Why most World Building Place Names Suck

World Building for D&D? Writing? Just for fun because you're a nerd like me? Here's (another) way to make place names, this time, it's easy, quick, simple, and shows a little bit about the cultures of the world.

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Here's a little world building for you. At the end, there's a map of Appendus, the land of the Vaettr (related to elves). The southeastern half, from the Gabhal Dynasty, to Sud Vekni, up to Teos was controlled 150 years ago by the Empire of Areo. Areo gained power by discovering elemental magic, and diffused it through its conquests. The administration of such a large empire collapsed in on itself in a short time, and soon the native peoples were able to reestablish their own autonomy. Since then, the Saesics have been expanding more and more, the dynasties of Drumaul have consolidated and began to fight each other in massive civil wars. In the southwest, the Kaitechtien Empire is hoping that Oudica II, the successor to Mayica the Conqueror, will live up to his father's accomplishments (he won't). To the north, the Gnomes from across the Morning Ocean carve their colony of Tryum from the untamed tribes of the region. Ohlām and King Gikrate have just created a pact that will hopefully drive the Stubbornfoot armies out of Appendus once and for all...

Inevitable flames in the comments about another place names video: this was gonna be a part of the next one but I decided just to make it its own thing. It's separate anyways so I don't really care.

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First song: My Town Yo Town

► Music Credit: LAKEY INSPIRED
Track Name: "Blue Boi"
License for commercial use: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported "Share Alike" (CC BY-SA 3.0) License.

[Stoneworks]

Lmao so many people in these comments being like 'It's Köln not Cologne!!' like I didn't say that at 1:07

[devinsamuel]

"The easiest way to do this without actually constructing a language-"

What are you, a coward?

[realmless]

'Nother tip, make a suffix, midfix, or prefix that simply means "city" in that language, and give it to 5% of that cultures cities. Better yet, make five and then combine them together to make a city name without anything else: Villeburg.

[TheZapan]

You used the French example without realizing that those "merger" zones are not only the sign of mutual cultural influence, but also of conquests that moved the borders back and forth for centuries.
In the case of France, some of those cultures were absorbed and more or less erased by the central power, and this too can be reflected in the maps, by making transliterations of local names from the old language of the vanquished to the new language of the conqueror.

In fact, all the town names in southern half of France are literally transliterations in French of older names in the Occitan language group (Gascon, Languedocian, Provençal), the difference is subtle because French and Occitan are both romance languages, but a shift in the letters used is still notable and very much a display of power by an invading force.

As such the main cities were renamed:
Bordèu=Bordeaux
Tolosa=Toulouse
Carcassonna=Carcassonne
Marselha=Marseille
Montpelhièr=Montpellier
Clarmont=Clermont-Ferrand
Ais=Aix-en-Provence
Niça=Nice
This also led the cartographs of the king to make amusing mistakes, for example one suburb of Toulouse is strangely named "Three Cuckolds" (Trois Cocus) after misunderstanding the Occitan name "Tres Cocuts" which means Three Cuckoos.

[fairy]

My Belgian Phlegm ass: laughing through the pain of having to know four languages and being good at none

[redeye]

I accidentally did this in a way while playing Stellaris. Oddly enough, it was my shitpost faction of aliens that it happened with. Basically, I ended up putting the word "Yog" before the names of colonies, and "oth" at the end of the names of colonized planets and their systems. Usually I just adapted the generated name for this purpose, deleting any "a"s and the like at the end before adding an "oth", although on rare occasions I kept the original name and just put a "Yog" before it.
For my starships, rather than being SS or HMS or the like before the name, they got the term "Yoggoth". While they didn't actually mean anything to me before, they sort of gained meanings on their own and how they saw starships as a sort of home, like a ship compared to an island. I never worked out any kind of actual conlang for it because it was and still is essentially a political humor shitpost faction, but having some lore behind it makes it a bit more interesting than just Eternal President Georgg Buush of a hive mind empire waging an eternal war for the energy credit standard. They tend to be fairly dysfunctional as well for some reason, always hemorrhaging some needed resource or another and waging wars that don't go anywhere after 200 years of bombing the enemy planets and hunting down their reinforcements that keep evading my fleets. I wasn't intending that accurate of a parody.

[GeneralLiuofBoston]

4:52
Chinese cities and provinces (especially the more well known stuff) is usually geographically based.
Beijing - Bei (north) Jing (capital) -> Northern capital
Nanjing - Nan (south) Jing (capital) -> Southern capital
Shanghai - Shang (high/open) Hai (sea) -> (the city) Open to the sea
Chongqing - Abbreviated version of the double celebration of Zhao Dun's coronation of king and then emperor (Shuangchong Xiqing -> Chongqing)

Provinces too:
Hebei - He (river) Bei (north) -> North of the river (Yellow River)
Hubei - Hu (lake) Bei (north) -> North of the lake (Dongting Lake)
Sichuan - Si (four) Chuan (another word for river, but also plains) -> Four Rivers / Four Circuts/Plains of Medieval China

[ftjqvil]

Easy: just Google translate random stuff into hungarian or something and play around with the results a bit

[adamf.charles]

I was acctually struggling **Right Now** with inventing names to my conworld. You are a sighn from God qwq

[tonio]

To be more exact the names you selected in France have been latinized then frenchified with time but they were Basque, Celtic and Greek of origin.
Though really nice introduction to toponymy. You can always go deeper and nobody really needs to be a real little Tolkien to really capture good thought out namings.

[Bronze_Age_Sea_Person]

This Idea of names can also work somehow with colonized places. Here in Brazil, there are tons of city names coming from Tupi, mixed in with names of catholic saints. So you can have Curitiba and São José dos Pinhais and Araucária in the same region and both somehow mention the araucaria pines in the region in different languages.

[watsondavis]

I wrote a php script so that I can feed in consants, vowels, along with rules on how to put them together, and then I run that for each main language and some sub-region.


But I never thought about the boundary regions.


This is genius! Thank you!

[kmmmsyr]

Also there are translated city names. For example, in Turkey: Prussa>Bursa, Stanpoli>İstanbul, Zone Göldağı (French-Turkish mixed name)>Zonguldak or Gallipoli>Gelibolu. When a place is conquered by another nation, they often keep the name, but pronounce it wrong, and the wrong pronounciation becomes the actual name in a long time.

[luciachayes]

I can understand why most don't, but I pretty much always make a conlang for every region I create. It just makes the world more "real" to me. Though I do admit when I get lazy I just pick things that "sound good" and rationalise them later.

Also, I enjoy playing around with what each place is called in different languages. You have a good example there with Cologne, Köln in German. I think playing around with exonyms and endonyms also reinforces the cultural differences, as in "You come to my land calling it some ancient name for it by people who conquered me?" —"Yes."

Great video as always!

[eccoeco]

Cologne was the Roman city of Colonia Claudia hence the name

[artoy]

Another trick that can be used (which can also help the lore) is that you can have the name of a city in the language of its founders and then adapt the name to the pronunciation of the language of the current inhabitants. For example the Carthaginian city of Qart Hadasht in Spain transmuted into "Cartagena", as the Arabs transformed CaesarAugusta into Saraqusta; Or in simpler examples, Barcino became Barcelona.
This can be useful to further represent the wars and interactions between the nations of your world, thus better reflecting the lore.

[hudsonbakke]

"The easiest way to do this without actually constructing a language-"

Me, who has already fully developed language families for every culture in my world: *sad biblaridion noises*

[dac]

If you're into world building, your local community college has classes both on earth science/plate tectonics, and also GIS (Geographic Informational Sciences) which are about how cities and cultures form, where and how civilizations impact the geography, and all sorts of subtle aspects of the spread of society. Really recommend it for DnD campaigning.

[Paledomain]

This is seriously good stuff. It also eases you into creating languages, its a lot easier when you have somewhere to start and compare!

[wintersking]

Actually Marseilles is actually based in Greek since it was a Greek colony back in the day, Masallia, but then the Romans conquered it.