This is an important post regarding fantasy world building. When you think of fantasy worlds, you always think of the creatures, the magic and all that. However, one thing that gets overlooked is the languages.
Sure, you automatically assume there are going to be unique languages associated with different races. Tolkien built on languages for Elves in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. The Elven language is copyrighted, despite the fact that Tolkien wanted to share aspects of Middle Earth so others could write from it.
I tried, they said 'No.' Quite firmly I might add...
So what's a girl (or guy) who writes fantasy to do about languages? Make it up as you go along.
Unless you have the time, skills and education Mr. Tolkien had, you have to use what is available to you. Most of it will be your imagination. There are ways to go about it and create something. I have a link here to my translator page. I use Latin for a lot of things. No surprise, look at the titles of my books. But I sort of cheat and mix Latin with Drow or Tolkien's Elvish. I'm not using his work, just using it as a guideline of sorts.
What I do is take a word. Let's use the word 'Sword'. We want another 'name' for Sword in our story, so we think about it a bit and hit the internet. Now in Latin, you can use the word Gladius. In Drow it is Killian. But I can't use Drow and I don't want it to be in Latin, that's sort of boring. I want to be unique. So I would combine the two somehow. Kildius, Kilius, Gladian... you get the idea. But a couple of those look kind of lame. So I just shuffle things about a bit and go for something along the lines of Kildan, Adius or completely away from either of my language choices and try Samas. Does this make sense? I may not get an exact derivative from my two language choices, but it sparked my imagination enough to come up with something else entirely.
There are name generators out there as well to help with the language and naming processes. I know there are sites out there that tell you when naming things in fantasy, don't use an apostrophe. Well. Screw that. Use what you want! I have lots of names, including the name of my world that have an apostrophe. Eir du'Brusai.
People always ask me how I come up with names. I honestly cannot give you a formulaic answer. I don't know. Names and the like just pop up in my head and I use what fits. Languages are the same for me unless I get stuck and then use my tricks up above with the two different languages. I try to be unique but not so unique in everything that people get frustrated reading my work. I try to give the unique name and try to find a way to describe exactly what it is to the reader. Most everyone will get the idea right away that my D'raetus Pastiniir are lethal, elite assassins.
But there is that pesky apostrophe!
Too bad. Fantasy Police don't like it, they can arrest me.
I am always happy to help other writers find unique names for people or items. So if you get stuck, by all means, drop me a line! I'd be happy to help. Most of my name generator links are on my links page of the blog. Check them out.
Showing posts with label english. Show all posts
Showing posts with label english. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Little Known Facts...
About me, of course.
All through high school, I failed English. Oh, I grasped the concept of it all, got things right in class and passed most of the tests. But I never really pushed myself in school.
I started working at the age of 15. I got a job to help pay family bills, not to have my own savings account. So school sort of took a back burner in my mind and so I ended up on the 6 year plan rather than the normal 4 years.
My English teachers loved me, though. All but one, but she was psycho to begin with and she is a whole other story.
One of my favorite teachers was my English Lit teacher. It helped she was Scottish, we had common ground. Each day or sometimes just once a week, she would write journal entry prompts up on the board and we had so much time to write. We would have to pass our journals up to the front and she'd browse through them while we were testing or whatever.
One day she wrote "Describe a forest fire" on the board and I immediately began to scribble out my story, from the viewpoint of the animals. When the time came to pass them to the front, mine caught her eye. She even read it out loud to the class and in her usual manner said, "That was a great piece! I won't mention who wrote it, but her initials are Melissa McWilliams."
Embarrassed the hell out of me. Looking back on it though, she was just one of the teachers that encouraged me to write. Only it took some time.
I didn't really catch the writing bug until I was 19 and started playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I came up with a really cool Elf Ranger... named Kayta. She's evolved quite a bit and she is my very first character ever. To have her in my current books has helped me a lot because she's an old friend, very familiar and she's easy to write about. She is like me, after all.
I think that if it hadn't been for my English teachers, I never would have even thought about writing. Another one of my teachers actually told me I would make a great writer, but passing English was sort of a big deal. That teacher had challenged the whole class with writing our own fable. She gave us the moral and we had to come up with the story. Matter of fact, I still have mine.
Maybe I'll dig it out for you one of these days.
All through high school, I failed English. Oh, I grasped the concept of it all, got things right in class and passed most of the tests. But I never really pushed myself in school.
I started working at the age of 15. I got a job to help pay family bills, not to have my own savings account. So school sort of took a back burner in my mind and so I ended up on the 6 year plan rather than the normal 4 years.
My English teachers loved me, though. All but one, but she was psycho to begin with and she is a whole other story.
One of my favorite teachers was my English Lit teacher. It helped she was Scottish, we had common ground. Each day or sometimes just once a week, she would write journal entry prompts up on the board and we had so much time to write. We would have to pass our journals up to the front and she'd browse through them while we were testing or whatever.
One day she wrote "Describe a forest fire" on the board and I immediately began to scribble out my story, from the viewpoint of the animals. When the time came to pass them to the front, mine caught her eye. She even read it out loud to the class and in her usual manner said, "That was a great piece! I won't mention who wrote it, but her initials are Melissa McWilliams."
Embarrassed the hell out of me. Looking back on it though, she was just one of the teachers that encouraged me to write. Only it took some time.
I didn't really catch the writing bug until I was 19 and started playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I came up with a really cool Elf Ranger... named Kayta. She's evolved quite a bit and she is my very first character ever. To have her in my current books has helped me a lot because she's an old friend, very familiar and she's easy to write about. She is like me, after all.
I think that if it hadn't been for my English teachers, I never would have even thought about writing. Another one of my teachers actually told me I would make a great writer, but passing English was sort of a big deal. That teacher had challenged the whole class with writing our own fable. She gave us the moral and we had to come up with the story. Matter of fact, I still have mine.
Maybe I'll dig it out for you one of these days.
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