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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tuxgeo" data-source="post: 5576903" data-attributes="member: 61026">Achieving a kind of "language recognition for names" must include at least these two necessary factors: 1. Some kind of recognizable similarity among words of a given language. This is a trait of the language itself. If the words of the given language have many different forms, including words like "alamoana," "strictly," "tsunami," "vodka," "passerine," "yuan," "moteshaekeram," and "marathon," then few people would think that they all came from the same source; instead, many listeners or readers might think that those words come from many varied sources, not from a single language. Yes, of course I selected those words from varied sources for the purpose of this example; but this list does point out that not all words used in a given area need have the same form. The main result of this is that you need to give a greater-than-normal regularity to the words of any given fantasy language in order to let your players more easily recognize those words as being part of the same language. 2. An extensive exposure to many words of the given language. This is a trait of the person doing the recognizing. If you had never heard any Basque words, then how would you ever recognize a name as being Basque? Or, to confront your own example: Chinese does have many monosyllabic words; but if you had never been exposed to any Chinese words, you wouldn't know that; and you therefore would not easily recognize "Poo Fong Hung Dong" as being Chinese. This becomes troublesome when aiming at name recognition in fantasy languages, because you cannot reasonably expect your players to have extensive prior experience with the vocabulary. The simplest way to achieve such language recognition for names is therefore to use names from real-world languages, because then you can reasonably expect that your players will have had at least some prior exposure to some of them. The earlier suggestion about getting place names from maps is a great idea, and can give you lots of examples. On the other hand, if you want to build language recognition for names in a fantasy language, without creating a complete fantasy language, you do have a lot more work ahead of you! To start with, you would want to create considerable recognizable similarity among words. One way to do this is to set some rules and follow them. (Hint: to avoid scads of work, use simple rules. . . .) For example, the construction of Japanese words is very simple: all syllables end in a vowel except for the syllable "N" (sometimes pronounced "M"). Consonants are never set next to each other, except again for "N," which can precede other consonants without a vowel between. ("Ts" is not two consonants in Japanese; it's a single, complex one, similar to "X" being pronounced as "Ks" in English.) The only complication here is that "Na," "Ne," "Ni," "No," and "Nu" are also syllables; so consonantal "N" isn't the only use for that sound. If you're going for simple, invented fantasy names, my advice is to avoid the complex things such as Tolkien's Dwarvish, which resembles inflected Semitic based on triliteral roots. (That gets screwy fast.) You don't have to include more complexity in your names than you want: Number designations (single versus dual versus plural) are optional; Gender designations are optional; Person designations (I/we versus You versus he/she/it/them) are optional. Lastly, make it extremely obvious: have language tropes that are hard to miss. Make a first language depend almost completely on vowels and the letter "H," so you would get words such as "Aeho'euhepa," which I just made up for this purpose; but make another language that can hardly get through an entire word without putting two (or three) consonants together in a row, such as the example of "strictly" that I listed above; and make a third language that uses the vowel "A" at least four times more often than any other vowel, and get things like "Anapurapana," which I also just made up for this purpose--so when your players come across a word including five (5) "A" vowels and one (1) vowel that is not "A," they know which language is being used.</blockquote>

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