I have a degree in lingustics and would be happy to coordinate the "research" for a data-base, but I don't know jack about scripting such things. Would anybody here by willing to write a little script for random name generation?
Perhaps Canonfire could host the script when it's finished?
Thanks guys.
The Everchanging Book of Names has greyhawk names by nationality (but not by human subrace)...maybe somebody could write a couple extra chapters for the EBoN...
Never heard of the EBoN. Where do I find it?
Personally, I find these things don't work well since they're based on the collective names in sources and it's not like the authors were following any hard and fast rules.
You're better off establishing your own preferences for flavour. For instance, old suel names can be spanish inspired, and old oeridien german or roman, etc. Establish a campaign/game flavour of your own and stick with it and you'll get more value from it than trying to replicate canon names.
There's already one for Nyrond on Nyrond LG's website.
Personally, I find these things don't work well since they're based on the collective names in sources and it's not like the authors were following any hard and fast rules.
You're better off establishing your own preferences for flavour. For instance, old suel names can be spanish inspired, and old oeridien german or roman, etc. Establish a campaign/game flavour of your own and stick with it and you'll get more value from it than trying to replicate canon names.
I disagree slightly (but not much) with Delglath. I agree that the usefulness of such things is limited, especially since the authors of canon sources didn't seem to be following any hard and fast rules all of the time. However, certain sources have established certain feels that I find difficult to capture sometimes on the fly, and a nifty little generator like the EBoN can help. I don't think the stuff in the EBoN captures the feel I had in mind very much, though, but it is better than nothing. I think the Scarlet Brotherhood accessory, and Ivid the Undying, for example do provide a corpus which a linguist could analyze to derive some "rules" for producing Suel- or Oerididian- sounding names. I'm especially interested in producing ancient Suel and Oerdian names for tomb inscriptions and whatnot.
I think the Scarlet Brotherhood accessory, and Ivid the Undying, for example do provide a corpus which a linguist could analyze to derive some "rules" for producing Suel- or Oerididian- sounding names. I'm especially interested in producing ancient Suel and Oerdian names for tomb inscriptions and whatnot.
Like I said, the Nyrond LG website has one where the creator has done exactly this (he came into the Greytalk chat once and told us about it).
If you're willing to edit out most of the names, some of them aren't too bad, but most are nonsensical and unpronounceable.
I may be totally blind (or it might be that I'm at work and don't have time to look very closely), but where is the name generator on the Nyrond LG page? I couldn't find it.
One of the problems of computational linguistics is getting a computer to take into account certain phonetic rules that change the features of certain sounds when they occur in particular environments (for example, in English both 't' and 'd' become what is called a 'flap,' shorter and more d-like than t-like whenever they begin an unstressed syllable--compare 'rider' and 'writer'. Taking rules like these into account when writing the script for random name generators might eliminate some of the unpronouncibility problems these things tend to have. Probably something more like deletion of consonants that don't form acceptable syllable onsets (like sl, sk, dr, etc. thinking purely in terms of English onsets) would help too.
Is this idea just entirely too...weird, nerdly, useless, what have you?
http://www.nyrond.org/turbine/page/players/names.html
I found somewhere on the net some listing of common and uncommon names and their meaning. For example, I needed a Baklunish Pelor Prophet, and I called him Abdenour. The meaning of Abdenour is "Servant of the Light". That sound pretty good to me.
I sometime use a random name generator, but I must agree that more often than not it provides few good sounding names. I'm more in favour of keeping some Name Lists and use them randomly (or choose from them). With little research, even elvish and orcish dictionaries can be found.
By the way, I also own a paper Finnish/French dictionnary. It is a good source for any fantasy name because it is really far from the two languages commonly used in my area (french and english).
Hope this may be inspiring for any of you.
For those of you who are in my position (having a hard time to choose or find a name for a character), there is the link to a great site having many many many names and their meanings. The site is great because the names are divided by nationality and genders. There are charts for old type names like Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Amerindian, Hebrew, and much more (even old French and English names).
The site is a good reference for Fantasy or Contemporary games.
The site is:
http://www.20000-names.com
This is surely a start for any serious name users
Fearghal