Why most World Building Place Names Suck

first always you want your place names on your map to work for you to show where each ethno-linguistic group is and where they all meet best example France and Germany and both of the heartland you can see there are names that would be specific to each of them a keyed end ba V and ma say our names that are based in Romance languages whereas in Germany they're based in Germanic German languages Wow like with funk foot but between the two you can see emerging of these things in Alsace Lorraine in France you have a city called Strasburg that sounds pretty flippin German just ask all the other burg cities out there but on the other side in Germany you have the city of Cologne see o logn e that looks like that would be a French or Italian city what the flip well I mean the Germans actually pronounce it good but you know we're not looking at it like that on this map so what gives you can see that the two languages merge around here that's also how you get weird stuff like Luxembourg and the existence of Belgium with the flip so to show the ethno-linguistic groups you have to set up the appearance of different languages for your map and the easiest way to do that without actually creating constructed languages is to just mess around with one the letters that you use and to how you string them together so how do you do this with the letters what I usually do is I omit certain letters and have certain consonant clusters that appear frequently for this example let's focus on the letters a TS c r ll n and a and let's omit stuff like K Q and W and then on the other side here in this example let's have it be pretty different let's have k's w's FVS let's have Z's but not at the end of words and let's have n G's so up here let's just use these things and string them together a true another one we can name go this one we can name new one not and then you can take the segment's that you just made up and turn them into words in the language wow these look fancy enough high-class but down here let's use our more barbaric letters like the case and double use poor fool scab let's go to wood new oak now the hard part is if you want something like this to be pronounced to new milk you can't spell it like this maybe I would spell that n oo ng o ke it keeps the ng and decay but it preserves the pronunciation or you could just be ok with everyone pronouncing it no knock because that's how they're going to do it so then in the middle here we need to create something that's a little bit of both so I noticed down here we have an S and a K skip that seems pretty Viking esque and that definitely wouldn't appear in the other one nope so let's mix it with this other language visually instead of having it be sk let's have a beat s see so this city in the middle and it's called soos can't that looks like it would be a mix of these two what did you say and if we add another little island out here we can screw with the syllable structure so it's totally different let's use the wildly different syllable structure of Hawaiian Aloha [Music] as every syllable is a consonant and then a vowel Japanese kind of has the same thing let's name this place cool rule na - got the CH in there that looks different from the other ones so let's name this big city in da da hook up the nd in the beginning what's up with that well we can count - this is one continent because a lot of languages do and that would not appear anywhere else it's a totally different language and just for kicks and giggles let's make a volcano on this and call it mount a toga or her Yuga I guess I'm totally fine with people mispronouncing things it's only natural over and it's well with what women or sauce for other forms of syllable structure look no further than China which has names that are made up of one syllable words strung together like Hong Kong Beijing Chongqing whereas an English you can pile on consonant sounds on either side of the vowel I mean look at the word strength can't do that in Chinese or Japanese obviously you don't want every single place name to just be strung together characters that don't mean anything to you originally put some heart and soul into it you know but when all else fails this is a very solid way to name your places because it shows where different cultures are hello Stoneworks boys and girls so this next video I'm doing is quite the undertaking so I decided this would make that job a lot easier and cut down on however many minutes this video is because this segment was going to be in it anyways it's gonna be a lot of fun I hope you enjoyed this video but yeah have a good day I'm out

Channel: Stoneworks

Views: 183,695

Keywords: World building, writing, d&d, stories, how to, help, map, stoneworks, culture, history, war, names, fantasy, dungeons and dragons, sci fi, create, fiction, imagination, education, biome, notes, climate, empire, religion, place names, ethnic, gaming, rpg, tabletop, DM, maps, world, roblox

Id: IFwTfCUY7x8

Length: 5min 41sec (341 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019