On Worldbuilding: Place Names — countries, cities, places

Watch out 6/12/19

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~ Tim

[HelloFutureMe]

*CORRECTION* : Istanbul was not officially renamed till many centuries later (though the name Istanbul was used within the Ottoman Empire colloquially), and the maps I found were not necessarily Ottoman made - my bad research there. The point about names and power still stands, but I made a mistake. If you want a different example, look into St Petersburg in Russia, whose name changes reflected power shifts as well.

No flag, no country name, and I'm backing it up with this rifle from... the National Naming Association. ***Watch out 6/12/19***



~ Tim

[eknapp]

“How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth, " when it is clearly "Ocean.” -Arthur C. Clarke

[imprincesswolfy]

Fun fact: in Mexico there’s a state called Yucatán, which was named when a Spanish conquistador arrived there and asked someone “what do you call this place?” He answered “yucatan” which meant either “I’m not from here” or “I don’t understand you”

[Tomensnaben]

"You don't need to create an entire language to name a place." Thanks, I really needed that.

[martinxy]

We can only agree on one thing, and thats the name of our planet, *DIRT*

[James_Wisniewski]

Then there's the African nation of Chad, a country called Lake which was named after a lake called Lake Lake.

[DolusVulpes]

My favorite thing about how the names of places evolve is that they will without fail always become as redundant as possible. There are so many hills whose names mean "hill hill", so many rivers whose names mean "river river", and so many islands whose names mean "island island". The practice of naming things redundantly is so common that there's even a Wikipedia page just for listing places with redundant names.

[ThrottleKitty]

Almost every desert on the planet is named "Desert Desert", just with a different language used for the first desert.

[ghs-]

There's a pretty good place name near where I live: Breedon on the Hill. Bree, of course meaning hill, and don, of course, meaning hill, and hill, of course, meaning hill. Breedon on the Hill literally means hill hill on the hill.

[marcossoares]

Fun Fact: A lot of places in Brazil have names in tupi language, even in the interior of the country. The thing is the tupi's lived just in the coast of the continent, and not at the interior.
So people wrongly assume that this names are given by the native that lived there, when actually others tribes, with others languages populated the area.
The portugueses used the tupis of the coast as guides to colonize the dense forests of the mainland, and for that they learned a litlle of tupi language, and named the places using the names given by these natives guides tupi speakers, witch never went too far inside the country before.
So, these places aren't named by the original natives, or even the colonizers, but by the guides witch never lived in the region.
(If you read this, thanks, its 6 a.m. and I'm super bored, writing fun facts on YT videos just to not sleep again)

[bkr_]

Longest place name in Wales:

Which translates to: “St Mary's Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel near a Rapid Whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the Red Cave.”

[Scroteydada]

My tactic: make names that sound cool and then asspull a deep history around it I'll hardly refer to in the final text

[alexross]

There's a place in Delaware called "Murderkill River."
It was originally called "Modder Kille" meaning "Muddy River" which sounded similar to "Moeder Kill" meaning "Mother River."
By the time the English got to it, they named it "Murderkill River."

[matiaspereyra]

"Coming up with names is hard"
Yes, ask the scientific community

[thevoidlookspretty]

“No flag, no name!”
Reminds me of a wise saying by Blue from OSP:
“If a flag isn’t waving, its ripe for enslaving.”

[polytech]

A personal favorite of mine about a name of a fictional town is "Novac" in Fallout New Vegas, called like that for the only working letters of the sign of "no vacancy" in the central motel.

[WindspriteM]

A lot of exonyms broadly mean: "the people who speak weirdly"
Barbarians, basically.

The word for Germany in most Slavic languages originated from a word that meant: "mute" or "speechless" because those were the people they couldn't communicate with, while some communication could be done with speakers of other slavic languages.

In Germanic languages, a word with a similar origin is "welsh", and it's applied differently in Germany and England.

The English named the nearest people living to them that they couldn't understand, the Welsh, while the Germans often used almost the same word ("Welsch") to refer to people who spoke romance languages (especially French) and the areas they lived in ("Welschland" could refer to France, french-speaking Switzerland or Italy).
The language of travelling peoples was also referred to as "welsch"

"Kauderwelsch reden" means "talking incomprehensible nonsense" in German.

I find this very fascinating, because it's just so revealing about how universally ignorant people can be independent of where they're from, if they can't communicate with another group of people.

[sauron]

And then 'Hivenfalls Polm' becomes a great city, the waterfall is destroyed when the river is redirected, and it becomes a great regional capitol known as 'Polm'

[Grayham]

What you can also do while naming places is think about miscommunication, for example Canada was named Canada after an indigenous word that means village but the Europeans thought that was the name of the place and started to call it Canada (it was also called New-France and later New-England for a while though).

[antoinemonks]

One of my favourite exonyms is in "The War of the Worlds." Humans refer to the alien invaders as "Martians" and due to the nature of the conflict we never discover what the aliens call themselves.