

It is possible, however, to have a system that will produce personal and
place names in fantastic languages with a min- imum of effort and
brain-wracking. What the gamemaster needs to do is create the language
from which these names will be drawn. Making an entire language would be
too time-consuming and not necessary, but you can use a few basic
linguistic principles to create a small part of a lan- guage in a
surprisingly short time. This article explains those basic principles
and gives specific pointers on language crea- tion so that it can serve
as a starter-kit for those who want to create partial lan- guages for
their campaigns. You should bear in mind that the article oversimpli-
fies many a tangled concept, but on the whole, it sticks close to modern
linguistic theory. It also uses two standard linguis- tic conventions by
setting off example sounds in slashes (/g/) and example words in italic
type.


What is a language?

Before we can get down to the step-by- step process of making up a
language, it’s necessary to define exactly what a lan- guage is: a
system of sounds, all given arbitrary meanings and organized into
patterns that carry meaning and show the relationships between the basic
sounds.

The one primary reason that languages exist is to communicate
information between individuals. Every existing lan- guage fulfills this
need in a very precise way, no matter what speakers of other languages
may think of it. You must understand that a truly "primitive" lan- guage
-- that is, a system of grunts, short words, and grammarless sentences,
like those often attributed to primitive peo- ples in fantasy fiction --
simply never has been discovered and probably never existed among anyone
recognizably human. It’s likely that as soon as proto- humans were using
tools, they were inventing real languages; the same will hold true for
any sentient human or humanoid beings in a fantasy or science- fiction
campaign.


Pick the right phonemes

The two basic parts of any language are its sound (what linguists call
its pho- netics or its phonological inventory) and its structure
(grammar and syntax). To invent a language, you must first deter- mine
what kind of sounds your new lan- guage will have, then decide what kind
of grammar it uses. Once these decisions are made, you can generate
lists of personal names and words that can be used to build place names.
Let us begin then with what most people call sounds but linguists call
phonemes (for a reason that will become clear later).

The human mouth and throat, to say nothing of the speech-making parts of
an alien anatomy, can produce an enormous variety of sounds, ranging
from a Bronx cheer to a soft hiss. Any language that used all or even
most of the sounds a crea- ture is capable of making would be too
complex to use for general communica- tion. So, every language selects a
rela- tively small number of sounds to use in building words. This
selection is what gives a real-world language its basic "music" or
character, because out of a simple human liking for what’s familiar and
orderly, languages tend toward con- sistency in their choice of
phonemes.

Thus, the German Ianguage sounds throaty and harsh to many people
because of its selection of phonemes pro- nounced farther back in the
mouth than those of English, while Spanish uses the open, soft phonemes
that give it its nick- name of "the loving tongue." These judgements, of
course, are culturally con- ditioned and emotionally subjective -- but
as a gamemaster, subjective emo- tional color is exactly what you want
in your invented languages.

Your first job, then, is to select basic sounds in an orderly, patterned
way to give your new language character. Since the word "sound" is
vague, let’s define our special term, phoneme: A phoneme is a
speech-sound that must be precisely pronounced to communicate meaning,
but this precision is a relative thing.

If a person with a high-pitched voice and one with a baritone voice both
say the word can, for instance, the pitch of the two words is different,
but they would both be understood. Similarly, a British and an American
speaker would each pronounce the vowel /a/ in can slightly differently
-- but again, they would be understood. On the other hand, if some- one
pronounced the word as con, the word would not be understood for what it
is. Thus, the British and the American /a/ sounds are variants of a
single pho- neme, while /o/ is a different phoneme.

When inventing your new language, then, remember to define the phonemes
closely rather than broadly. For example, just how will the vowel /a/ be
pro- nounced in your language? Don’t assume that it represents all the
phonemes that the English letter a represents, such as the phonemes in
can, cane, and aha, but decide which of these phonemes you want. (The
spelling in your new lan- guage will be a breeze, unlike English, if you
play your cards right.)

The number of phonemes used in human speech is vast, and far from
bounded by our English alphabet. Some African languages, for instance,
use the phoneme /!/ (no, that exclamation mark is not a mistake), which
is pronounced roughly like a bottle-top being popped by an old-fashioned
opener. Welsh has the phoneme /ll/, produced by putting the tip of the
tongue on the hard palate and hissing. Many languages use the throaty
/ch/, as in the Scottish word loch. Closer to home, consider all the
ways that /r/ may be pronounced: open as in American English, rolled or
trilled as in Celtic tongues, swallowed like in British, nasal- ized as
in New England dialect, or even aspirated like the /rh/ in Welsh, Each
language selects one method as the "right" way to pronounce /r/, and so
can your new language.


Vowels and consonants

Varied as they are, however, all pho- nemes fall into one of two groups:
vowels and consonants. A vowel is a phoneme produced by vibrating the
vocal cords and allowing the air to pass out of the mouth or nose or
both without obstruction. It’s the vowels, in other words, that actually
allow a word to be pronounced by a human or humanoid mouth.

A consonant may be simply defined as anything that isn’t a vowel.
Certain con- sonants, such as /s/ at the beginning of a word, do carry
air with them, but this air is insufficient to allow the word to be
heard from any distance away without the following vowel. Say the word
stop aloud and pay attention to the way that your voice becomes
automatically louder when you hit the /o/. Thus we see that a word
without vowels, such as the god Smkznrf of our example, is
unpronounceable and thus unusable, no matter how dandy it looks on the
printed page.

Both vowels and consonants are classi- fied into categories on the basis
of certain technicalities. Although you don’t need to learn all these
categories to create a partial fantasy language, included below is a
table for those who like this sort of thing. The table shows most of the
basic ways of producing consonants, defines those terms, and shows how
the English consonants are classified. Notice how few different
consonant sounds English uses, in comparison to the number of different
sounds the human vocal apparatus can make. For a new language, it would
cer- tainly be possible to introduce new con- sonant sounds -- but make
sure you and your players can actually pronounce a nasalized dental, for
example, if you choose to include one. (Perhaps written as /nt’/, it
would be sounded with the tongue pressed against the upper teeth as the
air went out your nose.)


TABLE OF CONSONANTS

            Nasals       stops           Spirants
                     voiced voiceless voiced voiceless
Labial          m       b       p       w       wh
Dental                                  th      th
Labio-dental                            v       f
Alveolar        n       d       t       zh,z,1  sh,s,l
Cacuminal                               r       r
Palatal         n (as in onion)         y       y
Velar           ng      g       k
Uvular  (not used in English; ch in German, as in achtung, is one example)


Definitions of terms in table:

Nasals are sounds produced with the nasal passage open.

Stops are produced by first closing the lips, then opening them with a
puff of breath.

Spirants narrow the lips, but allow air to escape with a feeling of
friction.

Voiced consonants are those where the vocal cords continue to vibrate as
they are pronounced. (Put your fingers on your throat and say first /s/,
then /z/ to feel the difference.) Many consonants have both voiced and
voiceless pronunciations.

The technical terms reading down the left column show how the consonant
is produced by the vocal apparatus. Labials are produced with the lips.
The other types are produced by contact between the tongue and another
part of the mouth: dentals with the tongue touching the teeth;
labio-dentals with the tongue and the lower lip; alveolars with the
tongue touching the gum above the upper teeth; cacuminals with the
tongue toward the hard palate; palatals with the tongue close to the
hard palate; velars with the tongue on the soft palate; and uvulars with
the tongue back in the throat. (Say some English consonants, noting how
your tongue is positioned, to get a better understanding of these
terms.)


Taking the table further

To go beyond the table of consonants given here, write out the English
alphabet and make notes of the variety of phonemes each letter
represents in actual speech. If you know other languages, think of how
those languages would pro- nounce the various phonemes. Pay atten- tion
to any foreign languages spoken in your community and try to distinguish
different phonemes. (If you’re unfortu- nate enough to live in an
English-only community, you can ask at the public library for
language-learning records.) You may want to incorporate distinctive
foreign phonemes into your new lan- guage. A little bit of thought will
give you a long list of possible phonemes -- more than can be
incorporated into a sin- gle language. Remember, however, that any
unusual sounds must be easily learned and easily spoken during the heat
of play.

To make your new language sound properly exotic, it’s not even necessary
to have a large number of non-English phonemes. Languages also take on
char- acter by the way in which they combine their phonemes and the
frequency with which they use certain combinations. English, for
example, readily uses con- sonants in pairs or clusters, such as in the
words strong track star. Other languages, such as the Polynesian group,
rarely use more than a single consonant per vowel, and many syllables
consist of a single vowel, as in Hawai’i or Nu’kalofa. The Welsh
language strings together a variety of diphthongs, as in haearn, while
Eng- lish avoids such combinations.

What about frequency? Well, if you
look over this paragraph you will see
many uses of /t/, /r/, /e/, /a/, and /n/,
but hardly any appearances by /x/, /q/,
and /v/, to name three relatively rare let-
ters in English. In other languages, /x/
(for instance) might be a common con-
sonant, even at the beginning of words,
while /t/ may be exceptionally rare.
When you select phonemes for your new
language, give them a different frequency
rate than in English; that is, use some of
them more and some less than the corre-
sponding English phoneme. The choice
of a phoneme pattern is just as important
as the choice of the phonemes themselves.

Let’s look at an example drawn from my own fantasy campaign, which has
two prominent languages: Kazrak and Tribal. Kazrak predominantly selects
the consonants represented by /j/, /k/, /z/, /w/, and /r/, with other
phonemes added for variety, of course. It also clusters its consonants
and isolates vowels from each other with consonants. Tribal, on the
other hand, prefers smooth sounds such as /l/, /m/, /d/, and /p/, and
rarely pairs, much less clusters, its consonants. If we have two
chararters, for instance, named Jezro of Haz Strokej and Marador of
Rinbabadelan, it’s obvious that the first is a Kazrak and the second a
man of the Tribes. Any place with a name like Melimbalaban will be in
Tribal lands, while Dazjarko must be somewhere in Kazrak territory. More
importantly, neither could be in California or Indiana.


Reading, writing, and morphemes

At this point, let's consider the ques- tion of how to write down your
new lan- guage. While it’s tempting to make up an exotic alphabet,
remember that you have to read these words out in the middle of a game.
Since learning how to read a new alphabet takes a lot of time and
practice, it’s best to start by writing your new lan- guage in the
alphabet you already know. For non-English phonemes, modify exist- ing
letters by such devices as putting a slash through or a dot over them.
Make a key, and stick to it, to avoid confusion.

If you assign one and only one pho- neme to each letter, spelling will
be easy. The horror of English spelling arises from the fact that one
letter can represent several phonemes, and some phonemes are represented
by several letters. This situation arose because of the "linguistic
melting pot" characteristic of English mentioned earlier -- a
characteristic you can avoid in your new language.

Before you begin making up word lists for your language, you have to
decide some basic questions about its structure, because the grammatical
structure of a language determines not only the length of its words but
the details of the words’ form. In spite of their amazing variety on an
individual basis, all known human languages can be classified as one of
two broad types: isolating and inflectional. (Modern European languages,
including English, are a mixture of the two types, but most other
languages are quite rec- ognizably one or the other.) In the primi- tive
and culturally pure worlds of fantasy gaming, languages will also follow
one or the other of these patterns. To define these two language types,
we need a new term -- morpheme -- to replace the common term, word.

Just as a sound can be made up of sev- eral phonemes, what are commonly
called words can be made up of several morphemes. Consider, for example,
the word unfortunate. It is made up of un, fortun, and ate, each a set
of letters that contributes meaning to the total word: a negation, then
the root meaning, and then a suffix showing that the word is an
adjective. Although none of these pieces can stand alone as a word in a
sentence, each has a definite meaning and thus is a morpheme -- the
smallest unit of a lan- guage that can carry meaning. Some words are
single morphemes: can, a, and is, for instance, cannot be subdivided in
the manner that unfortunate can be.


Isolating-type languages

In an isolating language, each mor- pheme is indivisible in the same way
as can or is. In the purest type of such a tongue, one morpheme equals
one word equals one syllable, always remaining distinct, never changing
its form or sound, and revealing its grammatical function by its
position the sentence alone.

Chinese is a good example of an isolat- ing language. In a very rough
transcrip- tion, in Chinese jung means middle and gwo means country;
thus the word for China (the Middle Country) is Junggwo. The morpheme
hwa means either "speak" or "speech"; there is absolutely no difference
in the form of the mor- pheme to show whether it’s a noun or a verb. The
morpheme bu is used for nega- tion. Thus, the sentence Do you speak
Chinese? translates (very roughly) as Junggwo hwa, hwa bu hwa? or, more
literally, China speak, you speak not speak? The listener understands
that this sentence is a question from the pattern of the morphemes; that
is, the repetition in hwa bu hwa is a vital part of the lan- guage and
carries the information that the sentence is a question.

If you choose an isolating type of struc- ture for your new language,
its words will be short --ideally all monosyllables, but even
Vietnamese, the purest known iso- lating language, does not attain that
ideal. Such a language will have to have plenty of different phonemes in
order to avoid words which sound alike but mean different things.
Chinese neatly solves the problem by adding tones to its phonemic
system; that is, a word like hwa means one thing when pronounced in a
high, even tone of voice, but quite another when pronounced emphatically
with a falling tone of voice. Unless you already speak Chinese or
another tonal language, this system will be very confusing for your
game-world language. Since you’ll only need a small number of words, you
can get by with simply including a lot of phonemes in the language and
paying strict attention to make sure that you don’t duplicate entire
words.

Making up names in an isolating lan- guage is a relatively simple
matter. Per- sonal names will consist of two or three words placed side
by side, such as "Ling Mei" or "Trong Nhu Tang," to give one Chinese and
one Vietnamese example. One of these words will be the person’s actual
name, the other the name of the person’s family, or perhaps the village
where he or she was born or resides. An attribute can also be added to a
personal name -- as in "Thor Stormbringer," to give a common-sounding
example with the attribute plainly stated in English. It would be much
more interesting to have the name be "Tor Mek Al," for instance, and
leave it up to the character bearing the name to reveal (if he chooses)
how he earned the name Mek Al, or "Bring Storm." Place names can be
formed in a similar way. "Big Tree Place" or "Orc Death Rock," suitably
translated, could be names of places in a country speaking an isolating
tongue.


Inflectional-type languages

Although the inflectional type of lan- guage is more complex, you can
invent one with a minimum of effort once you understand the basic
principles. Basically, an inflectional language changes the sound or
form of its words to show changes in meaning. There are two ways of
making these changes: (1) altering the sound, as in the English run and
ran, give and gave, and so on, or (2) by adding morphemes, as in
fortunate and unfortu- nate. When morphemes are added, some of them
remain distinct; others have their pronunciation "blurred’ and become
part of the word. (Always remember that speech is the primary form and
writing the secondary form when thinking about these matters.) In the
purest type of an inflectional language, every single word in a sentence
will change its form to show its precise function and various shades of
meaning -- but even in Latin, a good example of an inflectional
language, some words are invariable. Inflectional languages are further
subdivided into two types: agglutinative and fusional. Since the
differences between these two types is confusing at first, let us
examine them in more detail.

Latin is a good example of a fusional language. Remember our example of
unfortunate, a Latin word taken over almost whole into English. To form
that word, un and fortun and ate are "fused" into one longer word which
has a mean- ing that goes beyond any one of its parts. In Latin itself,
unfortunate undergoes another change when it’s being used in a sentence.
Consider the examples Marcus est infortunatus ("Mark is unfortunate")
and Anna est infortunata ("Ann is unfor- tunate"). The end of the word
undergoes a further sound-change because Ann is female and Mark is male.

Suppose we want to say that Ann and Mark are both unfortunate; this
becomes Anna et Marcus sunt infortunati. Notice that the verb changes
its form to the plu- ral, just as the end of infortunatus/a is altered
yet once again. Are these changes at the end of infortunat-
sound-changes, or are they morphemes added to the root? Scholars argue
the point, because in a fusional language it’s very hard to say.
Fortunately, the answer is irrelevant for our purposes, except as it
bears on the distinction between a fusional and an agglutinative tongue.

In agglutinative languages, there is no question of sound changes. Each
mor- pheme has a distinct meaning and a dis- tinct character, no matter
how many of them are "glued together," or aggluti- nated. In Turkish,
for example, the mor- pheme for house is ev. To form a plural, one adds
ler, for evler. This morpheme is always a sign of the plural. In Latin,
that -i which pluralizes can also be added to different kinds of words
to fulfill other functions: librum Marci does not mean a book and
several Marcuses, but a book belonging to Marcus. In Turkish, such
confusion would never arise.


Agglutinative languages can string together quite a number of morphemes.
In Turkish, the morpheme den indicates movement away from the root it’s
at- tached to, so that evlerden means out of the houses. In practice,
most fusional languages have some agglutinative fea- tures and vice
versa, but all you need to worry about is the predominant character of
your new language. Since an aggluti- native language can pack a lot more
mor- phemes into a single word, names in this language will be longer
but at the same time more distinctly pronounced.

Any inflectional language has a number of different kinds of morphemes.
Some are what we think of as words, pure and simple, referring to
events, things, qualities, and so on: horse, ride, fast, under. All
morphemes of this class are complete, as it were, even in their most
stripped-down form. If a Latin speaker, for instance, heard the
incomplete word caball-, he would think vaguely of a horse, even though
he would feel that something was missing without another morpheme on the
end. Morphemes of this first type can be called, simply, "com- plete"
morphemes.

A second kind of morpheme can be said to carry meaning by itself, but
its mean- ing is so abstract that it can hardly stand alone. This second
kind of morpheme is, for instance, a -us for caball- to make the word
"horse" in the nominative case, or the -i which would make it caballi,
the plural. The Turkish morpheme ler is similar, in that a Turkish
speaker would recognize it as meaning "more than one," but would hardly
consider it a word in the way that ev is a word. Morphemes in this
second category are those that add something to the meaning or qualify
the meaning of the root-morpheme to which they are attached; therefore,
we may call them "qualifying" morphemes.

A third class of morpheme, which I’ll term "relational" morphemes for
our purposes here, is exemplified by the phrase a horse’s back. The ’s
morpheme shows the relationship of horse to back, namely, that the horse
possesses the back. All inflectional languages either add morphemes or
use sound changes to show certain basic relationships such as
possession.

Inflectional languages have an immense variety of morphemes in both the
second and third categories for every part of speech, but you will be
pleased to know that you need only a few mor- phemes for a few kinds of
qualifications and relationships to make up names in a created
inflectional langauge. (Anyone who’s obsessive enough to want to create
an entire inflectional language should read Theoretical Linguistics by
John Lyons, Oxford University Press, to find out about the months of
work that lie ahead.)

If you’re inventing an isolating lan- guage, you’ll need none of these
secon- dary morphemes at all. Isolating lan- guages leave such questions
as number, gender, and time totally to the context of the sentence.
Thus, Two horses ran by yesterday would become Two horse run by
yesterday if English were an isolating language.


Gender and number

To make up names in your new inflec- tional language, you will need
qualifying morphemes or sound changes for gender and number. Gender is
important for per- sonal names for characters. It refers to actual sex
only when the noun refers to a living being, but inflectional languages
assign genders to all nouns just for lingu- istic consistency. Often, as
in Latin, a language will use three genders (mascu- line, feminine, and
neuter), but at times, as in Welsh, there are only two (mascu- line and
feminine).

A game-world language might well have an unusual way of designating
gender. An hermaphroditic race, for instance, might use the two
"genders" of living (sexed) and dead (non-sexed); or, a precise language
might split up the neuter gender into categories such as active,
passive, and abstract. When it comes to number, most languages distin-
guish only between singular and plural, but others include a dual number
for a pair of things or make distinctions between "one only" "a fe" and
"a great many"

Let’s look at some examples of number and gender changes. In Latin, a
common class of personal names ended in -a for the feminine gender and
-us for the mas- culine. Thus, Claudius and Claudia are the same name,
merely differentiated for a man and a woman. English has some names
which follow a similar pattern, as in Robert and Roberta. An
agglutinative language will have morphemes to show gender added onto the
core of the name. pair of things or make distinctions between "one
only," "a few," and "a great many."

It’s also possible to use internal sound changes to mark for gender, as
in John and Jane. The plural of words will be shown in similar ways.
Arbor is one tree in Latin; arbores means more than one tree. In
English, we have one man, several men. For variety’s sake, your new lan-
guage can have several different mor- phemes or sound changes that mark
for plural and gender. For example, you might decide that men’s names
always end in -onno, -el, or -on, while women’s names end in -alla, -or,
or -ne. If you are making up an agglutinative language, remember to make
the morphemes con- sistent with the general sound of the tongue; in a
fusional language, the mor- phemes should be short and colorless.


Possession and location

For place names, you will also need morphemes or sound changes to show
possession and location. The possessive has an example in English: the
’s added to nouns, as in the house’s roof. Although English can also say
the roof of the house, an inflectional language has no equivalent to of.
The possessing noun will have to have a sound change or mor- pheme added
to it to show possession. For example, in my Kazrak language, haz means
"fort," and stroko means "sun." The name "The Fort of the Sun" trans-
lates as Haz Strokej, because -ej is the fused morpheme of possession.

The locative, or located-ness, quality is more foreign to English, which
represents that idea solely with prepositions and makes no changes in
the actual noun. Although most inflectional languages have prepositions,
they also feel the need to add a morpheme or change the sound of a noun
to show its subordinate status to the sentence. In Latin, for example,
arbor means "tree," but "under the tree" is sub arbore. A word in this
locative case can also stand alone; domus is "home" in Latin, and domi
means "at home."


Prefix, suffix, or infix

By now you may have noticed that most of these examples so far have
added their morphemes at the end of the basic word, but many languages
make changes at the beginning and middle as well. A morpheme added at
the end of a word is a suffix; at the beginning, a prefix; and in the
middle, an infix.

All three of these forms can be used in the same language for a properly
foreign feeling. In your fantasy language, "tree" might be hendir, and
"trees" bahendir. In agglutinative languages, infixes become especially
important. For example, in my campaign’s Tribal language, the posses-
sive morpheme is bala, which comes before the possessing noun and after
the object possessed to form names. Since rin means "mountain" and delan
is "moon," the name Rinbaladelan means "Moun- tain of the Moon." Simple
sound changes can occur at the beginning or end of words as well as in
the middle. In Welsh, for instance, "home" is cartref, and "at home" is
gartref -- a locative parallel to the Latin domus/domi. You thus have
many ways of particularizing the different languages in your campaign.


Now, for the names

Now that you have determined the basic structure of your new language,
made up a list of the phonemes for it, and invented the basic
grammatical mor- phemes if it needs any, you are finally ready to make
up names and words. Per- sonal names are the easiest, simply because
they don’t have to mean any par- ticular thing. After all, do you know
what Susan or Robert actually means? Do you care? All you need, then,
are words that are the proper length and consistent with the sound of
your new language, and a way of marking them for gender. You can prepare
a list of such names and have it on hand for both NPCs and new player
characters as the need arises. If a simple one-word personal name is
unsatisfactory for some reason, you can add a place name, put into the
locative case, to show the character’s origins, or make up an attribute,
such as "Stormbringer" or "Quicksword," using the principles detailed
below for place names.

If you look at maps of various coun- tries, you’ll find that many place
names fall into one of a few broad groups. One group is a description of
the place, such as Salt Lake City or Stratham, which means "the hamlet
on the strata (Roman road)." Another group incorporates the name of a
god or a saint, as in San Fran- cisco or Lyon, which once was called
Lugdenensis, "the land of the god Lugh." Other places have been given
the names of secular heroes, like Washington.

Natural features sometimes take their names either from their
appearance, like the Black Hills, or from legends about them, like all
the places named Arthur’s Chair, Arthur’s Castle, Arthur’s Seat, and so
on in Britain.

To make up names, you can use these same groups, make up basic word
lists, and draw combinations from them. If your new language is an
isolating type, all you have to do is decide whether adjectives come
before or after nouns, then place the chosen words in a row in the
proper order. In an inflectional lan- guage, you’ll have to relate the
chosen words with the possessive and locative morphemes if necessary.


How many words is too many?

Doubtless you’re wondering how many words you’ll need to develop
meaningful names. In actual practice, you’ll find the number to be
surprisingly small; most real-world languages use a relatively small
vocabulary for basic, everyday communication -- and even fewer words
than that for naming.

A good many names can be built with only a hundred words of the right
kinds. One group of words necessary for place names are prepositions:
on, by, on top of, below, and so on. For personal names, you’ll need a
morpheme for son of and daughter of. Otherwise, most of the words you
need are nouns and adjectives suita- ble for describing countryside. You
can also use the names of the gods in your campaign, and secular heroes
if there are any. In a science-fiction game, many places will be named
after the person who first discovered or colonized them. In fan- tasy
worlds, the inhabitants are more likely to give their gods credit for a
deed as stupendous as founding a town.

At the top of the next page are some
examples, to get you started, of words
with a high degree of name potential.

Natural features: hill, mountain, river, forest, meadow, ford, peak,
canyon, plain, lake, desert.

Man-made features: town, city, village, fort, palace, battleground,
crossroads, bridge.

Adjectives: big, great, small, high, low, marshy, dry, color words,
north, south, east, west, dangerous, placid, famous, holy, cursed.

From even this short list, you can gen- erate a tremendous number of
names. Just for starters: Black Bear Mountain, Little Fort, Great Blue
Mountain, Dragon City, North Peak, High Fort, Holy River, and so on.
Translated into your new lan- You can also add some animals and the
names of certain trees: bear, horse, oak, dragon, pine, and so forth.
guage, these names will sound not only exotic, but consistent, as if
they were thought up by real brains and spoken by real mouths, instead
of having their names, and the history those names imply, come from an
essentially random choice.


Watch out for weird words

When you’re making up vocabulary, be careful to avoid inventing words
with unwanted connotations, and stay away from downright puns. Once
you’re immersed in a brand-new language, it’s easy to forget your
English "roots" and produce some real howlers if you’re not careful. To
use one of the examples from the beginning of this article: Oolala might
be a respectable name if pro- nounced oo-LA-lah, but who’s going to say
anything other than oo-la-LAH? Upchuk, of course, is reminiscent of
regurgitation no matter how you say it. To be reasonably sure of
avoiding such mistakes, say each of your invented words and names aloud
several times in several different ways, until you’re sure it can’t be
twisted into something you didn’t mean to say.

Another trap to avoid is words that might be a respectable name if pro-
nounced oo-LA-lah, but who’s going to sound like commercial products. If
you say anything other than oo-la-LAH? watch television, all that
advertising has Upchuk, of course, is reminiscent of regurgitation no
matter how you say it. To be reasonably sure of avoiding such soaked
right into your subconscious mistakes, say each of your invented words
mind, and it will reappear at the wrong and names aloud several times in
several different ways, until you’re sure it can’t moment. Take a name
like Kolak, for instance, which sounds properly mascu- line and exotic
at first hearing. But think about it for a minute, and it also suggests
cola, Kodak, koalas, and to the histori- cally minded, kulaks -- none of
those being words that have really suitable connotations for a heroic
figure.

Of course, it’s far from necessary to invent a language for every area
in your campaign, particularly if the players are going to pass through
it quickly, but I heartily urge every gamemaster to work up the two or
three primary languages in his or her world. Such a process adds more
than atmosphere. If you refrain from translating place names in foreign
countries, the rules about languages will have some point in the ongoing
adven- ture. Players will have to get translations from NPC’s to learn
that a place called Melimbalatanol, say, means "River of the Monster,"
rather than getting an easy clue the moment they enter an area.

As player characters gain added profi- ciency in a language, you can
offer more translations more easily, thus giving them the feeling that
they are indeed learning something new. The cleverest of characters may
even learn to pick apart names and decipher them for themselves. When
faced with a string of border forts, all called Haz something-or-other,
even a dolt can figure out what haz means.


The last ingredient: you

Following all of these rules and guide- lines need not restrict your
creation of a language in any way, because the one element that
distinguishes each language from all others -- its individuality -- is
something that only you can provide. The atmosphere and the conditions
of your game-world remain the overriding considerations when inventing
consistent and workable names for that world. When we consider what’s in
a name, we may conclude that a rose by any other name would smell as
sweet -- but if roses were called plontzes, it’s unlikely that they’d
figure as prominently as they do in poetry and song.