Why most World Building Place Names Suck
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 18 ก.ย. 2019
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World Building for D&D? Writing? Just for fun because you're a nerd like me? Here's (another) way to make place names, this time, it's easy, quick, simple, and shows a little bit about the cultures of the world.
If you use adblock... you monster......... I need to feed my KIDS. HOW COULD YOU?!
Here's a little world building for you. At the end, there's a map of Appendus, the land of the Vaettr (related to elves). The southeastern half, from the Gabhal Dynasty, to Sud Vekni, up to Teos was controlled 150 years ago by the Empire of Areo. Areo gained power by discovering elemental magic, and diffused it through its conquests. The administration of such a large empire collapsed in on itself in a short time, and soon the native peoples were able to reestablish their own autonomy. Since then, the Saesics have been expanding more and more, the dynasties of Drumaul have consolidated and began to fight each other in massive civil wars. In the southwest, the Kaitechtien Empire is hoping that Oudica II, the successor to Mayica the Conqueror, will live up to his father's accomplishments (he won't). To the north, the Gnomes from across the Morning Ocean carve their colony of Tryum from the untamed tribes of the region. Ohlām and King Gikrate have just created a pact that will hopefully drive the Stubbornfoot armies out of Appendus once and for all...
Inevitable flames in the comments about another place names video: this was gonna be a part of the next one but I decided just to make it its own thing. It's separate anyways so I don't really care.
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Lmao so many people in these comments being like 'It's Köln not Cologne!!' like I didn't say that at 1:07
Stoneworks World Building how do you sleep at night
Stone works, you should look the 2b2t history of the server, its.... i cnat explain, its realy interesting consept, on how factions and cultures develop from 0 in an anarchy world with diferent rules that the real one
La Republica canal oficial I’ve watched FitMC’s things on it I love them
what very well, thank you
@@Stoneworks ajaj nice, Saludos desde Argentina
"The easiest way to do this without actually constructing a language-"
What are you, a coward?
*Reaches into my pants and pulls out a 120 page dictionary for an extinct language which is only relevant to a small island with one town (with a 30 page addendum on the cultures of said island)*
*Looks over at Stoneworks*
"You see this, this is the proof of manhood among my people. We call those who have not been proven men "bouwkbok", it means the small chicken that runs from its own shadow.
(Jk, we love you Stoneworks)
@@theapexsurvivor9538 your comment made me crack out laugh, I woke up my neighbours.
New language idea: the people say "ah" and "oo" but each pitch and duration is a different word
Here's an example: oo OO AH AHHHHH (the sky is blue)
[Majora's Mask main theme intensifies]
[J.R.R. Tolkien's face fades in over the moon]
no. A coward, like me, would just use the real world to avoid making maps and place names
'Nother tip, make a suffix, midfix, or prefix that simply means "city" in that language, and give it to 5% of that cultures cities. Better yet, make five and then combine them together to make a city name without anything else: Villeburg.
Or circumfix... :P
Nice idea!
In German, -burg (castle/keep) and -berg (mountain/hill) are also very popular.
Maybe in some cultures, they name their settlements other important landscape features, for example, after river parts, if they use a lot of river rafting.
"[river name]-spring" or "[river name]-mouth", "[river name]-lake", "[river name]-bridge" or "[river name]-rapids", whatever.
@@Jpteryx That sounds like an adhesive tape brand. :D
@@Jpteryx I forgot about those
Or have different naming schemes per culture.
Maybe "Germany" names after water bodies, "France" names after historical people, and "Italy" names after religious figures. And then "Switzerland" has a blend of names.
Examples (Real towns/places)
Cranberry Lake, Newton Falls, Oxbow
Gouvernour, Morristown, Fredricksberg
St. Regis, St. Lawrence
And for flare scatter a conquered civilizations name under some of the nations like all the "Indian" names in America like Canadaigua, Oneida, Miami
My Belgian Phlegm ass: laughing through the pain of having to know four languages and being good at none
Being an American citizen being born/living in Phlegm (lmao), going to British school in Wallonia, with a father who speaks Danish a Grandmother who spoke German, and then moving to the States where Spanish is so common. I relate so so much.
Being able to say tongue-twisters in other languages but not be conversational is a whole other experience
Can confirm, I suck at all 3 languages that I know, yet I proceed to learn another
And then there's me, an American who lives near Canada who only ever needed English to survive. But forced to learn Spanish OR French in grade school and subsequently forgetting most of that Spanish.
But also due to the whole conquest then imigration history about half of place names are random old world cities and half are native words. (Potsdam, NY is north of the Adirondack Mountains for example)
So now i am still only fluent in English but have a bunch of random phrases from arbitrary languages.
PS: the French need to fix their spelling to be somewhat close to the phonetic pronunciation. #BlameKingLouisforpayingbytheletter
You only exist because Great Britain felt like fucking with France that day.
You used the French example without realizing that those "merger" zones are not only the sign of mutual cultural influence, but also of conquests that moved the borders back and forth for centuries.
In the case of France, some of those cultures were absorbed and more or less erased by the central power, and this too can be reflected in the maps, by making transliterations of local names from the old language of the vanquished to the new language of the conqueror.
In fact, all the town names in southern half of France are literally transliterations in French of older names in the Occitan language group (Gascon, Languedocian, Provençal), the difference is subtle because French and Occitan are both romance languages, but a shift in the letters used is still notable and very much a display of power by an invading force.
As such the main cities were renamed:
Bordèu=Bordeaux
Tolosa=Toulouse
Carcassonna=Carcassonne
Marselha=Marseille
Montpelhièr=Montpellier
Clarmont=Clermont-Ferrand
Ais=Aix-en-Provence
Niça=Nice
This also led the cartographs of the king to make amusing mistakes, for example one suburb of Toulouse is strangely named "Three Cuckolds" (Trois Cocus) after misunderstanding the Occitan name "Tres Cocuts" which means Three Cuckoos.
It also becomes obvious in Alsace Lorraine. Strasbourg is not somehow a merger of French and German. it's just historically a german city. But since Straßburg would be pronounced totally different in French it became - bourg.
It's equally obvious for Saargmünde in France, right next to Saarbrücken in Germany. Or for Hagenau in France.
The ambigious ones in the region are Metz and Colmar. I can't really say from which language the names origin from, but if i had to bet i would say it's also German. Whole other story with Nancy, that's definitely french.
@@JH-zs3bs Just wanted to say that I know somebody living in Hagenau xD
Your comments were interesting, thanks for sharing!
Conquest is literally a form a cultural merger, so I'm not sure it's fair to say it wasn't accounted for in this 5 minute video.
@@JH-zs3bs Same with Luxemburg, which the French spell Luxembourg.
The english have just mostly adopted the french names for many places and people, e.g. Charlemagne should actually be Charles the Great in english, but they use the french name. Or Alsace Lorraine, the french version, even though Lorraine exists as Lotharingia in english too.
@@JH-zs3bs Metz' name is celtic in origin, and Colmars is latin. But both current names are definitely germanified versions.
The french call Metz Messins though.
I accidentally did this in a way while playing Stellaris. Oddly enough, it was my shitpost faction of aliens that it happened with. Basically, I ended up putting the word "Yog" before the names of colonies, and "oth" at the end of the names of colonized planets and their systems. Usually I just adapted the generated name for this purpose, deleting any "a"s and the like at the end before adding an "oth", although on rare occasions I kept the original name and just put a "Yog" before it.
For my starships, rather than being SS or HMS or the like before the name, they got the term "Yoggoth". While they didn't actually mean anything to me before, they sort of gained meanings on their own and how they saw starships as a sort of home, like a ship compared to an island. I never worked out any kind of actual conlang for it because it was and still is essentially a political humor shitpost faction, but having some lore behind it makes it a bit more interesting than just Eternal President Georgg Buush of a hive mind empire waging an eternal war for the energy credit standard. They tend to be fairly dysfunctional as well for some reason, always hemorrhaging some needed resource or another and waging wars that don't go anywhere after 200 years of bombing the enemy planets and hunting down their reinforcements that keep evading my fleets. I wasn't intending that accurate of a parody.
I had a similar outcome for my own shitpost continent map, wherein some nations ended in -oeia, a by product of laziness and just wanting to get the map done but I nonetheless backcronymed into it denoting a strong cultural remnant of an empire that once ruled the Continent. And from there I had some history I could build on.
+Mark that's what I went for initially, but it eventually devolved into dated political jokes only I find funny. Somehow.
The thing about waging 200 year-long wars that go nowhere hits a bit different now that we've pulled out of Afghanistan lmao
+RedSunRises yeah, ironically I was fighting the United Nations humans. My friend who was playing as necroids helped me beat them, but then he took me down soon after.
Hopefully that isn't an omen.
+RedSunRises I should note that it was worth it to crush them though, the woman leading them kept saying eugenicist stuff, like how my species brains were less developed due to skull shapes, she said "look it up, it's science." This was an AI faction too, so the humans are just naturally racists, and I was a gestalt consciousness who physically can't live around other species so that's saying something. Humans aren't that bad when I play them, although that's also somewhat of a shitpost , but gone right this time. That one I played as the Catholic Church itself being the new earth government. In that game I'm the top member of the galactic council with a diplomatic weight of over 10k, open to all species of faithful. Many vassals that I treat nicely too, mostly because I had to release the newly-conquered territory or die from the debt they were causing me. But it works, so far it's been my most successful game ever, I've made it through maybe 7 Popes and we're on top. I did accidentally gene-modify most of humanity to be more communal during that game, but it's fine. Probably.
4:52
Chinese cities and provinces (especially the more well known stuff) is usually geographically based.
Beijing - Bei (north) Jing (capital) -> Northern capital
Nanjing - Nan (south) Jing (capital) -> Southern capital
Shanghai - Shang (high/open) Hai (sea) -> (the city) Open to the sea
Chongqing - Abbreviated version of the double celebration of Zhao Dun's coronation of king and then emperor (Shuangchong Xiqing -> Chongqing)
Provinces too:
Hebei - He (river) Bei (north) -> North of the river (Yellow River)
Hubei - Hu (lake) Bei (north) -> North of the lake (Dongting Lake)
Sichuan - Si (four) Chuan (another word for river, but also plains) -> Four Rivers / Four Circuts/Plains of Medieval China
This should be much higher. A _lot_ of place and city names are just descriptions of the area or references to some famous person from there. People are generally quite poor at naming things with originality.
This is actually pretty nice.
Japan also seems to have that going on, Tokyo literally means "Eastern Capital"
The previous capital for a lot of the time, Kyoto, actually means "Capital of Calm and Peace", so it's not all copying China like that time they copied their alphabet. Or copying the West like that reform they did that made the Emperor the Emperor again.
@@redeye4516 Well, the Japanese Kanji alphabet is moreso just based off of the Chinese character system and is more inspired and based off of, not a one for one copy.
I was acctually struggling **Right Now** with inventing names to my conworld. You are a sighn from God qwq
I know that this is really late but I usually figure out the culture and then find parallels in real cultures and take names from it
How the hell am I supposed to read the “qwq” in my head?
@@DarwinskiYT quick maybe?
@@DarwinskiYT This is actually little crying cat face. Yes, I am cringe, I have nothing to be ashamed of.
Easy: just Google translate random stuff into hungarian or something and play around with the results a bit
Tbh that's usually what I do when I want to come up with a word but am feeling too lazy to make one from scratch. I got "Xtata" (pronounced "Shtata") by messing with the Spanish "Ciudad", And "Patikuñ" by taking the Arabic "Kitab", reversing it, Then adding a couple extra letters. Also works great for personal names, If you're lucky you can find obscure enough ones you don't even need to modify them.
To be more exact the names you selected in France have been latinized then frenchified with time but they were Basque, Celtic and Greek of origin.
Though really nice introduction to toponymy. You can always go deeper and nobody really needs to be a real little Tolkien to really capture good thought out namings.
I wrote a php script so that I can feed in consants, vowels, along with rules on how to put them together, and then I run that for each main language and some sub-region.
But I never thought about the boundary regions.
This is genius! Thank you!
Link please?
@@theshadow5251 I guess I should clean it up and make it available for people, but I've been using it strictly localhost. There's no real UI for it. I manually create the rule files (which are basically JSON) and each language I need gets its own version of the script with the rules files hardcoded.
@@watsondavis5696 Please do it, that would help a lot of people!
@@watsondavis5696 I would totally like that!
reminder
This Idea of names can also work somehow with colonized places. Here in Brazil, there are tons of city names coming from Tupi, mixed in with names of catholic saints. So you can have Curitiba and São José dos Pinhais and Araucária in the same region and both somehow mention the araucaria pines in the region in different languages.
Another trick that can be used (which can also help the lore) is that you can have the name of a city in the language of its founders and then adapt the name to the pronunciation of the language of the current inhabitants. For example the Carthaginian city of Qart Hadasht in Spain transmuted into "Cartagena", as the Arabs transformed CaesarAugusta into Saraqusta; Or in simpler examples, Barcino became Barcelona.
This can be useful to further represent the wars and interactions between the nations of your world, thus better reflecting the lore.
And Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium becoming… Cologne. It sounds romance because it originates from Latin
Cologne was the Roman city of Colonia Claudia hence the name
The Claudian Colony, named after Claudius.
@@Ratchet4647
So we could say it was a … Cologny. (⌐■_■)
Also there are translated city names. For example, in Turkey: Prussa>Bursa, Stanpoli>İstanbul, Zone Göldağı (French-Turkish mixed name)>Zonguldak or Gallipoli>Gelibolu. When a place is conquered by another nation, they often keep the name, but pronounce it wrong, and the wrong pronounciation becomes the actual name in a long time.
These are more transliterated names. Cities of former Austria-Hungary were often actually translated, e.g. Eisenstadt in German, Kismarton in Hungarian, Zhelezny in Croatian, all meaning "Iron city", is the capital of state of Burgenland aka Ovirdek aka Gradishche, all meaning "land of cities/castles".
Your zonguldak example is nice but there are varying reports on how the name was actually given
@@Niko-bx6mc Yes, it's just a theory, but still a nice example, I think.
@@kmmmsyr9883 it is a good example indeed, yes.
For a nice example of this, many places in Southern Spain still have names with roots in Arabic from the days of the Moorish conquest of Iberia.
I can understand why most don't, but I pretty much always make a conlang for every region I create. It just makes the world more "real" to me. Though I do admit when I get lazy I just pick things that "sound good" and rationalise them later.
Also, I enjoy playing around with what each place is called in different languages. You have a good example there with Cologne, Köln in German. I think playing around with exonyms and endonyms also reinforces the cultural differences, as in "You come to my land calling it some ancient name for it by people who conquered me?" -"Yes."
Great video as always!
I'd tend to make a phonology for the region and then make a full fledged Conlang out from that
One time I was in an RP and had some fun coming up with place names for foreign places, Often time I just transliterated the local name, but one time I had the local name interpreted as being grammatically plural when it wasn't because its ending sounded similar to the plural suffix in my language. The continents are more fun though, I have one continent split in two, each named after a major nation in the area, because historically my people were unaware those two nations were on the same landmass, and interacted with them more than anyone else in the continent, and I have another continent whose name translated to "Fake", because for the longest time my people didn't believe it to be real, even when their immediate neighbours were regularly trading with it.
If you're into world building, your local community college has classes both on earth science/plate tectonics, and also GIS (Geographic Informational Sciences) which are about how cities and cultures form, where and how civilizations impact the geography, and all sorts of subtle aspects of the spread of society. Really recommend it for DnD campaigning.
This is seriously good stuff. It also eases you into creating languages, its a lot easier when you have somewhere to start and compare!
"The easiest way to do this without actually constructing a language-"
Me, who has already fully developed language families for every culture in my world: *sad biblaridion noises*
4:33 in catalan eruga means caterpillar so it's Mt. Caterpillar xd
its cool how he just combined few letters which coincidentally meant something
@@juicebox6124 I'm sure most short letter sequences that look like words are actually words in some language.
Yes, that kind of error is so common, in brazil they had to change the name of count dooku from the star wars prequels, as his name was pronouced "Do cu", which meant from the ass, or taking it up the ass, which was a complete pr disaster, hehe.
Hi 👋
As a German, in German Cologne is written Köln. Now it sounds quite German. Same with Munich, or München. But in another video, I forgot the title, it was mentioned that different Languages habe different Namens for the same cities/rivers etc.
Prag in German, Praha in Czech, Prague in English, e.g.
Deutschland, Allemagne, Germany
Ich liebe Käse 🧀
A better example for a French sounding name would have been Saarlouis for example.
Especially in contested areas like Prussia, Silesia, and other egions.
The reason, why Köln is internationally called "Cologne" is not only that it is easier to speak for them, but also because of ancient history, it comes closest to the roman origin, with the settlement back then named Colonia.
Dude you have literally the best world building channel I ever saw. Awesome montage, explanations and *memes* damn I loooove it
Thanks so much. I'm really bad at place names so this will help a lot!
Me: *chilling, enjoying the worldbuilding discussion*
Kamehameha: 🍑
Me: 😳
wow that city Rona looks like a cool place to go!
*him* you gotta spell it like how it sounds
*Scandinavians* sweating profusely
French: *contemplate la mort*
Actually Marseilles is actually based in Greek since it was a Greek colony back in the day, Masallia, but then the Romans conquered it.
So it's like he said - merger zones, except every bit of Europe is a merger zone several times over
Paris is also a Celtic name since it was inhabited by Celts before Romans came in
My surname is marsella but it actually originated in apulia italy lol
Kinda embarrassing man, gotta do the research
There's is a point in European history which we could summarize to: "...But then the Romans conquered it"
Ayo I got this video in my recommendations and it was really interesting and funny as hell. You need more subscribers, this channel is the definition of underrated 😵
most towns and cities atleast where im from are named after the local tribes or chiefs that lived there prior to settlement or just random terms they sued. its how seattle was named, same with humptulips ilwaco chewelah and walla walla. then theres places like arlington that are definitely named after non locals
This is so awesome! I can really see the work you put into these. Great job!
Dude I watched three videos from you and had my mind blown each time. This is amazing. The concepts are so impressive and the delivery is fantastic. Great job.
And here I thought this would be a commentary on bogstandard names like "danger woods" or "death mountain", but it went in a totally different direction and a much better one at that.
Candy Mountain
just stumbled onto your channel and have found your videos very helpful... I immediately see several things I want to change about my own worlds I've built for either a novel or a d&d game that will really enhance the cohesion & immersion of them. Thank you!
Eventually I'd love to hear your take on tundras, taigas and flat out ice deserts. :)
I was literally about to take on the long and arduous journey into conlangs just to create interesting place names. This makes it so much easier.
Thank you for this video, been struggling with this
"Souscant". I'm not sure you can say that on TV.
"Suu-Sawn."
Sus
Helpful, I feel like this channel is easier, better, and has better-displayed information than even professionally done videos on worldbuilding.
The Chapsticky boi back at it again with the names. And an uncomfortably long glance at King Kamehameha's junk.
Kevin LaPrade I did it for you, Kevin ❤️
@@Stoneworks You know me too well.
As a thighs-loving girl, I also appreciated it.
This is actually a fantastic video that I cannot believe I went so long without seeing in my life.
What a great little exercise to get peoples creativity going!
This is content that I never knew I loved until I watched this.
One of my favorite naming methods is specifically for new people asking natives what the name of this place is. But, neither party speaks the other’s language.
So, the colonists come in, ask “what’s this place called?” While pointing to the ground. The natives just go “that’s called dirt you idiots” and the colonists go “Ah! Dirt! Wonderful name!”
Happens a ton irl too. Sahara desert and gobi desert is desert desert. Any river named avon is just river river. Etc
3:57 I was thinking about it and then I started busting out laughing when the music started😂
Bourg is actually an extremely common component in French toponyms, even outside of the regions bordering Germany. The Cherbourg Peninsula in Normandy is one such example.
I sometimes translate my place names, especially if the culture is relatively new.
Like, if you have a place which in the local language means "Red Fields", that's how the people who speak the language would refer to it. Or just "Fields".
I think it's also a great way to expand the worldbuilding by having people of different cultures refer to or pronounce things differently
Personally I pick two different dead languages for a region and create a bastardization. Typically favoring one languages suffixes and another's prefixes. I haven't actually applied a border mixing pot to my naming schemes as this video pointed out, and hence forth it's definitely a technique I'll use where applicable.
that's pretty dope, which languages have you used?
@@Stoneworks
I predominately use latin, ancient Greek, and old norse. Partially because these are languages that English is derived from, which makes bastardization very palatable, and partially due to my own familiarity.
Here's an example. Fyeos, which is known as the flaming theocracy. This is deprived from the old norse/english word fyr, or fire, and the Greek word theos, or god.
Another example is Equesgîr, which was a kingdom stylized after the polish winged hussars based off the latin word equus for horse, and the old norse word vængr for wing. They're very literal names.
5:13 that map kinda reminds me of something...
Gothmor (Morgoth)
Gondar (Gondor)
Norther Shire (The Shire)
A dark tower (Barad Dur)
Mount Death (Mount Doom)
Mountains of Mist (Misty Mountains)
Shadow Mountains (Ephel Duath or Mountains of Shadow)
Battleplain (Dagorlad)
Did I miss anything?
I just make sounds until I find something that rollswell off the tongue. My names probably aren't very original, but my worldbuilding is just a hobby that nobody ever sees.
Anyway, you probably have videos planned, but if you get the chance, how do you design the shape of the landmasses?
oh boy that's a big one I've been working on for months now. I've got a few things pinned down.
@@Stoneworks Cool. Whenever I draw maps, everything is too big or too small.
@@jacoborourke8714 i use the Minecraft terrain generation and shape it to make more sence, go to minecraft biome finder on google
pro tip: determine what real life culture's language is most similar to your fantasy cultures language then just zoom in on a map and find small towns in that region of the world to name things after.
genuinely thank you
Now I'm wondering what the best way of automating this kind of name generation would be. Like give a program the rough rules (preferred letters, omitted letters, syllables, special rules), which then craps out 250 names, then a human picks out the ones that sound the best. Doing it automatically could in theory reduce bias introduced by humans subconsciously replicating what they know.
To be fair though if you wanted it to be really realistic you'd need to either get the program to scatter in some prefixes and suffixes at random, or add them yourself, which adds a bit of effort to it.
It's also surprisingly common for cities to just have that language's word for city as a suffix, or something similar. -by is used in Danish for example, -borg or -burg both just mean castle which means that this city was originally the site of a castle though in German it also came to mean city over time, -havn -hafn and so on are also common as very often the most important feature about a city is their harbor because they're trade centers. English even does this too but it's mostly seen in the US where many cities are just called X City. It can definitely help make the names look less random and bring a consistency to it, also very often when a suffix like this is used it's because the city is being named after a local feature like a river or holy site or something and therefore you have to distinguish between the two, so you can name that feature the same minus the suffix.
One thing that's interesting about English is their suffixes for things like this actually derive from a bunch of different sources, '-ton' and 'burg(h)' derive from Old English, '-by' comes from Norse, '-cester' comes from Latin, '-ville' and 'city' from French, et cetera.
This video finally told me how to spend my three languages and 8 writing systems that I've worked in quarantine
Fascinating ✨
bruuuuuh how you doin'
Stoneworks World Building lmaooo I’m good. How are u
@@siryplume9218 eem gr8
Ha. Goronachu
CoronaACHOO
Zalidia wow can’t believe someone thought the same immature thing as I did lol
This is a very good guide
That french accent at the beginning was one of the best I've ever heard
4:12 the fact there's a place named Goronachu, which is also not too far away from a town named Rona, and that this video was made a few months before Corona decided to yeet into existence, is HIGHLY unsettling.
2:35 oh god even this fictional place has the "Rona"
Doesn't beat Goronachu
I'm glad to hear someone talking about linguistics in worldbuilding, even in a very simplistic manner. I'm tired hearing worldbuilders making up cliché names with K or G and -os or -is at the end x)
I’m making a big DND campaign rn so this was helpful
This is one of the only TH-cam videos I've seen in which the western host pronounces Chongqing correctly (just a non-Chinese accent, but otherwise quite good). I'm so happy not to hear another "Chong king," "Chong kweeng," or "Chung kwen." Good job!
I created a Steampunk planet in my Space Opera idea called Zortham, it has two countries Zohr and Tham , Zohr is the dominate country and Tham is almost like its puppet state after they unified after. a war over FTL Feul 200 yers ago in that plants past
0:57 Köln gets it's name from the Latin word "colōnia" because it was started as a Roman colony
Mmm tasty knowledge
1:21 sick Flanders burn
hahaha wild "eddy wally" appearance at 0:36! he's a Belgian singer and showman, rather popular still, long after he died :D
Country : Madrid
Capital : Spain
Anoni Mosu wha?
You can get redundancy when areas there's migration. Case in point, Mississippi is Ojibwe for Great River but people like the refer to it as the Mississippi River. Great River River
What mapping software do you use? Is it its own software or are you just a wizard in MSPaint?
TheTurtleinariver I use GIMP, which I just picked up recently so it’s pretty intuitive
Place names to not directly follow languages. For example, rivers aren't named the "Bigwater River." However, the current language does have influence on place names.
To use English as an example, English doesn't like monosyllabic place names, so Koln becomes Cologne, Wien -> Vienna, et cetera. Likewise, it will often drop the tail-end of words: Konstantinopoulis -> Constantinople, Korinthos -> Corinth. Long place names will tend to be shortened, Philadelphia -> Philly. "Unpronounceable" consonant clusters, such as pn, gn, need to be resolved somehow, either by dropping a consonant or adding an intrusive vowel. Likewise, non-native phonemes would need to be resolved, generally by approximating the closest native phoneme or entirely dropping it.
Also, there is the issue of spelling regularization. In an language like English, in which "through" and "threw" are homonyms, there is no inherent problem in spelling a city "Orleans" and pronouncing it "OrlEE-an,." But, there would be a tendency to pronounce the city as "Orluhnz."
In more literate societies, there would be a tendency for the spelling to make priority, while is less literate societies, the pronunciation would take priority, and there would be less a tendency to translate names. So, "New Orleans" might be spelled "Nuvvel-Orleehan" if the city was conquered in a hypothetical medieval period. If the original place name meaning was forgotten, it could wind up as something like "Nuvellor" or "Vellorlly." (Compare Konstantinopoulis -> Istanbul.)
Nuvellor sounds like a Tolkein-esque city. I like it.
Bro I really neaded this txx
2:55 I mean, could always throw an umlaut or some other kind of accent for the letters to force a different pronunciation (unless you don’t want to fuck around with accents)
That pfp 😩
More creative than just using Google translate for Latin. Great vid!
Thank you
3:36- sounds like Coruscant...
Perfect! NOPE!!!😅
How I’m doing it is by taking a one word descriptor of a place translating it into a foreign language and then use that as the name.
Paris is a Gaulish place-name, not Romantic, named after the Parisi tribe that lived both there and in what would become the Kingdom of Deira once the Angles captured the Depar area. Aquitaine is indeed a Romance root for the area, but the Aquitani (an exonym for the tribes that lived there) used place names that were non-Romance based. Many of the towns and cities in modern-day Aquitania are Basque-derived.
And Germanic and Gaulish place names are very hard to decipher between. Yes, many of these modern day boundary areas between France and Germany sound mixed, but a lot of that is because the Gaulish and Germanic tribes were intermixed and not creating strict boundaries based on what Julius Caesar called Gallia and Belgica and Germania. Many tribes used multiple languages, or had Celtic leadership but Germanic populace, or vice versa.
I’ve missed your videos.
Cologne is not an abnormality. In german, it's spelled Köln. Just wanted to point that out. Otherwise, this was a fantastic video. Informative, but short and to the point. Definitely putting this in my worldbulding reference folder.
Köln is not entirelly a german name due to its origin in the name for the roman city there "Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium" which transformed into "Cologne" in english and "Köln"in german.
@@Sebi_ad_portas Well, yes, but that's still the english name being used in a video comparing specifically german and french place names. As such, the proper german name should be used if you want to make an accurate comparison. Also, MANY place names don't have their origins in the same language, branch or even family as the current one, so saying that because "Köln" originated as the latin word for "colony", the word isn't german, is like saying the words "Manchester" or "London" aren't english. It's redundant.
I love the diablo 2 reference.
Plz make a video about worlbuilding Flora and fauna
Yea Speculative Biology seems to be a cool topic that kinda needs some attention
In italy german cities become more "latin": Cologne is known to us as Colonia, Munchen is Monaco, Mainz is Magonza and so on
"Rona" Reminds me of something
The main problem i have with this video is that different languages have different names for the same places. And lands/cities can be renamed by their conquerers. In my fantasy world, the dwarvish is the backbone language of the true This is why the official names of the lands and citties all have dwarf friendly prenonciations.
Interesting.
Thanks I’m trying to make my own game
Nice
Do you offer transcripts of your videos?
I use google translate to simulate the passage of time. Original meanings get lost, spellings mangled, pronunciation ignored. So you end up with like half of the city names near where I live. Some have a meaning, in another possibly dead language. Some are just absolute gibbersh. The few with a meaningful name, were mostly renamed in recent time, or refunded after being devastated/abandoned.
What game is this and where can I find it?
Funfact: Burg means castle in german... so a city like Freiburg means "Free Castle", for example. And Strassbourg basically means "Road Castle".
Magdeburg may or may not mean "maiden's castle". It probably does, but it's not certain.
@@johannageisel5390 A Magd is a Maid so it would be the Maid Castle. A maid was, when castles were still a thing, an unmarried woman, usually lower nobility in service of higher nobility or alternatively a virgin. So yeah Maiden's Castle or Virgin's Castle would be a suitable translation.
@@IshanDeston Yes, Magd is maid/maiden, but it's not 100% sure, that the "Magd" in "Magdeburg" is derived from the same root.
In English we have burgh which means something similar.
@@TheLordUrban Probably the same root.
Ah yes, the Corona island, you propably didnt see that coming.
Alternatively, try and build languages for societies going back thousands of years so you get the full effect of the place names moving through languages and ages. This may take multiple years but your world building will be hella grounded
2:52 nunguk?
I don't understand what this video is about but I still watched it till end
cologne is called köln in german. the englisch name sounds french, sure, but the german name is pretty, well, german. It even contains the letter ö, wich doesnt even exist in french
I bet you commented that right before I said the same thing in the vid lmao
@@Stoneworks oh fuck I thought I deleted that comment. Anyway, you’re right
Or you could be super creative like in the NES days where you would have beatiful places like Elfland and Dwarf Cave.
4:13 this map makes me feel uneasy