• The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!

world-buildng: naming deities

TDRandall

Explorer
Well maybe it's too literal or would be obvious to the players, but the next step to try after synonyms might be running the words (or the synonyms) through Babel Fish (babelfish.altavista.com). Toss in the names, pick a language to go to (that you expect no player knows), hit the button and WIGGLE them a bit while writing to your original language (which I'll presume is English here)! Easiest if they use the familiar alphabet(See "Dutch" below).

If you know different alphabets then you can phonetically bring it back (greek #1). But it may eve be better if you don't and bring 'em back in what they LOOK like in English and remove/add a few letters to form intelligable syllables (greek #2, and Russian)

English Dutch Greek 1 Greek 2 Russian
truth warheid alethia alhoya nepabha
reason reden logos hoyos nepnynha
grace gunst epieka ettiekia onoputypa
law wet nomos vous eakoh
duty plikt oasmos oayus obreahoc

This way they even have a bizarre bit of inner consistency - if you're shooting for such.

Good luck!
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Altalazar

First Post
When I named my dieties, I tried to pick names that either sounded right for the portfolio, perhaps an alliteration, or names that sort of had an ironic connotation, just for fun.

Like for anyone who remembers Senator Jesse Helmes and his tirade against the federal funding of the arts because of a handful of controversial art exhibits: So I named the God of Art, Literature, and Music: Helmes. And I doubt any of my players ever caught on to the connotation.
 

Dogbrain

First Post
Halivar said:
One of my favorite places to turn for naming people and places is the appendix to The American Heritage College Dictionary by Houghton-Mifflin Company titled Indo-European Roots. I string together the proto-Indo-European roots together that mean something significant and it usually comes out sounding like a cool name.

Like the following?

Dyéus Patér--head god, law, and oaths
Perkwúnos--thunder and fertility god
Aryomen--laws and oaths
Meitros--friendship, peace, and oaths
Diwós Sunú--twin sons of the head god, horses and cattle
Akwom Népot--waters, volcanos, and wisdom
Yemós and Mannus--first king and first priest
Páuson--herds, travelers, merchants
Ménot--moon god
Ekwamedha--goddess of horses, granter of kingship, goddess of eroticism
Gwouwinda--cow goddess, fertility, wealth
Awsós--dawn goddess, beginnings, youth
Sawelyosyo Dhughter--sun goddess, sister and lover of Yemós and Mannus
Donu--river goddess
Westya--goddess of the household
Dhéghom Máter--the earth
Kolyos--goddess of death and the dead
 

Galethorn

First Post
I just made up words; here are the 'true' (as in 'actual names they would respond to if asked') names of my deities, who are worshipped together in a small pantheon, known simply as The Four...

Uru; the now non-existant deity who created the universe, and The Four.

Urui; the self-proclaimed leader of The Four, who rules the sky (and consequently storms), who is commonly known as Tyr. He created the Nayr (a race of 'sub deities'), then later the race of humans.

Yril; the mother-goddess, who is actually the world itself (hence the setting being called Yril), whose common name is Sylvanna. She created all the plants and animals (not including humanoids/homonids).

Dorod; the god of craftsmen, who created dwarves, and is commonly known as Dorn (or Dorûn by the dwarves). He rules over the mountains and stones of Yril but not her fertile surface or fiery heart.

Lyri; the maiden-goddess, who created the elves and fey, and rules over the worlds' seas. She is also credited with the creation of giants, but they were technically Dorod's creation, as they were originally dwarves. Most humans know her simply as the Moon Maiden.
 

ArcOfCorinth

First Post
Lately I've been taking a central element of the god's portfoilo and then translating it into another language. I cut the name in half and keep one half. Then I translate the original word into yet another language and cut half of it off and put it together. For instance, my god of hate is named Konshevn. I can't remember the two languages though. I think one was Norwegian...
 


gamecat

Explorer
Hm... i tried using basque... but splicing two languages? Ingenous! I'll post the results later.

And no, Integra would be the goddess of high-rev engines that produce
 

gamecat

Explorer
Hm... i tried using basque... but splicing two languages? Ingenous! I'll post the results later.

And no, Integra would be the goddess of high-rev engines that produce no torque...
 

reanjr

First Post
Aristotle said:
If you had the time you could do a little research on conlangs (constructed languages).

As someone who has done some pretty extensive conlanging, I might be able to offer inspirational suggestions.

First, are all the gods named in the same language? Often times, historically, you'll find one set of gods to be named entirely differently because they came from a different culture. You could split it up between the gods of good and the gods of evil. Then give each god or goddess a title. Look for words that come up repeatedly (mother, father, of, the) and try to come up with some unique system for representing these words. -i- could be of (or genitive form), for instance, so a Mother of Law might be written as Mother iLaw (with the words for Mother and Law translated of course).

Basic concepts and common words should usually be kept short, while complicated ideas or things might be very long. Mother and Father, for instance, are rarely longer than two syllables in most languages, but this might be different if it is a culture that communally raises its young.

Decide what types of sounds are in the language. For instance, removing the S sound could deeply affect a language's tone. Are vowels usually found together, forming complex diphthongs (daiesmaeri)? Dominated by clusters of consonents (skratsen)? Does each letter (or diphthong) usually make only one sound (Spanish is like this) or are the sounds influenced by what is found around them (French, and to a much more ridiculous degree, Welsh)?

How are verbs (or nouns) conjugated? The concepts of unity and duality are universally understood by humans, but rarely is the concept of a number greater than 4 instinctually understood. This is often reflected in plurality. For instance, the word duck might be translated as "jin". The suffix -o might indicate one, -i for two, -a for three, -ez for more than three, or indeterminate. As an examplem, "I have..." is translated "Grinel" (the base word, grin, is the infinitive for "to have", while the suffix -el indicates self; One could also correctly say Eln Grinel or "I have", but it is usually shortened to just Grinel), the following would be:

I have one duck - Grinel jino
I have two ducks - Grinel jini
I have three ducks - Grinel jina
I have ducks - Grinel jinez

Or to make things more complicated, you can make the word "jin" have a particular form indicating possession by the speaker. So you would say something along the lines of "There are two-ducks-that-are-mine".

Think of word order as well as structure. In English, "small, red car" is the norm, while in most Romance languages "small car red" is the norm. Hyphenations might be common, as could be apostrophes to indicate either letters that are removed when contracting two words (as in English didn't) or as an additional pronunciation guide, so that the word Daar, being of ambiguous pronunciation, might be made Da'ar to indicate that the two "a"s are not a diphthong, but treated as seperate vowels.

Do verbs always begin with vowels? Nouns always end in consonents? These types of rules can often give the language a more flowing sound. How do you determine which syllable is stressed. In English, there is an arbitrary primary stress, and alternating sylables from primary stress get secondary stress. In some languages, the first syllable always gets stress and there is no secondary stress. In some languages, stress is used commonly to change the meaning of a word. TOno might mean house, while toNO means dog. This is why you have funny TV shows where someone says something like "I either asked where the bathroom was or how to get to the nearest camel."

Now, after these few hours of work, you will have the basic roots of a linguistic system. Now start translating each word of the god titles as seperate words. Don't translate the entire title as it will create too much phonetic influence. Once you have all the words, start placing them together for the titles. You will find alot of them don't sound good together. Alter a vowel here, remove a consonent there, etc. to get it to sound good. This is normal in the natural evolution of a language. The word starboard, for instance, was originally sterbord, which was literraly steering side-of-a-ship. Over time, the two words were used so often, that they mutated into their own word that, in modern times, seems to have absolutely no bearing on the original meaning.

Hope this was helpful to someone or at least interesting.
 

d4

First Post
excellent advice, reanjr. i've done a bit of conlangs before myself.

here's a great site with information on how to get started constructing a conlang; i think he specifically talks about "naming languages".

http://www.zompist.com/kit.html
 
Last edited:

Remove ads

Top