Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Territorial Markings

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we're going to go through how to name things.  We're also going to, y'know... name things.

What We Have So Far

We have a vast cosmos, most of which needs labels.  Working from the outside in, we have a giant planet, ten times wider than Earth and 10 times its mass, which means it has 1/10 the normal gravity.  Orbiting this planet are what we've been referring to as the Lantern and a pair of moons.  The planet has a 40-hour day/night cycle and a four-"day" week, and its year is dictated by the progression of a continent-sized storm system we called the Blanket across its surface.  Our world has four continents, one of which we've focused on- a landmass many times larger than all of Earth, with a vast inland sea, featuring misty hyperforests, megasavannahs, and chthonic intertidal zones.  We focused still further on the strait that connects the sea to the greater ocean, and on a specific Hill overlooking the strait.  At the base of the Hill, we've built a civilization, currently residing in the Bronze Age, its citizens a mix of three species: critters we've been referring to as nu humans, furries, and scalies.  Magic exists in this world, as do creatures that make use of that magic, but beyond coloring the setting, they haven't had much of an impact yet.

In a bit of prescience, we established in previous posts that nu humans like to use words similar to those of the Lakota and Maasai; furries prefer Iroquois and Finnish-style words, especially portmanteaus; and scalies will like words that sound familiar to those of us who are comfortable with the Romance languages.

Last but not least, we've established a mixed mythology that has aspects of polytheism, druidic folklore, and hero worship.  This last is important for reasons that are about to become obvious: people tend not to be very imaginative when it comes to naming, and we need a source of names beyond the objects themselves.

The Big Book of Baby Names

In Western civilization, the single biggest source of names is the Roman Empire, which is hilarious, because the Romans were terrible at names.  If you look at Roman proper names, you'll notice that most have at least three names.  This is because they needed them to distinguish themselves, given that their first name was limited to fewer than 20 options.  In areas where they followed a patronymic tradition for the family name, that meant that any village with more than 400 people had multiple folks with the exact same name.   The Roman solution was to simply give them more names, not to come up with new ones.  Another famous example of their naming prowess is the rivers of England.  More than a dozen of them are named "River Avon," because the mapmakers would ask locals what the rivers were named and then simply wrote down the answer without bothering to find out that "Avon" literally translates to "the river."

The happy ending to this amusing historical anecdote is that, with the Romans as our basis for naming conventions, it is really easy to come up with names that are at least as good as the ones on Earth.  You basically have 4 options when coming up with a name for a creature, object, or location:

1. Name the object literally, but in another language.  Torpenhow Hill is a famous and semi-mythical hill in England; its name comprises four different cultures rolling through.  The first simply called it Pen, or "Hill"; the second, thinking the word was a name, called it Pen How (Pen "Hill"), the third repeated the process, calling it Tor Penhow ("The hill" Penhow), and modern English helpfully tacks on the last Hill.  Since most folk don't speak Lakota, Maasai, Iroquois, or Finnish, giving it a literal name will pass muster.  Watch- the Hill is now named Oniara Ridge.  Furries add a soft click at the end of each syllable when they say it.
2. Describe the object simply.  Take a wild guess as to how many rivers are named some variant of "Blue River," "Swift River," or similar, but it sounds cooler because the first word is in a different language.  Another example:  Let's say our scalies named the Lantern and the moons.  The Lantern's name is Lumera ("Lantern," following our first option), and the moons are called Sango and Turchina- words that translate roughly to "the red one" and "the blue one," respectively.
3. Name the object after a mythological figure.  The Atlas Mountains are named after the titan Atlas. The days of the week come from Nordic gods ("Thursday" = "Thor's Day"). Most celestial bodies with proper names are named after random gods and goddesses.  The gods themselves tend to get their names through one of the other methods- "Zeus" comes from a pre-Greek word for "Sky God."
4. Name the object after the corruption of one of the other options.  This is the most common method of developing modern placenames and the like; almost every name we have for objects comes from one of the other options, which was then mildly mangled in our native language.  Cincinnati, Ohio, got its name from the Roman folk hero Cincinnatus.  England used to be "Angle-Land."  Our nu humans migrated to the Hill after crossing the Ninthinta Grasslands; there's no direct analogue for "Ninthinta," but it looks an awful lot like how one of the other species might mistranslate the Lakotan phrase "sea of grass."

The List

We are, finally, going to name a bunch of the things that we've given placeholders to.  As we do, we'll note how we came up with the name.  A note:  we are not linguists here at Vagrant Dog Productions, but we don't need to be.  We're using language for inspiration, not accuracy.  That means you should assume that any translation we're about to do is derived from a quick Google search, rather than, say, the three summers we spent on language tours of Italy.

The Lantern.  "Lumera," from the Sicilian term for oil lanterns.

The Blue Moon.  "Turchina," a variant on the Sicilian description for a blue sky.

The Red Moon.  "Sango," a variant on the Sicilian description for a blood moon.

The World.  "Istenaiti," from one of the Iroquois words for "mother" and a Finnish word for "mother." Most cultures refer to Earth as a "Great Mother," so why not?  We also get to see how corruption can come from the same culture, since Iroquois and Finnish are both the inspirations for the furry language- they likely didn't intend to call the world "Mother Mom."

The Continent.  "Merenka," a corruption of two Maasai words that together mean "speckled land."

The Inland Sea.  "Marian Sea."  From the Sicilian for salty waters, this can more or less read as "The sea-like Sea."

The Outer Ocean.  "Deforic Ocean."  Mangled Portuguese that almost looks like "Outer Ocean."

The Strait.  "Ieman Strait."  Named for the Brazilian sea goddess Iemanja, which we're going to pretend is the scalie god of rough waters. 

The Hill.  "Oniara Ridge," a corruption of one of the Iroquois words for "hill."

The Megasavannah West of The Hill.  "Ninthinta Grasslands."  As mentioned above, it's a mistranslation of the phrase "sea of grass."  If translated literally, it would more closely line up with "water of grass."

The Forest Covering The HIll.  "Karha," which we've decided is also the name of the city.  It's Mohawk for "forest."

The Coast On The Other Side of The Hill.  "Stancos Tarm," Romanian (roughly) for "rough coast."  It turns out that Romanian counts as a Romance language, who knew?

The Nu Humans.  "Llaikan," roughly translates to "Grass people" in Maasai.  Forgive us a bit of a linguistic joke, but it is ridiculous the number of cultures that are named for their word for "people."  For example, Maasai means "my people," Lakota means "my friends," and Iroquois means "longhouse people."

The Furries.  "Rontakowa," a mangling of the Iroquois for "tree people."

The Scalies.  "Siculi," the name of the people who named Sicily after themselves.  Since they're thought to be a branch of the semi-mythical Sea People, it seemed appropriate.

The City.  "Karha."  Over time, the forest will thin, the city will spread, and people will forget that the city was once named for the woods that surrounded it.  This happens a lot, especially in America, with a city named for a geographic feature hundreds of years ago that no longer exists.

Conclusion

We could probably do another post of names, but that isn't necessary.  From here on out, when we want to name something, we can refer back to these rules and name it on the spot.

This post actually marks an important turning point for us.  We are officially mostly done with building this world; while we still have months to go before we've completely fleshed it out, most of what happens next will be building on what we already have, rather than introducing new concepts.  That building starts next week, as we take a technological hop forward and look at what changes about the city of Karha.