OpenGeofiction
Over the past couple of months I’ve made what I would like to think are some substantial improvements to AR901. I started with a coastal town named Frogtown (which I’m about to write up the history of once I get wiki access), and have cleaned up the roads made by other prior mappers to improve either connectivity or the plausibility of the road layouts as the case may be.
I’ve also added some prefecture boundaries in the parts where cities already exist. I ran out of names though, so I could use some help here as well.
Also, for all of this, I still can’t think of a good name for the country to save my life. Since this is a community territory, I’m asking if anyone has any good ideas.
Discussion
Comment from Luciano on 22 February 2015 at 00:44
This is a bit “jokey” - which may not be what you’re hoping for - but perhaps its obscure enough: how about “Æyar Nainowun” ? Sound it out… A R 9 0 1.
Comment from skquinn on 22 February 2015 at 01:32
I’ll admit that’s cute, but not what I was really going for.
One of the neighboring countries to the north has been claimed and is called Cookieland. Candyland might get us in trademark trouble. Sugarland could be confused with the suburb of Houston (which is spelled as two words, but close enough).
It has a lot of coasts, and the major cities we have so far are Eriwynne, Border Bay, Frogtown, Cape Sou, and a couple of others I can’t remember off the top of my head. If I’m overlooking painfully obvious good ideas, let me know.
Comment from Luciano on 22 February 2015 at 02:22
I think it’s more interesting to have a name that seems exotic (non-English - Ingerland has had far too much colonial success in OGF so far… ). Of the names you mentioned, Sou and Eriwynne are non-English. The first could pass for non-Indo-European, or could be Frenchish - “sou” is like “penny”. Playing on Frogtown (which happens to be a Hmong neighborhood in St Paul where I used to live), we could have a French-seeming name, e.g. “Côte des Grenouilles”.
Eriwynne looks Celtic - in Welsh it could mean “brave and fair” (“fair” as in fair-haired, white-skinned, as the common last name “Wynn(e)”). Riffing on celtic influence, we could come up with: Brogawyn (“white frog”), which would make a nice flag and symbol.
Comment from isleño on 22 February 2015 at 03:37
I’d suggest sketching out some ideas for AR901’s history, which will help guide its names.
It definitely seems there’s been English/Ingerish settlement at the western edge of the country. Not only is Frogtown an English/Ingerish name, but all the streets and features in Frogtown are English/Ingerish, too. The only other cities with significant development, Border Bay and Eriwynne, are both full of English/Ingerish features as well.
So it would seem that the English/Ingerish language has some presence along the western corridor between Frogtown and Eriwynne. But what other languages should exist in the country? And where should they be found? Answering these questions will help figure out a pattern of names for the country as a whole; and a logical pattern of names will help move the country towards realism and coherence.
Don’t feel locked into the other names in AR901. Apart from Frogtown/Eriwynne/Border Bay, those other names are ‘empty,’ not attached to any significant development, so feel free to change them. Personally I’d love to see more non-European languages in OGF, especially fictional languages (i.e. unrelated to Earth languages), but maybe that’s just me.
In any case, the key thing is to figure out what languages settled where, and use that to create a pattern of names that makes sense, so the names don’t seem totally random. Figuring out the country’s language mix will help determine the country’s name as well.
Comment from skquinn on 22 February 2015 at 04:14
There are some other names of note:
The others are small towns in the immediate vicinity of Frogtown.
I haven’t given much thought to the other languages in the country, though at one point we did have a city named Laikkivudursia added by someone just playing around. I deleted the area not because it was non-English/Ingerish (looks kind of Scandinavian to me, actually) but because the whole thing was just a bunch of random garbage. I undeleted just the city node in case someone wants to have a go at building a real city around it. (It is kind of close to Cape Sou, so maybe move it up the coast a bit?)
Comment from Luciano on 22 February 2015 at 04:24
I started writing here but decided it was too much for a comment. I put it on my bliki.
Comment from Luciano on 22 February 2015 at 04:25
oops, that bliki link definitely failed to work. here, again: http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/User:Luciano/Bliki
Comment from isleño on 22 February 2015 at 07:18
Personally, I wouldn’t take “Quwertieville” or “Kaeleq” into account, since there’s virtually nothing built there. I’d simply choose a couple languages for the country and run with those, and feel free to replace any ‘empty’ placenames that don’t seem to fit.
By the way, Luciano has some great things to say in his bliki post. I’d recommend anyone follow the link and read it.
As he says, there are tons of different ways to create a landscape of names. I’d only add that, for me, some are a lot harder than others. Building a conlang from scratch, like Mahhalian (my favorite language in OGF), takes a huge amount of skill and talent; I’d never be able to do it. A conlang based on an Earth language… still harder than I could ever manage. Using a simple name generator like Niulutic or a basic set of sound rules like Onnutuan is infinitely easier, probably the simplest way to get a consistent-sounding “foreign” result with very little effort. Of course the quickest of all is just adopting an Earth language, which is great too.
Naming things randomly and trying to find patterns in the resulting chaos? That’s pretty hard, at least for me. I’ve tried that before, and things seem to fall apart rather than come together, and I end up losing interest. But for those who can do it, it can be awesome. More power to them. :-) So I guess I should add to my advice, the caveat that no two people are the same. I just recommend what I find to be easiest, because that’s what works best for me. Individual results may vary. :-)
Comment from Sarepava on 24 February 2015 at 00:17
I totally agree that a more exotic language than English makes the map far more interesting. Would far prefer to see lots of strange but plausible combinations of x,y,z,q,j and apostrophes than another country full of ‘[x]ville’, ‘[x]land’, ‘[x]city’ etc. You can easily find an obscure real-earth language and make tweaks to create a new tongue (which is the basic idea of Karolian, an amalgamation of mis-spelt Finnish and Estonian with a little Hungarian and Romanian thrown in for dialects). There has been competitively little use of Slavic, Central American and African languages on the map so far, so perhaps one of these could be a starting point.
If you then even give your cities prosaic names (as mostly happens in the real world, with most names translated to ‘Egga’s Farm’, ‘Castle-near-the-sea’, ‘Town with walls near the river’) they sound interesting and consistent.
Comment from Luciano on 24 February 2015 at 01:35
Sarepava’s point about using an obscure language to “hide” boring names is an excellent one. Do you have any idea how boring place-names are in Korea, for example? Seoul means “Capital”. Busan means “South Mountain” Incheon means “Virtue Creek”.
Comment from Portopolis on 24 February 2015 at 04:34
Funny enough I live 20-40 minutes north of Sugar Land in Katy,TX. Not many people know about the suburb, do you live nearby or are you a geography guy/gal like me?
Comment from skquinn on 24 February 2015 at 05:04
I live in Houston, TX.
Comment from Easky30 on 25 February 2015 at 23:49
A lot of the names I use in OGF are completely made up, especially the suburbs around Gobras City. I try to make names that sound interesting. Some names I originally thought would be tempory and end up sticking like First Harbor or Orinoco. Orinoco is a street I lived on in Long Island, NY and I needed a quick name for my new country. Long Island has hundreds of unique native names. First Harbor was literally my first edits and now the names seem fitting.
Google Translate is also a good resource I will throw random words in and see what comes out and paste it into OGF.
@Luciano, I never knew Busan meant South Mountain, I remember the city having numerous 20-30 story apartment blocks going into the hills 20 years ago. I can only imagine what Korea looks like now.
Comment from Luciano on 26 February 2015 at 00:17
@Easky. Actually I’m embarrassed, I made a double-typo: “Buksan” (the giant park in Seoul, means “North Mountain” not “South Mountain”). “South Mountain” is “Namsan”, another park in Seoul (unsurprisingly, just south of “North Mountain”, across downtown). On the other hand, Busan, I had to look up… I think it would translate as something like “Kettle Mountain.” And yes… apartments as far as the eye can see. The photo I took and I posted in OGF for my city Askendom is walking distance from where I live.