Toponomy, or How to Name Places!

[Ascension]

Now that's some great info there, Peg...very nice and thank you very much. I'll definitely be using this.

[Korrigan]

For those who'd like to use french as a basis for your toponymy, there are a few facts that are worth knowing (especially if you plan to give it a medieval feeling).

Lots of places are named (as in any language, I guess) after landmarks : rivers, hills,... or after what the place was used for in the first place.

For example, if you want to use landmarks :

- The french city of Bordeaux is named after the fact it is a coastal city. Bordeaux a contraction of "bord des eaux", which could be translated as "water side".
- The town of Liège is named after a small river that crossed it before it was "forced" underground, the river Légia.
- You can find a whole lot of places with names like Montrouge (red hill), Le Chesne ("chesne" is an old form of the word "chêne", which means "oak tree"),...

Places named after what they were used for :

- There's a neighborhood in the city I grew up in called La Bergerie (the sheepfold). Of course you won't find any sheep, but it's what it used to be.
- There are villages called La Forge (the forge), Vieux-Moulin (old mill),...

A lot of place are named using ancient words. This is what makes french medieval places sound "medieval"... You can use oldish versions of some words quite easily :

- The word "château" (castle) used to be "castel" (as in Castelnaudary, the new castle of Ary, or in Castelsarrasin, the Saracen castle)
- The word "royal" (related to the King) used to be "réal" (as in Montréal, the King's Hill)
- The word "nouveau" (new) used to be "nau" (like before, in Castelnaudary, which we can decompose as "castel nau d'Ary", the new castle of Ary)
- The word "libre" (free) used to be "franc" (as in Villefranche, free city)

People who named the places liked to show how new they were :

- Chateauneuf-du-Pape (Pope's new castle)
- Villeneuve-d'Ascq (the new city of Ascq)
- Neufchateau (new castle)
- Funilly enough, the "Pont Neuf" (new bridge) in Paris is the oldest one in the city

Of course, we also have more than a few names that come from other languages : latin, german, flemish, italian, spanish,...

[m2wester]

Not sure how that works in other countries, in Germany the endings of village and town names are often regional for various reasons.

One typical thing is that in borderregions or conquered regions, place names are derived from the original language, for example, in Eastern Germany, there are a lot of places that were originally slavic settlements and retain some features of those (-in, -ow, -itz, -leben [probably Germanized from -slav). The far north has some endings common with Skandinavian city names (-by, -holm).

Then, the spelling of the same thing very often depends on the local slang, eg -rode, -roda, -rath and -reuth all stem from "Rodung" (deforestation), -rode is typical for north Germany, -roda east Germany, -reuth Bavaria, -rath Rhineland. Other example: -um in northern Germany, -heim elsewhere (Heim=home). In some cases a word might just be typical for a region (-wig for market in old north German).

In most maps, this shouldn't play much of a role because you won't need enough names for it to matter, but in a detailed map of a large enough empire, I believe this is something to keep in mind, especially if you want to give different regions an own flair.


I'd also like to mention that while Fantasy names are often pretty tacky, Dark Forest is perfectly fine (Apart from the "Schwarzwald" - Blackwood - there's also a German town called "Finsterwalde" - Darkwood) and in cases where the location lives up to its name, I wouldn't object a Dire Swamp either - if there's just a couple of hermits living in it and the neighbours fear going near, they might well call it the Dire Swamp.

[Saule]

Interesting

I know that (English) Irish placenames are usually just how an English speaking person would write the original Irish name. The names in Irish are often references to the landscape. I personally think it's interesting how very mysterious sounding names can have a very basic history. Inisheer for instance is 'Inis Óirr' in Irish, which simply comes from 'East Island'.

I actually had to look up how it usually works in the Netherlands, but I found that most are references to the landscape as well. Because they come from very old Germanic languages, most names aren't recognizable by people today.