The Mythcreant Podcast 575 – Creating Names and Terms
Can this drink be called champagne in a world without France? Can this weapon be called a sword if there’s no Proto-Germanic for the word to evolve from? Should your magic users be called wizards or wisendars? Deciding on names is an important part of any story, but especially if your story takes place somewhere other than Earth. You want the names to be distinct and memorable but not so outlandish that they’re hard to understand. Fortunately, we’ve got tips!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Michael Martin. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Theme]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris …
Oren: [Sickly, congested] And I am Oren, the Plague Bearer. Hopefully this will be the last one, ’cause we won’t record another set for three weeks, but I suppose we’ll see.
Chris: I mean, considering how rarely you get colds, maybe it really is the plague.
Oren: Could be.
Chris: And we’ll all have it.
Oren: Yeah. Who knows?
Chris: So I was thinking the term podcast would just seem really anachronistic in my lower tech fantasy world. So I was thinking I would just call it like, a “herald’s call.” ‘Cause the heralds, they just sit in a tower and talk real loud—
Oren: Yeah. Okay.
Chris: To each other. And everybody listens to them.
Oren: And their names are all “Harold,” so it all works out.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Of course, this has to happen in a big city. So they have their, like, influencer audience. I’m gonna call the big city “London,” and in a kingdom called “France.”
Oren: [Hoarse guffaw and coughing]
Chris: It’s, you know.
Oren: That’s a rude thing to pull on me at the beginning of the podcast, Chris. God dammit.
Chris: I mean, aren’t all European countries really the same?
Oren: Yeah, they’re all basically the same. I mean, is England a European country? They’re gonna have to fight over that, I guess.
Chris: That is kind of funny because you wanna get a taste of what cultural appropriation is like from the other end. I mean, it’s still not because the dynamics of oppression aren’t there, but maybe that will give you an idea of why people from Polynesian cultures don’t like it when you just have one like, generic Polynesian island that takes stuff from like Samoa and Hawaii and everywhere and just mixes it together.
Oren: Yeah. It’s also just really funny. You can see how Anglocentric our world and our language is, because we have whole groups of things that we call Continental, by which we mean they come from mainland Europe. Which is the fakest continent.
Like, all continents are a little fake. But Europe is the most fake. There is no definition of continent that Europe fits. It’s just a thing we all decided ’cause it seems important.
Chris: [Chuckles] Any case, what we’re talking about is inventing terms for your world, because of course, anytime you’re worldbuilding. You’re gonna end up having to name a whole bunch of fictional things. Maybe less if it’s like an urban fantasy, so you’re worldbuilding in the real world.
But even then, if you have magic, you’ll have to come up with names for that. Or if you have technology, you know, often that needs names. You might have special roles or titles or jobs. Places almost always need some names. Fictional creatures, special social conventions, or rituals. Usually there’s just lots of naming and coming up with new terms that comes with worldbuilding.
Oren: No, I refuse to name anything.
Chris: [Laughs] Well, Raven Scholar actually is really funny because it has these factions that are like, really important to the story and it just doesn’t name them. We just end up calling them “houses.”
Oren: They should be called “sects,” but saying sects makes it sound like you’re saying sex. And so that is awkward.
Chris: But they’re technically like religious orders, I guess.
Oren: Yeah, I guess “orders” is probably the best thing to call them. The orders ’cause it’s “Order of the Raven.”
Chris: Yeah. But the book doesn’t ever call them that I don’t think. And even order isn’t really a great term because an order implies like a fairly exclusive group, whereas it feels like everyone in this setting is part of one of these religious animal factions. I do wish that that book had used more descriptive names for its monasteries. ‘Cause the monasteries are really important, but they all have names that start with “Anat” and then another word.
Oren: So you’ve got Anat-Garra and Anat-ruar. Which one is that? I don’t know. They’re always talking about a not-something-something.
Chris: But on the other hand, the animal names for the factions are very easy to remember.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true.
Chris: Terms, basically, when we’re inventing terms, there’s usually two concerns.
Usually it’s A: basically about how easy it is for readers to learn and remember, and B: about atmosphere or the general impression you’re creating for the world.
Oren: I mean, I think those are two important concerns. I guess other concerns I would add would be things like, should it have a different name in the first place? ‘Cause that’s not always easy to tell. Like should you call the “Emperor’s Special Protective Unit” the “Falcons Claw,” or should you call them the “Imperial Guard?”
Chris: Sure. But what’s at stake when you make that choice? Usually it’s either a matter of the impression you’re creating for the world and how easy it is for the reader to get.
Oren: Yeah, I’d say that’s fair.
Chris: Like, that’s the two things to think about when you’re coming up with terms. But it is really funny to have a world where we have both “Anat-Garra” and like, “The Ravens.” ‘Cause that just sounds like two, you know, very different things. Although maybe one of them is “Anat-Garra Kraa” and it’s supposed to be a raven. The main character’s last name is “Kraa” ’cause people take last names after their like, magical house?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Their sect?
Chris & Oren: Their order?
Oren: Their “magical clubhouse.”
Chris: [Laughs] Yeah. That’s how all encompassing and important it is to this world. And we don’t have names. For these factions!
Oren: I think that Raven Scholar should have called them something that isn’t a fake word, considering how the book doesn’t really use many fake words. I think something more descriptive would’ve been better. Like “Raven’s Reach” or “Raven’s Roost” or something for the Raven Monastery, or even just “The Roost.” You know, something that’s a little easier to remember that way.
That’s something that is always interesting is when you are naming places: how descriptive should they be? And to what extent? Because in the real world, a lot of place names are very descriptive, even if the description is not necessarily accurate. Like Greenland. But at the same time, you don’t want everything to be named that way. ‘Cause then it starts to feel weird and fake.
Like you’ve got a lot of places, you’ve got “Hightown.” That’s a descriptive term. And you’ve got “Long Street.” That’s a descriptive term. But if they’re all named that way, it seems a little weird, right? You’re gonna wanna throw in a few things that are not obviously just a description of what the thing is.
Chris: I would put that under the general strategy—that there’re some general strategies for coming up with these terms. This is the strategy of repurposing existing words. So you’re just using English language words to everybody knows to name things. Doing it, something that is descriptive of the place, that is very specific.
And I can see after a while that would start to sound kind of contrived. But I think that using other words like, okay, you have the town of “Yellow Leaf” or something, and it doesn’t necessarily have yellow leaves all the time.
You can use “Northtown.” It starts to get a little more generic. Whereas something like “Long Street” is just like very, like literally there is a long street there, and I think that’s where some of the awkwardness comes in. But I think there is some disadvantage of repurposing existing words in that it doesn’t give you an opportunity to kind of set a stronger atmosphere. And sometimes it does feel a little simplistic. Not that your words that you choose can’t necessarily leave an impression, but it does tend to fade more in the background. And in a lot of ways that’s good. That means it’s easier to absorb and doesn’t call too much attention to itself.
But you know, sometimes that may not have the kind of feeling that you want for the world, or it may seem a little simplistic. If everything in our Raven Scholar story was like “the Roost.” And honestly, if we’re already naming the orders after animals, I think that would make sense.
Oren: Right. I mean, especially because there are so many of them. There’s like eight monasteries that they talk about.
Chris: I mean, that’s another thing to factor in. It’s like if you have that many, maybe you should prioritize making your labels easy to understand.
Oren: Right. Whereas I don’t think they needed to give the city they were in a descriptive name. I honestly don’t remember what it was called. It didn’t come up that often, and I wasn’t trying to tell it apart from the other cities. I did sometimes forget the name of the city where the bad guy is from. Which was important ’cause they kept talking about new troops coming in from that area. And I was like, who?
“Samran.” That’s what it’s called. Like they kept saying the “Samran Hounds.” And I was like, who are “The Samran?” What is that? But I don’t think that was a problem with the name. I think I was just a little checked out by then.
Chris: So what you should do to break up your descriptive names is have a place called “Newtown” and it’s like, the oldest city.
Oren: [Laughter]
Chris: I mean that one, again, that’s always what I push people towards by default, just because it is so much easier for readers to understand. And it’s honestly less effort from the worldbuilder too, usually to just call your magic “weaving” or something. It’s a little easier for everyone. It’s the simple, usable, low effort strategy that generally works.
One thing that I’ve seen lately that works significantly less well, even though it is more memorable, is slightly changing existing words or like, altering their spelling. Or doing words that are obviously based on real words in English but are not because they tend to look very silly and sometimes they seem funny. They’re more memorable than completely made up words, but often they just feel like they’re so on the nose that they actually ruin the atmosphere.
For instance, I recently did a critique on this book called Anathema. Probably by the time this episode comes out, probably my critique will be published. It has like this whole glossary up front that is hilarious. Because a lot of these terms are kind of creative. For instance, mages that become violent are called “Carnificans,” and if you look at that word, you can easily see the “carn” and how it’s based on the word “carnivore.” And it just adds something that to me comes off as very silly.
Oren: Yeah, I agree. I am hard pressed to explain why I don’t like that. It feels very silly. I had a similar reaction to in The Goblin Emperor where the mages are called “mazas.” It seems silly to me. That name isn’t any less generic than just calling them mages. It just seemed odd, but I’m not sure why I felt that way.
Chris: And in When the Moon Hatched, and this also—we can see this in character names too. The water goddess, her name is “Rain,” but rain is spelled R-A-Y-N-E.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And this is in a tidally locked setting. So there’s no like, regular days and nights. So instead there’s days, but days are spelled D-A-E-S.
Oren: Oh no.
Chris: There’s something about this, I think again, if you are writing a light children’s book that’s very playful. If you’re writing like, Cat in the Hat, then I’m sure that’s fine if it’s silly. But it just adds a sense of silliness. It’s almost like you’re putting puns in a story that’s supposed to be dark and serious. This kind of wordplay is not usually taken very seriously. And I think maybe that’s the issue, is that it comes off as wordplay.
Oren: Yeah. To me, whenever I see a story that takes a normal word and spells it odd, I immediately take it less seriously. I’m immediately like, oh, what are you trying to sneak past me with this one. I have a very negative reaction to spelling magic with a “K” or spelling vampire with a “Y.” Something about it feels pretentious to me. It feels like you’re trying to tell rather than show that there’s something special here. But again, it’s hard for me to intellectualize why I feel that way. I can only report my feelings.
Chris: So basing it off of existing words, but then changing the words somewhat can make it more memorable. But unless your story is like a comedy or for children, then I think there’s too much risk involved. I’m not gonna say there’s no way to make this work, but yeah, as opposed to like compound words usually work much better. So if you wanna take two existing words and just put them on top of each other, like the town of “Yellowleaf,” one word, that’s usually fine.But when we get into weird, uncanny valley words where we can obviously see it’s invented from a word we know but—
Oren: It’s invented, but still sort of following English grammar rules. So I feel like it’s raising questions about what language this is in. ‘Cause normally we just accept that the narrative is translating from whatever language they’re speaking to English. But now it’s like, this word is obviously not an English word, but like it’s also clearly not a made up fantasy word entirely because it’s using a really obvious English root. So what is happening? Maybe. Maybe that’s the reason. I don’t know.
Chris: And I don’t know perhaps what word you choose to adapt also matters. Like for instance, in Anathema the villain is called “Cadavros,” and it’s just only on the nose for the villain, the evil look at villain to basically be named “cadaver.”
Oren: Yeah. He’s the corpse guy.
Chris: It’s just too … whereas, I don’t know, maybe if we took a completely different word that is less just on the nose, it would not be quite so silly.
Oren: Interestingly, I just wanted to check the pronunciation here. And I’m not trying to like gotcha. I just think it would be interesting. So the book we’ve been talking about is called Anathema. But it would’ve been interesting if it was called “Anthema.” That’s like—
Chris: [Laughter] Look, you can’t tell me how to pronounce words, okay?
Oren: [Laughing] I’m not trying to grammar police you.
Chris: [Chuckling] I’ll pronounce them however I want.
Oren: I just think it’s interesting.
Chris: You can’t tell me how to say words.
Oren: One thing I do find interesting is you wanna pay attention to theming as well, because sometimes—I have especially noticed in science fiction—giving something a descriptive name is more likely to sound kind of silly. Especially if it’s something very technical or scientifically weird.
Like in, this was technically in Discovery, but it was sort of also the backdoor pilot for Strange New Worlds over on Star Trek. They go to this Klingon moon where they need to find these special crystals that have odd time properties, and they’re called “time crystals.” And I don’t know. Something about that just made me roll my eyes and I’m still trying to find where they went. Like, really? We couldn’t come up with a more technical sounding term.
Chris: Do we need, like—is it “tetryon particles?” Are those the time particles?
Oren: “Chronitons,” I think.
Chris: Chronitons? Should we call them “chroniton crystals?”
Oren: “Chroniton matrixes” or something like, you know, a “crystalline chroniton structure,” we’ll call it that. I don’t know. Something other than time crystals.
Chris: That does make sense because there are specific types of words that we associate with scientific and technical things, and one of the issues with repurposing existing words is that sometimes it can feel a little simplistic in the atmosphere that it creates.
So that makes sense that that would really clash with something that’s supposed to be super technical. And in that case Star Trek has so many made up technical terms, could probably just reuse some of those. Another strategy, though, of course, is because a lot of scientific terms are based in Latin or Greek. Another strategy that you can use in your world is to use an existing… I mean, if you write an English, non-English language, but you wanna pick one that’s dead or non-modern. Unless if you, for instance, are from France and you wanna name everything in French. But at that point you wanna use repurposing existing word strategy and make it sound natural to French speakers and not have it so that if you know French, then like, oh, this town is called “London, France” or something.
Oren: [Chuckling]
Chris: And I think there can be a problem if English speakers just start taking words from modern, in use languages they don’t know and counting on readers to not know those languages.
Oren: Yeah. In general, you don’t want your story to get worse because some of your readers took a Duolingo class.
Chris: And it can feel a little disrespectful, right? Again, I’m not worried about oppression against—
Oren: Against the French? [Laughter]
Chris: Yeah. So if you piss them off, it’s not that it’s that big of a deal. But why mess with them if you—I mean, unless you want to mess with them. But in general, we’re not just trying to piss people off. We want them to enjoy the story. [Laughs]
Oren: Look, as the inheritors of British hegemony over the globe, is it not our responsibility to mess with the French at all times? I would argue. Also, I need a moment to assure everyone that I’m not like other storytellers. ‘Cause I realized I talked about not liking it when words are spelled weird. But I also kind of did that in my book ’cause I called the ruler of this empire, an “empero” instead of emperor.
Chris: But you were copying Scalzi, weren’t you?
Oren: I was, but I did it different ’cause he spelled it with an “X,” which I hated ’cause it looked like “emper-rocks” even though it was pronounced “empero.” I hated it so much. And I’m not saying you have to like my choice there. You might find it goofy. But I do just wanna point out it was a little different than what I was talking about earlier, where you change the spelling but keep the same pronunciation.
Chris: You know, I think the issue with ‘emperox’ is it doesn’t have enough ‘Ys.’
Oren: [Chuckles]
Chris: I think you should add one or two “Y’s” in there.
Oren: “Empyroy.”
Chris: And start with a “Y” and then you could just say it’s pronounced “empero.”
Oren: See now if I’d written that story a few years later, I would’ve just called them sovereigns. That’s my favorite term for like, the monarchical ruler of a realm that isn’t gendered. I love the term “sovereign” because that’s what it means, but we don’t really use the word that way very often, and it also sounds kind of grand and cool. So that’s my favorite. And if I didn’t believe that you shouldn’t edit a book after publication unless you absolutely have to I would just go through and change it to “sovereign.” Quickly. Ctrl F. [Laughs]
Chris: Ctrl F. But yeah, beyond Latin somebody gave me a book about Old English words.
Oren: [Sarcastically] Oh, who? Who could that have been? We may never know.
Chris: So I might use Old English as my naming language at some point. ‘Cause that’s fun. It has enough similarities, but it also looks kind of different. It’s like, closer to German or Old Norse. It actually looks kinda a little bit Nordic.
Oren: I mean, it is. It looks like German, ’cause it is German.
Chris: Because it is German!
Oren: It’s a Germanic language. It hasn’t been invaded by French yet. So, you know.
Chris: Well if you really wanna get back at those Frenchies… [Laugher]
Oren: Right. This is why it’s our responsibility to bully the French? ‘Cause they messed up our language. Which is also sort of the Norman’s fault and those are also vikings. So that’s also sort of our fault.
Chris: Did they mess up the language or did the Great Vowel Shift mess up the—
Oren: We don’t talk about the Great Vowel Shift here, Chris.
Chris: [Chuckling] We don’t talk about the Great Vowel Shift?
Oren: That’s the first rule of Language Club, is you don’t talk about the Great Vowel Shift.
Chris: Okay. Anycase that’s a strategy and that basically gets you a consistent looking language with words that you can look up. Which again, is easier than the conlang option.
Oren: Yeah, conlangs are rough.
Chris: Which look, if that’s your passion and you really wanna do a conlang, go for it. They’re just, ah man! It takes a lot of work for the storyteller. They’re usually often hard for readers to remember because they’re completely made up and often pronounced. And then because you put so much work into them, storytellers are usually tempted to use them more than we really should.
I’m sorry to say, there’s just only so much use for words that readers don’t understand in our books, which exists for the purpose of actually reading and understanding the words.
Oren: I would write the whole book in words the readers couldn’t understand if that was an option.
Chris: [Laughing] So they could assume it’s brilliant, whatever it is you can’t read here.
Oren: Yeah. Then they can’t tell me it’s bad ’cause they don’t know. [Chuckles]
Chris: But you know, when done in the right way it can add a lot more immersion and realism to the world. So it can be a really fun, great thing when used well. But it’s a lot of work and then you have to like, use super restraint when actually using it. And it’s not the easiest on the reader. So again, if you’re really serious about your worldbuilding that might be a way to go. But that’s not an easy one. It’s not an easy solution.
Oren: Okay, so I do have to call out a specific story, which uses a really interesting made up word that, maybe nobody else would care about this, but it sent me like, running around on wiki searches, trying to figure out what was going on here:
The first book of the series is What Moves The Dead. It’s a novella series by T. Kingfisher. And the main character is from a made up country that’s like somewhere in the Balkans. And that country is called “Gallacia” (guh-LAY-shee-ah). That’s how it’s pronounced. And I was like, that sounds familiar. I’ve heard that before somewhere. Is that a real place? And at first I thought I was misremembering Galicia (guh-LEE-see-ah), ’cause it’s spelled similarly. And I was like, no, okay. It’s not Galicia (guh-LEE-see-ah). That’s a different spelling and it’s different pronunciation. It just looks similar on the page. And then I was like, is a region of Spain also called “Galicia?” Maybe it’s pronounced differently. No? Okay. And then I was like, oh, it’s pronounced like Galitia (guh-LAY-shee-ah), the Roman province in Anatolia. But it’s spelled differently. What is happening?!
Chris: It’s brilliant really, ’cause it sounds like a real country.
Oren: It does. It sounds like a real place. But it’s not spelled like the real one. It’s not quite the same.
Chris: I mean, that is kind of a brilliant strategy of your historical fiction. You want a fake country. Just look and find a bunch of words that are similar and be like, okay, this sounds a lot like several different real places, but is it quite the same as any of them? Sneaky, sneaky, Kingfisher. Very sneaky.
Oren: It is sort of funny imagining adding another country to the Balkans, ’cause that area’s already pretty crowded.
Chris: Well, that’s exactly why you just wouldn’t notice. You know, we could sneak another country in there. You wouldn’t notice a difference ’cause there’s already so many.
Oren: That’s the thing you notice with your readership, your readers are more likely to think it’s weird if you add another country between like France and Belgium, ’cause we kind of know that area pretty well. But like, you know, your average reader doesn’t know as much about Eastern Europe or in this case, southeastern Europe or anywhere else. So it becomes easier to accept that there’s like a fake country in there somewhere.
Chris: I have a question for you, Oren.
Oren: Yeah?
Chris: Do you know why The Tainted Cup uses titles that are Roman-like, but not actual Roman titles?
Oren: I have no idea. I also only know one for sure that is a Roman title, which is princeps. But it uses princeps weird. In real life princep is a very high ranking Roman title. It’s where the word “prince” comes from. Whereas now we think of a prince as being subordinate to a king. That’s not how it used to be used. It used to mean a supreme ruler. So it was like higher ranking than a king, which is why it caused a lot of drama when the ruler of Wales called himself “the Prince of Wales,” which is a whole other story. That’s the one that I noticed. And it was a little weird ’cause in The Tainted Cup that’s like a fairly low ranking title and it was confusing me all to heck.
Chris: One of the strange things about The Tainted Cup is I guess we’re going for a kind of Roman feel because there are Roman-like words that evoke the feeling of Roman, but they’re not actually the same.
Oren: Yeah, and there are other Roman words too, right? Like we’ve got a senate, we’ve got legions. So it’s like, this seems kind of Roman. But then there are a bunch of non-Roman titles, but are also not real words. So that makes it hard to tell what the ranking system is.
Chris: And there’s so many of those ranks too.
Oren: Yeah, I couldn’t tell like, is that a rank or a name?
Chris: Why can’t we just do like “junior princeps,” “senior princeps”…
Oren: “Ultra mega princep.”
Chris: [Amused] “Ultra mega princeps!”
Oren: I would probably have just gone for real rank names like captain or governor or something. I think that would probably have worked better just because, if for no other reason I wouldn’t be struggling to tell the character’s rank and name apart.
Chris: That’s part of the problem. It’s really hard. There’s so many names and every character has two names too, of course. Just to make it extra hard for us.
Oren: I was like, is “Immunis” her name or her job?
Chris: Is there something wrong with the original Roman titles?
Oren: If it were me, I would probably not have used all the Roman titles. I think that would’ve made the setting feel a little too Roman and then it would be weird ’cause the setting is also different from Rome in a lot of ways.
Chris: I guess there could be an issue of people thinking that it’s literally Rome when you’re just trying to give it a Roman feel.
Oren: Yeah. Like I would probably not have used princeps. I think senate and legions are both fine ’cause those are like, associated with Rome. But not only Rome has those. Whereas like princeps is really specific. It’s like, are you also gonna call the leaders “consuls?” That’s again, very Roman specific. That just seems a little weird at that point. So that’s me personally. If I was creating that setting I would have kept the Roman associated, but not specifically Roman names, and then dropped the princeps.
Chris: Because it has the wrong association to it.
Oren: Yeah. And it’s being used wrong. It’s like, too Roman and also gives the wrong impression if you know what it means.
Chris: That does sound tricky. We want it to be Roman-ish, but not directly Roman.
Oren: Look, you just do what I did in my book. Okay. I stand by that.
Alright. Well, now that we have figured out everything there is to know about naming, definitely, I’m gonna go ahead and give this podcast the name of “Done.”
Chris: Did you know that you can be a Dire Wolf, Pegasus, or Sea Serpent? These may be our made up terms for our Patreon tiers, but they’re also cool titles that you can get if you become our patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our World Turtle level patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
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