*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
I’ve got so many countries which I should actually name, rather than “the kingdom of ____” errrrrrrr........ well it’s an excuse to watch your video, I guess 🤷♀️
There's way too many Springfield's in the US. Where's that elaboration nooch? There's usually just one Springfield per state that has one, so it's kind of hard to blame.
@@theshamanite There are a lot of city names in the USA that occur almost one per state. What this says about the USA is the historic emphasis on state governments and thier once greater autonomy. It demonstrates the focus of the power and that the federal government was a unifying force to it's subordinate regions but not an oppressive one. This does not mean it was perfect in this regard but that there was an overarching theme and value placed on it. In contrast, too many Alexandrias in the ancient world was because one guy named a bunch of places he conquered after himself. Both tell you a lot about the culture.
Goes to the rule of power. The people writing the history books live on the land parts. If someday the dolphins or octopi take over the world they'll probably call it ocean or something.
Water covers the earth... but if you take away the earth, there is no planet... on the other hand, take away the Ocean and you still have the planet... barren... but still the planet.. it's like how a bucket filled with water has more water than bucket, but the item is still called a bucket... it's just holding the water...
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”
Allegedly, that's the same reason for the name of Kangaroos in Australia lol (supposedly "Kanaguruu" meant "i dont understand you" in the language of the locals they met)
@@slevinchannel7589 You can just look up another language and take or add letters to that language to make it "new" or "alien" without making a whole new language is what I meant.
Having done some looking around... most languages just use dirt or ground or earth ball so it's all basically the same. Sometimes they're named after gods of earth and stuff, which is the same thing.
Then we need to reclassify what we consider a name. For example, if aliens were to call me Lokesh Human, does Human become part of my name of is it just a classifier added to a name? If we seriously consider classifiers to not be part of the name, then there's less instances of river rivers, because we know that the name is Avon, and it's a river. Part of the problem comes from our tendency to include classifiers as part of the name. Why am I talking to a cat again?
@Insignatious The difference being, Most rivers actually have different names than "River river". I was doing some research for this for an RPG based on going back to the root meanings. So, for example, the Nile means "Great", Mississippi means "Long water", Amazon means "One breast" (named supposedly by the Portuguese commemorating a battle with a group of female native warriors near the mouth of said river), Missouri means "Muddy", Thames means "Wide", etc etc. There are, of course, differences even among deserts. While the general meaning of the names usually will boil down to "Desert desert" (Sahara, as you noted, literally is "Desert"), there are variations. "Gobi", for example, means literally "No Water", while Kalahari means "Thirsty place", Sinai means "Hated or Cursed place", while the Mojave desert was named after the Mojave people who lived there... "Beside the Water". The Namibian desert, of course, just means "Big". So there are actual exceptions to the rule
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.
There are also places where due to significant language changes it gets repeated (e.g. Bredon Hill (and Breedon Hill) "Brez" is Celtic, "Dun" is old English)
I just try to be brutally on the nose with a couple of names I can joke around. Like a southern trade route being guarded by two towers called "The Hands" why? I have no idea but the locals in my world have a good explanation "because there's always an asshole keeping his hands open." As the towers function both as garrison and toll booths. The eastern tower regulates incoming wares and taxes the western outgoing.
@@keenakeet3792 thanks- I name most stuff on the nose like that.or at least in a very simplistic fashion. A "green mountain" for a volcano would probably be a bit counter intuitive but if it is what makes an agricultural region flourish? why not? I use names like that for natural landmarks and cities/villages that evolved naturally and a bit stranger less fitting names for defensive structures. (defensive structures are named after the elements. like Seahold or stormwind. Just because it is former empire with an almost druidic state religion. Meaning symbols of strength are always taken from nature, (plus everything that has to do with storms just sounds cool but you gotta justify that within the storx^^) )
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)
@Facepalm Full O' Napalm the Iroquois aren’t even a tribe. It’s a nation of several tribes who banded together because they spoke similar languages and all lived in longhouses. Their name is the haudenosaunee (the people of the longhouse).
This reminds me of a one story where colonizers tried to talk to natives. The natives replied with a word, which in their language means "i dont understand what youre saying." Because the colonizers didnt understand either, they named that place after the word the natives used lmao. I cant remember the specifics though
São Paulo was a jesuitic village, this the paulistas (from São Paulo) were indigenous descendants, and probably all spoke Língua Geral, meaning they were just naming things after their common language.
I like how the plants and animal names sometimes contrast with the common names. Take the Douglas Fir, named for a botanist. The scientific name, pseudotsuga menziesii, is named for a rival botanist: Menzies. One rival won the recognition of the scientific community, and the other entered the average man's lexicon. "Pseudotsuga" is interesting in itself in that it combines Greek "false" and Japanese "hemlock". False Hemlock, which is apt since the Douglas Fir is neither a hemlock nor a true fir tree.
Longest place name in Wales: “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch” 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.”
This wasn't naturally named though - falls into the power category - it was renamed when it got a railway station attract tourism. It's generally referred to as Llanfair or Llanfair PG. So i guess that's another part of the naming at work.
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.
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.
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.
Thats interesting! In Dutch the translation of 'Kauterwelsch' is 'koeterwaals'. Waals is also the language people speak in the Frech part of Belgium: Wallon.
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."
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'
More accurately given that logic it be more likely the name would change to Hivenfalls (or just Hiven) as the people would not know what that word means but do know Polm means water, a element that no longer exists.
And then it gets taken over by a group of people who cannot pronounce the letter L and substitutes all Ls with Rs so the city is now known as "Porn" lololololololololol
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).
another example would be yucatan; when the spanish arrived there, they asked the natives who, since they obviously didn't know spanish, replied with "we don't understand"
There is a joke in Germany, why Canada/Kanada is called so... The first european settlers saw no indigenous people and said: " Kaana da!" (Keiner da! = Nobody there!)
Combine it with prefix and you could name a city new new, like New Novolondon. Or maybe even postfix, though I don't know if any language make new words this way.
@@mytiliss682 Well in my country of Malaysia, when the southern state of Johor made a new state's capital they called it "Johor Bahru". They added "Bahru" which mean new in our language so that people could distinct the name of the state's capital and the state itself. This mean Johor Bahru mean New Johor. It was how our language work like for example Bukit Nenas mean Pineapple Hill but a realy straight up direct translation would be Hill Pineapple (Hill of Pineapple) since Bukit mean Hill and Nenas mean Pineapple. We also have one state in the east coast of the peninsular called Kelantan which was a simplification of it's original long name which came from the old form of the local dialect (as the local dialect there also continue evolved) and at one point on it's history the tragedy fall the rullling dynasty which end up dividing the state and a warlord from Pattani came to unified the state and established a new rulling dynasty the Kelantan. Since the old capital of the Kelantan was destroyed alongside the fall of the old dynasty, a new capital was established and it was simply name "Kota Bharu" mean new fort or new city which the name remain until nowaday and it was still the capital of the state of Kelantan. Well if you noticed the different spelling of Bharu and Bahru, both name appear at different time which mean the spelling evolved.
"Batalha", Battle in Portuguese, is a town founded after and around a Monastery that was built to give thanks for a victory in a very important battle.
In the region of Veneto in Italy there are many towns which have "della battaglia" after their name. It means "of the battle" and it was added after WW1 and the battles of the Piave river.
Nonono, I will share the greatest secret to coming up with names for a fantasy setting: 1) Use a crappy placeholder name until inspiration strikes. 2) Become attached to the placeholder name. 3) You're now attached to the placeholder...
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.
Sci-fi is a complicated can of worms since you've basically got the entire set of steps, across an entire world, and it's already happened, and it's spread out beyond their home The scope is positively ludicrous and it's incredibly hard to go down into step-by-step creation for a space-age society beyond the critical points because of how much culture is represented by an entire planet. You gotta remember, you could host an entire campaign on just one island on that entire world, let alone a continent, *let alone the world* and that's assuming it even *has* continents. It can help to do it for some things but trying to do it overall is an exercise in insanity lol
You could literally just name each planet whatever the word for Dirt, Ocean or Home is in the dominant cultures home. Or if it's mostly uninhabited you could simply just copy an actual planets name, for instance: HD 224693 b. That's a planet name and is unlikely to change, or if the planet is a hot spot for mining or something, it could have a colloquial name, such as "Herdee Twenty Two B" or something that rolls off the tongue a lot easier than HD 224693 b
You can also play around with vowel shifts. literally just draw a couple lines on the IPA chart from a naming lang (devolve by bringing some towards a "centre", diverge to evolve). Can do the same thing with consonants, just shift them around on the chart to where they make sense (following general conlang rules).
Singapore had its name evolve from myths and legends before being renamed by colonial overlords. Temasek is one of the oldest known names for the region, before the fall of the Majapahit (no one can pinpoint the exact etymology behind the name today). Then according to legend, some prince called Sang Nila Utama 'discovered' the island and renamed it "Singapura" (singa=lion; pura=city or port) because he allegedly saw one roar at him after he landed (he and his advisors must have been high though, since the region has no recorded sightings of lions ever. Plently of tigers though). Then the British came by did some colonial stuff and adjusted the name to "Singapore" probably cuz it reduces the sylables by one. Singapore is the official name used today; Singapura in Malay documentiation or coats of arms; Temasek as a legacy name in places, buildings, streets, etc. It's fun breaking down names and the history behind them, especially for the places you live in.
In Portugal we still call Singapura cause it’s easier to say it in our language. I think it’s because of how we pronounce vowels. It’s closer to our Latin origins
@@presidentialsystemenjoyer It means "stronghold", or "city" if you look up the etymology of the suffix. It's present in several Germanic languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Old High German.
As for Omashu combined name: a similar thing happened in the Polish capital. Legend has it that a knight called Wars fell in love with a mermaid named Sava, and now people live in Warszawa (w=v), which emblem is the mermaid. By the way, I've always found it curious how accurate the English translation is: Warsaw did indeed see many wars.
It is a late legend though, and the problem with it is that Sava is a male Ukrainian name. Wars (Varsh) is legit, and originally the name meant just "a village of Wars/owned by Wars"
@@pawelkoziol9544I doubt mermaids care much about what gender human names have 😅 Just take the legend and stop picking it apart. It's a legend and not historical fact for a reason.
Slavik Chukhlebov yes is one of the many words with more than one meaning it all depends of the context chico could mean small, boy, budy, and probably more things that I’m not remembering now
So, i've tried to apply this kinda to my own scifi setting. The capital of this interstellar republic is called Miara Cora. The name comes from the fact that 1. the nation is about 300 years old, and 2. they named a lot of stuff after explorers. Miara is the name Mia, the a coming from the French particle to mean "at" (essentially Mia-a-cora). The predominantly english speaking crew of the UNS reliant found this difficult to pronounce, so over time the name "Miara" took place, slowly devolving later on into Mara Cora. The Cora suffix is a term thought up by the three explorers who discovered this small subsystem of planets in the Prycon system. Because of this, the two other planets were named Srednyaya Cora (Middle Cora (it being the central planet in the sub-system) in Russian) and Dreianna Cora (this planet was the third discovered, funnily by a women named Anna, most of the English cosmonauts naming it "Anna's Third" or "Third of Anna" which was very badly translated into "Drei" (Three) Anna, the Cora suffix again added to specify that it's in the Cora Subsystem. The reason the languages are so muddled is because at the time, and up to now, the Republic in this book is massively multicultural and cosmopolitan, coming from an era when the UN managed to somewhat loosely unify the earth and explore the stars.
A breakdown of the English topographic feature of "Pendle Hill" Pen = Brythonic word for hill Dl = A corruption of the Old English word for hill Literally we call this place "Hill Hill Hill"
I always think about a cemetery in Brazil called "Cemitério da Saudade"; the word "saudade" doesn't have a direct translation (it can have multiple meanings depending on the phrase) but here it's like that burning sensation of missing someone you'll never be able to see again, so it's like "Cemetery of the felling of missing someone you loved" and it's poetic and deep 😔
@@scalkin but you can also feel "saudade" for things and people you know you're going to see again. Grief is different, the overall meaning is heavier, idk
There is kind of an example of a 'bigger' and 'smaller' something! Big Diomede and Little Diomede, a set of twin islands in the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska. Also, Constantinople would have been a great example of your point if that had actually been what happened :/ Already in Byzantine times, when you were talking about going "to the city" you would have said "eis tin polin" (which is where Istanbul comes from). When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, the city's name didn't change officially, it was still "Kostantiniyye" in Ottoman Turkish. The official name change happened in 1923 with the foundation of the Republic. Amazing video idea, keep it up! PS: In part 2 of this, you need to mention Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Wales and Y in France.
Also Great Britain (small Britain being Brittany peninsula of France), Lesser and Greater Poland regions of Poland, and also lots of Islands/Archipelagos are called lesser/greater something (Antilles come to mind). Some branch rivers are called "Small 'name of the main river'". Also thanks for saying that Istanbul is actually a Greek name. A lot of people don't know that or the fact that the name Constantinople stayed official until the Republic. New Amsterdam - New York would have been better. Or Tsaristyn - Stalingrad - Volgagrad. Königsberg - Kaliningrad, Pressburg - Bratislava, Leningrad - St. Petersburg. Really there are many much better examples.
i think the name Holland (which is a province and not the name of the country btw) comes from "Hol" meaning low(?) same goes for the countries name "Nederland" Neder literally meaning Low so its "Lowland"
@@dutchdoggo Dat weet ik, is'n scherts 😋 aber wirklich het heet Holt-land (het hout). Ik kom uit Hamburg, wij praaten Platt. Ich kenn auf jeden Fall Nederland :). Aber ja, Holland wirklich heißt Holt-land (het hout) dat is zieker. nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland
@@Jack-rk7jc hollen is old germanic meaning to prick. Holly bushes (prevalent in the area, the origin of the name) are prickly. So Hollywood is prickly wood/bushes.
Wow that was really enriching! This reminded me of three examples in my country, Saudi Arabia:- 1-Naming based on Geography: The city that I live in is called Yanbu, and it's actually a verb that means "something that springs" in Arabic since the area is known for having many water springs in the past that have dried out. (Fun Fact: I once told my sister that if it was an English-named town I would name it Windy Shore, as it's a costal city that is mostly windy, she laughed and said that's a cringe video game name :).) 2-Naming based on Legends: There is another famous costal city named Jeddah, some say it was driven from the Arabic word "Jaddah" that means Grandmother. Legend has it that when Eve died she was buried in this land, hence the name as she is the Grandmother for all humankind :). 3-Naming based on Historical Events: The second holiest city in Islam after Makkah is called Madinah, the city originally was called "Yathrib" (whitch wasn't a very nice name) but it was the only city that accepted the migration of Muslims from Makkah as the rulers of Makkah made them flee, when the Prophet arrived to the city he named it "Al-Madinah Al-Monawarah" which literally translates to "The Enlightened City" to honor and bless it, now to simplify it people just call it Al Madinah "The City".
I named my world "Jai Vendaris" which translates to "The home of Vendaris", Vendaris being the god who created the world, and Jai, meaning 'home' or 'dwelling place'
@@spaghetto9836 I think the issue is being too creative. When coming up with names I often get way too caught up in my own head trying to think of a smart name for it, when in reality I should be thinking "this town has been here for a while so the people would call it Old Town"
How about "The City"? Which actually happens in real life? People living close to NYC just call it "the city", I'm sure this happens in the vicinity of other big cities too
@@elliart7432 It does happen, yeah. It's just that there are so many different languages that what seems like a fancy, neat name could be the simplest, most plain thing you can imagine.
There's the popular legend, which I don't know if it's true, of how a census taker was going around getting the names of the settlements in Alaska, and was told this one town didn't have a name yet so he wrote "No name" on his map, but the cartographers misread his handwriting when they were making the official map and that's how the town wound up being called Nome.
The best census story I heard is about weird fiction writer E.T.A. Hoffman, who worked in Warsaw as an office worker in the beginning of the XIXth century, when modern naming custom of using first name and family name was enforced. Allegedly, he made quite a business of giving names to the Jews, aking them to pay for "expensive" names like Goldstein or Rubinstein.
The northwestern region of France is called Brittany, but to differentiate between that and their British neighbours across the channel the French added "Grande" to the beginning, so you have Bretagne in France and Grande Bretagne is Great Britain. (Fun fact to describe a person from Brittany you would call them a Breton, and a British person is a Briton)
After watching this, I took all the advice and wrote a piece of world building that I am more proud of than nearly any other work that I have ever done. I only wish I could thank Hello Future Me for all the with he's done.
YES, THANK YOU I REALLY NEEDED THIS. I’ve been racking my brain for months finding the name of my overall continent. I’ve got towns and cities done, but I’m really hoping this will help!
@@moistslippers9726 ulfricar (northerners) amataria (southerners) a-cranius (outsiders) these are just examples, or maybe something simpler ulari amunt a-crian and so forth, you know what, fuck it, make a whole new language.
I recommend looking into real life names and their meaning. They tend to be phrases in certain languages like tons of names in the Bible. A lot of languages also name children after virtues (Beauty, hope, Strength etc). Or perhaps something that is consider to embody a virtue (I have a warrior culture that likes the name Kuda meaning snake because they admire how quickly snakes strike their enemies). And finally you also have names that spread from different languages and changed pronunciation as it came over and lost common knowledge of meaning (or older names that lost meaning over time). Also worth considering naming conventions, such as order of names, do they have family names or are they given a second after where they are from, or who their father is. Do they ever rename themselves as part of their religion? Sorry this comment is so long, but this is something I find interesting.
Heyyy let's already do a part of the work for him then. Naming convention also depends on ruling power, most Ghanaians seem to have a Biblical first name, a second first name that indicates the day of the week they were born on, and then a last name (and I think I'm forgetting one, it's been a long time since I looked that up). In the Netherlands and Spain you have regions with separate languages and their own names that follow conventions of those languages, so if you have a Frisian or Catalan name, everyone's gonna know where you're from - which might cause you trouble if you ever try to find a job outside of that specific section of your country, so people might actually name their children more traditional names the whole country recognizes for that reason. On the other hand there's people who use traditional local names as an act of rebellion against 'the man' (see Catalonia right now). It's the same reason people from all regions of China might decide to only teach their children Mandarin Chinese (instead of for example Kantonese) and there's a political struggle going on on the island of Aruba, a former Dutch colony, about whether or not Dutch should still be taught in schools, because Aruba isn't a rich place and parents want their children to have the best possible chance at getting a job, possibly in the Netherlands if they manage to go there, and thus also parents who will give their children traditionally Dutch names... which some believe is slowly killing traditional Aruban culture. I've known Dominicans named George even though they knew no word of English for the same reason. Colonialism and wealth are big driving factors. There's a channel here on youtube called Say It Loud that explores black American culture that also has a video on where their names tend to come from (which is kind of surprising in some aspects).
@@trishapellis I completely forgot about day of the week names. Similarly, there are places ( I don't remember specifically where) where your middle name is a Saint based off of what day you were born on, so you have guys with their middle name Maria. Speaking of Middle names and gender specific names, my real life middle name is Michelle and I find it interesting that in english that name is considered female because it sounds feminine in our language, while in French it is a man's name, basically their version of the name Michael. There are other names like Ariel and Lindsey, which were once men's names but now mostly women's, and I am sure there are names that have done the opposite transformation but I can't think of an example off the top of my head.
@Quantum Last names can also come from where one's ancestors lived! For example, my own last name has two parts, one which means "small village" and the other which is a suffix meaning "small." I usually take it to mean that my last name means "really tiny village" or "puny village."
As a world-builder, naming places is probably my favorite part. In one of my worldbuilding projects, the Naufrages, the people intentionally named places with bad/forboding/off-putting names after liberating themselves from Portuguese rule. So there cities are called Condenaçao (Condemnation), Tempestadt (Storm city), Iscariot (as in Judas), et cetera
After the mixed Portuguese, Galician, Xhosa, Dutch, and Zulu population rejected Portuguese rule, they then tried to emulate and attract the then-Dutch Republic. So they decided rename their capital city of Santa Isabela. They fused Latin tempesta with -stad (or -stadt).
We have a city in Peru call Callao, because the conquistadors thought that was it's name. It actually means "little sibling" because it was the smaller city next to a bigger city call collana or "big sibling"
Fun fact: Istanbul comes from the Greek phrase "εις την Πόλιν" which sounds like "istinpolin" and it meant "to Constantinople". So when Byzantines where saying "I am going to Constantinople" they said "πηγαίνω εις την Πόλιν" which pretty much sounds like . Istinpolin turned into Istanbul and so when someone says "I'm going to Istanbul" he is actually saying "I am going to to Constantinople"... Excuse the bad English please :)
Seems all good to me. Although I think ‘Polin’ just means to the city in general, not Constantinople specifically; and if Istanbul means going to the city, then the phrase: I am going to the city of Istanbul kinda means I am going to the city of going to the city. ;)
@@chestermc9954 Huh. Well I guess you learn something every day. Cheers. I find it hilarious that the city was so well known that people didn’t even name it, if you talked about ‘The City’ everyone knew what you meant.
@@machaiarcanum there are regional cities like that all over. It's pretty common if there's one major city in a rural area for example. "I'm going to the city today", no one is going to ask which one. If you're going somewhere else you'd use the name alone, probably.
@@BobDavies1 Slight correction: The first published Bible in Welsh was printed under Elizabeth I. This encouraged people to leave the Catholic Church in droves as they could finally understand the Bible in their own language.
@Fflur Efa As someone that speaks English as their first (and only) language, I agree that it is absolute nonsense. Most of the rules only work half the time, nothing is spelled the way it sounds, words can sound the same but be spelled three different ways with their own meanings, and a lot of it is just words we stole from the French and then seemingly decided to pronounce incorrectly just to spite them.
After years of worldbuilding, I've found that when I make up words for names, I have a specific style. Like, what consonants or vowels I use and how they're combined. Makes me feel like I have a legacy in my works and a unifying style.
8:54 "Is there any example of one place called 'bigger thing'?" YES! Just down the road from my hometown are two villages called Great Chesterford and Little Chesterford. And many other place names in the region like Great Sampford. Let's also not forget that Great Britain was originally given that name to distinguish it from the Brittany region of France.
Greater Poland and Lesser Poland exist as well. Also Veliky Novgorod (not sure about the exact spelling but it means Great Novgorod, distinguishing it from Nizhy Novgorod)
10:08 , one of the given meanings of Istanbul is that it refers to ''eis tèn polin'' (to the city) which was the way the Greeks referred to Constantinople, since it had no real rival as a metropolis at the time the people simply referred to it as ''the city''.
Imagine two small villages. One by the river had an impressive arch over the door to their town Hall, and they named their community Arch Hamlet. There was a less impressive village inland known for raising goats which was called Goat Hamlet. As time went on the names were shortened to Arkham and Gotham. Eventually Arkham grew into a trading hub while Gotham remained a farming community. However there was a cheese maker in Gotham who's famous Gotham cheese was traded through the port at Arkham. People started to associate Arkham with the cheese and called it Gotham. To differentiate the thriving metropolis from a goat farm, they changed the name to Gotham City. And now you know the rest of the story.
@@Rainbowthewindsage Not broadly. There are a great many Batman stories that retcon how or why Gotham got its name, but the general one is that Gotham is called that...because that's that the founders decided to call it and that "Arkham" is literally just the name of the family that founded the Asylum, and the ISLAND was renamed due to the asylum being the only thing of note. Gotham, however, is, IRL, stealing an old name for New York...which in turn is stealing from a town in England...which IS named for that reason. "Gotham" in Old English is "Goat-home", and is a small town in England that supposedly, centuries ago, learned the king wanted to build a hunting lodge in the region, and (not wanting a royal highway made through their town/to have to deal with a king all the time) all pretended to be idiots when the royal surveyor came to see the town. This started a bunch of jokes about "the Mad/"wise" men of Gotham", which was later used as an insult for other big cities: To call a place "Gotham" was to call the people in it crazy. Washington Irving (the guy who wrote Ichabod Crane) used the joke as a dig at the Mayor of New York, and it kinda stuck. So Gotham City in Batman is meant to be a crazier New York full of madmen and darkness, KIND OF based on the idea of "Goat Hamlet".
@@AllWIllFall2Me I see. I was just curious, although I did know that Gotham is to some degree based off of New York, I didn't know it was also an older name for it.
You see that in several places in North America too. Washington has at least a dozen large cities (including the three largest) named after either a Native American place or people. Seattle is the botched and misspelled version of Chief Si'ahl/Sealth. Tacoma is named for Mt. Tahoma, the original name of Mt. Rainier. Spokane and Puyallup are both named after local tribes. Tons and tons of examples. I don't know if that makes them good guy invaders or if it was just easier to trade and negotiate with the people already there when they used recognizable names.
There are loads of places like this in Canada too. Our national capital, our nation's name itself, and almost half of the provinces' names are Anglicised forms of Indigenous names. There's a section of the Trans-Canada Highway called the Yellowhead, which is a translation of an Indigenous nickname for a white explorer who had blonde hair.
There are many places like that in the Midwest as well. And I'm sure there are all over the county, too, but most of my knowledge is of the Midwestern place names. Hell, over half of the state names come from Native American roots! 26 states in the US have names taken from or derived from Native American languages (and there's also Hawaii, which comes from, of course, the Hawaiian language, which is in the Polynesian family of languages).
I'm from Chicago, a place that still somewhat keeps its Native American name, "Chicagoa" (something like that). 😊 It means "stinky onion", I believe. 😂😂😂⚰⚰
If World Anvil didn't threatened to dump everything I put on it into the "public" pool against my will if I miss a single payment, I might would consider using them. :(
@@lesteryaytrippy7282 Yeah, the basic things are free, and they're basically all you need. The forums are also pretty cool. There's a premium version, but it's not really worth it imo. But yes, free
"Orcland and New Zealand, yeah, land of the orcs." I love this line because it's subtle and if you blink you miss it, but I see you and I appreciate you
at 10:00 - 10:10 when you talk about Constantinople being changed by the Ottoman Empire to "Istanbul" in 1453, you are somewhat misleading: The Ottoman Empire after conquering Constantinople from the Byzantines, they didn't name it "Istanbul": they called it by a "ottoman turkish" name of Constantinople: "Ḳosṭanṭīnīye". It was only around the 1930's Ḳosṭanṭīnīye [by the muslim majority]/Constantinople [by the christian minority] changed the name to Istanbul after the loooong collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Just a short history about the place and city itself.
Also, cool fact that i learned from my grandfather, Instanbul also comes from Greek believe it or not. Because Greeks used to say "ης την πόλιν" or "Is tin poli" meaning, into or entering the city. This stems from the fact that Greeks sometimes called Constantinople "The City", due to the mere fact that everybody knew that they were referring to Constantinople.
I had a suspicion that it wasn't that simple, since someone had to _make_ that choice. According to Wikipedia, apparently the first real use was a description of the Holy Roman Empire, in an attempt to mark it as the Western Roman Empire reborn. Previously, the earliest historians were simply using the term to mark part of Thrace, the shoreline west of the Aegean Sea, so it's not clear why Anaximander/Hecataeus suddenly decided it was an adequate term to describe everything west of the Phasis. But it's _modern_ usage appears to simply be, "That which Charlemagne was allowed to claim according to the Church."
In Sweden sometimes when two places have the same name they get named after the province. There is Kil of Värmland and Kil of Närke. And Fagerhult of Skåne and Fagerhult of Småland
Yeah, Germany does this too, we do it with Rivers. So there's Frankfurt (Main) and Frankfurt (Oder), but also Nienburg (Weser) and Nienburg (Saale). etc. You either write it and say it like 'Frankfurt Main' or 'Frankfurt am Main'.
That's also common in the US, you have Springfield, Massachusetts, Springfield, Missouri, Springfield Illinois, ect. And you have things like Quincy, Illinois and Quincy, Massachusetts
@@cosmicostrich3657 We do the same in Norway. A lot of old names based on natural features are repeated, and are usually referred to by the administrative area they're in, though this is not a part of the official name.
One example of a confusing name is "el Yunque" in Puerto Rico. "Yunque" is the Spanish word for anvil, so one might think it was named by the Spaniards for its shape. But it was actually named by the Tainos, who called it something like "yuké" which means either holy mountain or white mountain, because it's always wrapped in mist and rain. The Spaniards adopted the name, had some trouble with the pronunciation and altered it slightly to "Yunque", which makes it seem like the mountain was just named after anvils.
Amsterdam: comes from 'Aemstelle Dam', 'Dam in the (river) Amstel'. 's Gravenhage (Den Haag/The Hague): 'The Count's Hedge' (because it was quite a wooded area and Holland was a county) 's Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch): 'The Duke's Forest'.
The biggest lake in Europe, Lake Geneva, is called by people that actually live by it (and not in the tini-tiny city of Geneva that only takes up 2% of the lake) "the Léman", or sometimes "Lake Léman". Léman comes from the celtic for "lake", so by calling our lake the "Lake Léman" we actually call it the "Lake Lake". Really deep symbolism over here in Switzerland
Ye, or "fort" but in some cases for basically = thing will wall around it and city = town with wall around it. Hence the Welsh call Chester "caer" = fort = city with a wall around it. Hence Caerdydd = Cardiff.
Castra was a fortress or army camp but over time came to be used as a word that could describe many things. For example a political faction could be a castra or the army as a whole. But generally speaking it meant an army camp. That could be a permanent fortress resembling a castle or a temporary fortified camp.
@@hakonsoreide first off, "city" is not derived from the word for castle, both have separate etymologies. City comes from a word meaning citizenship, citizenry, or...a city. Castle comes from the word meaning camp or fort. Eventually castle went on to be synonymous with "town" or "city" but that doesn't mean it's the same. You're mixing up both etymologies and the timing. On top of that, it doesn't matter what the etymology of "city" is when we're talking about the etymology of "chester". Chester doesn't mean castle. That simple.
Town/City came later as settlement grew up outside Roman Fort Walls ...Castra/Cestra = Chester ...Fort ...later in English becoming Castle ...so your "nit-picky" is factually wrong. The Latin word for Camp which also comes down to us as Campus meant a field.
Just wanted to say "thank you" for this video, I've been building a new nation for a story I am working on and it was a great help. I started knowing I'd want to call this nation the Doramin Empire, which led to deciding that its capital would be called Doram. Since I'd also decided that Doram sat on the banks of the area's major river and at the boundary between the mountainous highlands and the fertile lowlands. So I took your tip about coming up with a lexicon and decided that "Doram" would mean something like "gateway". Then the next city I needed to name was a major port city at the mouth of the aformentioned river. So I took the "Doram" root I already had, and added to that "Afar", a root I made up that means "ocean/sea". Then I used your tip about streamlining to compress "Doram Afar" to "Dorafar". And so on. So again, thank you for this.
I like places called something like “X’s Folly”, because you *know* there was supposed to be a lesson that the original namers thought was worth remembering. You also know that said lesson is just not present in contemporary understanding and also that when you look it up it’s always something like “do not ask your army to cross the river away from actual fording points” or “do not just build a tower on any old ground without foundations”
Midwesterners scorn at you when you say soda instead of pop. I am a born midwesterner and I call it soda because a kid in my high school class transferred from the South, and in the South, where my grandfather was from, pop means a punch to the face.
Zeeland is a Dutch province and the English translation for it is actually "Zealand", so really its just the original name (Nieuw-Zeeland, which is also how the Dutch still call it) but Englishified
"Who gets to choose the name of a place of place is about who holds power there?" I instantly thought in the Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien. "'There is my home' Mim said 'You have often seen it, I guess, for it is tall. Sharbhund we called it, before the Elves changed all the names.' Then they saw that he was pointing to Amon Rudh, The Bald Hill." The Children of Húrin, Of Mim the Dwarf.
Ye. And a lot of people from greater poland (mostly older folk) to this very day not consider anyone west from greater poland a Pole. And usually boast about their uprisings that were the only successufl ones in history of Poland. They are almost as full of their own shit as people from the capital.
I recently used some of the techniques from this video to name a region. The oldest name known to me for it is the Weald, being a forested region. It might've had an older, more specific, name once, but eventually it became just "the Weald." Then, it was conquered by a power roughly equivalent to the Roman Empire. They split the region into eastern and western administrative subsections, naming them Weald Aurora and Weald Vesper. These are the current names. I actually considered how these might change, becoming colloquilized as something like Dawnwood and Evenwood. If another power roughly equivalent to the Normans then conquered the region from the east, the whole Weald might become something like Dawnwood Forest. I actually started the whole process as a sort of joke, trying to come up with really generic-sounding fantasy place names. But then the names Weald Aurora and Weald Vesper emerged and they sounded too cool so I had to ponder why the names contained two obviously different languages.
10:06 That's inaccurate, Mehmed claimed to be the successor of Byzantine Empire, so it wouldn't make sense if he renamed the city Istanbul right away, in reality he renamed the city Konstantinniye, as many former Greek cities did (Izmir = Smyrna, Gelibolu = Gallipoli, Edirne = Adrianople, Konya = Ikonia, Kayseri = Caesaria, Ankara = Angora, Antakya = Antiochia, Atina = Athens, Nigbolu = Nicopolis, Trabzon = Trebizond, etc.)
@@CinnamonCari Supposedly, Turks call it "world", although the word actually comes from an Arabic root meaning "lower (place)", contrasting us with Heaven.
A lot of German villages exist twice in the same region and are indeed called "big[village name]" and "small[village name]" first that comes to my mind are Großbeeren and Kleinbeeren literally meaning bigberry and smallberry so perhaps those were named after berrybushes that peopled settled next to.
Dutch examples: Amsterdam, a dam across the Amstel Rotterdam, a dam across the Rotte Blaricum, the Latin name for that area Noord Brabant (North Brabant) without a south Brabant within the Netherlands because that region is in Belgium. 's-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch), literally the forest of the Duke
In a story I'm writing, it's told with everything translated, this results in most places having names that are meant to be translated when the story is told in another language, with some exceptions. Since my only real language is English, I've mostly only come up with English names for these places. Some have non-English names, but I've translated them as best I can to English. Some of them are purely geographic: Starside, Sunside, The Nest, The Desert, etc. Some include "Great" to indicate they're the biggest or most important of that type: Great Plains, Great Mountain, etc. Two of the mega cities are named after smaller precursor cities, which, in turn, were named after nearby permanent weather features: Hurricane City and Typhoon City. In the case of Typhoon City, it's located on an island formerly known as The Island, but the mega city completely encompasses it now, so the name was dropped and now the entire island is referred to as Typhoon City. In the case of Hurricane City, it's undergone some turmoil over the past hundred years, and so new undead inhabitants in the southwestern side of the mega city refer to their ruins as Necropolis, the city of the dead, and there's a make-shift mutant scientist district directly east of it that its inhabitants refer to as Abom Nation, a play on the term abomination, but outsiders still refer to these areas as part of Hurricane City, being southwest Hurricane City and southern Hurricane City respectively. Exactly 100 years before story start, The Imperial Capital was new enough that it didn't develop a unique name, and it was sacked, conquered, and given away by a different emperor, and was renamed The Old Capital in the process, and its new inhabitants still haven't renamed it because they just don't care about the name, yet. Meanwhile, the new imperial capital, the world's third mega city, was founded and given a different name, Central City, named for how it's the center of the known world, even having the magnetic north pole at its center, causing all compasses to point to it, and the south coasts of Hurricane City, Typhoon City, and Great Plains are all equidistant from Central City, as is the south side of Great Mountain. Central City is the central hub of the world, not just its own empire, since Typhoon City isn't part of said empire. A few additional places include: Dead Man's Road, Hidden City, Wastelands, Hurricane, Typhoon, Underworld, Noman's Land, West Tower, East Tower, Grand Imperial Great North Tower Tree, The Hidden City (not the same one from before), Skycity City, Grand Imperial Gardens, Cave of the Fallen Emperor (aka Home of the Righteous Wind or House R'ind), Snake District, Upper Cavern, Lower Cavern, Eternal Snake God (not related to Snake District), and The Incident Site.
A good translation can work with bent names as well. The translations of LotR were famous for that - Tolkien personally oversaw them to make sure they were done properly to invoke the same feel and meaning in the languages his work got translated to, and that includes placenames. For example, in German, Hobbiton became Hobbingen, The Shire became Auenland, and so on. So don't be afraid to be as free with your naming as you want to be, just because you want them to get translated properly if you work ever gets translated into non-English languages :)
Sometimes ridiculously simple names are just as viable. For example: the capital of the german state northrhine westfalia is Düsseldorf. Düssel is the name of the river that flows through it Dorf is simply german for village So it translates to village by the düssel. Not only does this show how utterly simplistic names can be sometimes (it just describes where it is) it also shows that the name has not changed as it expanded from being a village to becoming the state capital.
Also with St. Louis. However, in Kansas City, people call them Kansas City Kansas and Kansas City Missouri. In St. Louis, however, people just call it St. Louis (Missouri side), and East St. Louis (Illinois). Yeah, we don't prefer to acknowledge Illinois is a part of St. Louis here.
Kansas City is actually an interesting study of how places are named. Kansas City was named by the native American tribe that lived there (Kansa), which probably meant "People of the south wind". It was then people heading west passing through Kansas City and going onward "further into the Kansa land" that the state Kansas got its name. So the state was actually named from the city, even though the city was in another state at the time.
Also, regional names can move. For example, Saxony in Germany is nowhere near the Saxon homeland. This is because the Duchy of Saxony was divided in Saxe-Lauenburg and Saxe-Wittenburg. The former eventually being incorporated into Schleswig-Holstein, while the latter was later given the Electorate of Saxony and, through conquests and such, ended up 'migrating' southwards.
I read similar advice to this once a few years ago and it forever changed the way I feel about world building and inspired one of my most memorable fantasy cities. The innocuously named, Westport. Western most port of an old empire. Once you realize humans name things in ways that are familiar, nostalgic, or utilitarian, you become much less self-conscious about things like Milltown or Ciderville or Battle Vale.
Yeah but it is a sort of joke name because it sounds like Heldesheim (Heldensheim? It's been to long since I read German), home of the heroes, which is one of the flowery ways of describing Valhalla in norse mythology.
Example that hits a cross section of a heap of this- Motu Kōkako- Piercy Island/Hole in the Rock, up in the Far North, Aotearoa Motu (Island) of Kōkako- a bird kept on the island as a sort of aviary since they were useful for hunting Piercy- An admiral that Captain Cook wanted to honour, as he did with a heap of the exonyms he gave Hole in the Rock- The notable land feature of it The use of the island vs the shape of the island and who has power over it Btw if you're visiting the area plz do not take the illegal tours through the Hole- they are breaking the Treaty in doing so
@@TomorrowWeLive Taking or using freehold land is illegal, as was initially guaranteed under the Treaty and enforced through land rights law. I'd also encourage you to be introspective of why you'd be defensive about the semantics of whether someone technically can colonise and not
@@TomorrowWeLive it is illegal to break treaties you signed. For example, if a country signs an international treaty and ratifies it and then breaks it, it deserves sanctions or to be expelled from an international organisation, because if you don't like a treaty, just do not sign it, if you signed it, you have to follow it. And the treaty between British Empire and Maoris kinda fits, cause at that time Maoris were a separate tribe
Cornwall is a great example for place names! I take inspiration from the Cornish language a lot when writing fantasy. Most places in Cornwall begin with a prefix, such as Tre (meaning homestead, a town) or Ros (moor, heath) or Pen (a headland). So you have places like Tregony, Roskear, Penryn... No matter where you go in Cornwall, place names can offer you a wealth of information on where you're going. It'll tell you if it's a town, a beach, a moor, or if it has a mine or a church. Which would have been extremely useful for travellers I imagine. There's a rhyme which goes: "By tre, pol and pen, you will know the Cornishmen!"
8:55 There was actually a VERY particularly funny case of this in late classical antiquity when Khosrau of Iran went to war with Justinian, and sacked numerous eastern cities. He had abducted the entire population of Antioch and was unable to ransom them back to the Byzantines, so he ended up building them an exact replica of Antioch in his borders, right down to the designs of each home and yard. The cherry on top of all of this, though, is that he named it "Weh Antiok Khosrow", or "Khosrau's Better Antioch".
![On Worldbuilding: How do Empires Work? [ Fire Nation l Roman l Mongols ] PART 1](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/51MWp0Hgo90/mqdefault.jpg)
*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
I’ve got so many countries which I should actually name, rather than “the kingdom of ____” errrrrrrr........ well it’s an excuse to watch your video, I guess 🤷♀️
Hey Tim, I really love your videos and wonder whether you could also make a video about Joseph Campbell 's monomyth/the hero's journey?
There's way too many Springfield's in the US. Where's that elaboration nooch?
There's usually just one Springfield per state that has one, so it's kind of hard to blame.
@@theshamanite There are a lot of city names in the USA that occur almost one per state. What this says about the USA is the historic emphasis on state governments and thier once greater autonomy. It demonstrates the focus of the power and that the federal government was a unifying force to it's subordinate regions but not an oppressive one. This does not mean it was perfect in this regard but that there was an overarching theme and value placed on it. In contrast, too many Alexandrias in the ancient world was because one guy named a bunch of places he conquered after himself. Both tell you a lot about the culture.
Hello Future Me 👌
“How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth," when it is clearly "Ocean.” -Arthur C. Clarke
but there's Earth under the ocean. Maybe the planet should be called "Magma".
Goes to the rule of power. The people writing the history books live on the land parts. If someday the dolphins or octopi take over the world they'll probably call it ocean or something.
Water covers the earth... but if you take away the earth, there is no planet... on the other hand, take away the Ocean and you still have the planet... barren... but still the planet.. it's like how a bucket filled with water has more water than bucket, but the item is still called a bucket... it's just holding the water...
Only the majority of us don't live on the ocean, we named the place after the bits we live on.
@@Mr.Nichan I vote for Magma. That sounds pretty badass!
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”
This information literally made my day. :D
I'm mexican and i didnt know this
@@carso1500 Same and I lived in Cancun for 20 years lmao
Allegedly, that's the same reason for the name of Kangaroos in Australia lol (supposedly "Kanaguruu" meant "i dont understand you" in the language of the locals they met)
@@unsuspiciousdweller8967 That's a completely untrue myth lol
"You don't need to create an entire language to name a place." Thanks, I really needed that.
@@slevinchannel7589 link?
@@EvanDelck I gave you all the names!
You find i in 5 Sec's.
You don't. Especially when other languages already exist and can just take or add in letters.
@@RavenCloak13 ??
@@slevinchannel7589
You can just look up another language and take or add letters to that language to make it "new" or "alien" without making a whole new language is what I meant.
We can only agree on one thing, and thats the name of our planet, *DIRT*
Actually, I prefer Sediment.
I suspect its only called Dirt in a few languages.
@@mrhed0nist yeah that probably, I just dont know which ones. Hell I think theres also a few that might still not have a name for the planet
EXCEPT ITS CALLED TELLUS! No, wait, that's just dirt in Latin...
Having done some looking around... most languages just use dirt or ground or earth ball so it's all basically the same. Sometimes they're named after gods of earth and stuff, which is the same thing.
Almost every desert on the planet is named "Desert Desert", just with a different language used for the first desert.
Then we need to reclassify what we consider a name.
For example, if aliens were to call me Lokesh Human, does Human become part of my name of is it just a classifier added to a name?
If we seriously consider classifiers to not be part of the name, then there's less instances of river rivers, because we know that the name is Avon, and it's a river. Part of the problem comes from our tendency to include classifiers as part of the name. Why am I talking to a cat again?
@@lokeshchandak3660 .... ???? I'm going based on current classifications of names, without making up random things for no reason.
@@ThrottleKitty Chaos my friend. Make of it what you will.
@Insignatious The difference being, Most rivers actually have different names than "River river".
I was doing some research for this for an RPG based on going back to the root meanings. So, for example, the Nile means "Great", Mississippi means "Long water", Amazon means "One breast" (named supposedly by the Portuguese commemorating a battle with a group of female native warriors near the mouth of said river), Missouri means "Muddy", Thames means "Wide", etc etc.
There are, of course, differences even among deserts. While the general meaning of the names usually will boil down to "Desert desert" (Sahara, as you noted, literally is "Desert"), there are variations. "Gobi", for example, means literally "No Water", while Kalahari means "Thirsty place", Sinai means "Hated or Cursed place", while the Mojave desert was named after the Mojave people who lived there... "Beside the Water".
The Namibian desert, of course, just means "Big". So there are actual exceptions to the rule
@Insignatious hrrrmmmm someone here is definitely speaks English as a first language... possibly the only.
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.
Link to the Wikipedia page?
@@croquemaster314 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_names
@@DolusVulpes Thanks, this’ll be a fun read
There are also places where due to significant language changes it gets repeated (e.g. Bredon Hill (and Breedon Hill) "Brez" is Celtic, "Dun" is old English)
@@fatrobin72 hill hill hill is my favorite hill.
Then there's the African nation of Chad, a country called Lake which was named after a lake called Lake Lake.
and Chad is one of the least lake-like nations I can think of
Chad is most likely chaud - french for hot
@@Justsevensi Chad is named after Lake Chad which means Lake in an African dialect. That's the actual origin
Lake lake in the country of lake.
all these "lakes" and "Chad's". is it weird that I have a customer at the place I work named Chad Lake?
My tactic: make names that sound cool and then asspull a deep history around it I'll hardly refer to in the final text
Same.
Yeah this is exactly what I did. I named my world Forwent then later came up with a legendary king named Forwent that the world was named in honor of.
I just try to be brutally on the nose with a couple of names I can joke around. Like a southern trade route being guarded by two towers called "The Hands" why? I have no idea but the locals in my world have a good explanation "because there's always an asshole keeping his hands open." As the towers function both as garrison and toll booths. The eastern tower regulates incoming wares and taxes the western outgoing.
@@keenakeet3792 thanks- I name most stuff on the nose like that.or at least in a very simplistic fashion. A "green mountain" for a volcano would probably be a bit counter intuitive but if it is what makes an agricultural region flourish? why not? I use names like that for natural landmarks and cities/villages that evolved naturally and a bit stranger less fitting names for defensive structures. (defensive structures are named after the elements. like Seahold or stormwind. Just because it is former empire with an almost druidic state religion. Meaning symbols of strength are always taken from nature, (plus everything that has to do with storms just sounds cool but you gotta justify that within the storx^^) )
i just play around with random letters that I think fit together well, and the same fore character names.
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)
Daí isso se resulta em certos nomes que nem Ipanema = Lugar feio e Tapuia = Não gente/humano lol
@Facepalm Full O' Napalm the Iroquois aren’t even a tribe. It’s a nation of several tribes who banded together because they spoke similar languages and all lived in longhouses. Their name is the haudenosaunee (the people of the longhouse).
This reminds me of a one story where colonizers tried to talk to natives. The natives replied with a word, which in their language means "i dont understand what youre saying." Because the colonizers didnt understand either, they named that place after the word the natives used lmao. I cant remember the specifics though
That is a very dope fun fact
São Paulo was a jesuitic village, this the paulistas (from São Paulo) were indigenous descendants, and probably all spoke Língua Geral, meaning they were just naming things after their common language.
"Coming up with names is hard"
Yes, ask the scientific community
The sonic gene is one of my favourites.
I think the physicists lost it when naming quark “flavours”
I like how the plants and animal names sometimes contrast with the common names.
Take the Douglas Fir, named for a botanist. The scientific name, pseudotsuga menziesii, is named for a rival botanist: Menzies.
One rival won the recognition of the scientific community, and the other entered the average man's lexicon.
"Pseudotsuga" is interesting in itself in that it combines Greek "false" and Japanese "hemlock".
False Hemlock, which is apt since the Douglas Fir is neither a hemlock nor a true fir tree.
just learn latin and science gets a lot easier
Certain scientific names reveal a lot about the average maturity level of biologists.
Longest place name in Wales: “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch”
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.”
So Welsh names are a GPS/map of the location?? Wild
Why does that look like a keyboard smash I'm concerned--
This wasn't naturally named though - falls into the power category - it was renamed when it got a railway station attract tourism. It's generally referred to as Llanfair or Llanfair PG. So i guess that's another part of the naming at work.
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokai: Am I a joke to you?
Why not call it "Hazel Cave Church"
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.
Thats immensely clever and completely believable and its really cool how that name will now outlive the sign
Same with "Arefu" from Fallout 3, which came from a Highway Sign that once read "Careful, Lanes Merging" or something like that
@@repubblesmcglonky8990 or river city, heck for all its logical faults megaton has a pretty good name as well.
@@jonahulichny9874 I assume this was a typo since it's a Rivet City and it's clever since it's on a beached ship that has lots of rivets.
@@oz_jones yea it was auto correct.
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.
That's beautiful
Moon Moon involved into River River, which bowed to its master of Hill Hill on the Hill
Heh. Breed on hill
Hilly McHillface
I can see the name became shorter in the future and they drop "on the" to be just "Breedonhill" or Hill hill hill
“No flag, no name!”
Reminds me of a wise saying by Blue from OSP:
“If a flag isn’t waving, its ripe for enslaving.”
I feel terrible for laughing at that
"No flag, no country, you cant have one!"- Eddie Izzard.
@@ObligedUniform This is the comment I was looking for.
For anyone unfamiliar, I offer you this.
ua-cam.com/video/_9W1zTEuKLY/v-deo.html
@@ObligedUniform This guy gets the reference.
@@ObligedUniform I loved that Eddie Izzard bit, thank you for the memory.
The west country of England also has "Wookey Hole Caves" which translates to "Cave Cave Caves"
@@lsmith3557 same, they have some very cavy caves ngl
The caves are so cavy
Yes, and I love them.
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.
Thats interesting! In Dutch the translation of 'Kauterwelsch' is 'koeterwaals'. Waals is also the language people speak in the Frech part of Belgium: Wallon.
and the word 'barbarian' comes from Greeks writing off foreigners speaking their language as just saying "barbarbarbar"
"Wallachia" also derives from this same root, as does 'Vlach'
"Und ob mein Hertz im tote bricht
wirst du och drum ein welscher nicht. "
Wow so wales is literally named for speaking incomprehensibly
Omashu was literally just named after Oma and Shu's ship name and I love that.
Also Budapest. Was once two cities: Buda and Pest.
@@ecthelion1735 wasn't Budapest also called Pestbuda in history?
@@jeannebouwman1970 It's like how it took people a while to agree that AppleDash just sounds better than RainbowJack.
Imagine naming a city "kataang"
@@jeannebouwman1970 i guess budapest stuck because buda was a higher class town than pest
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."
"Ohio" also means "river".
So the Ohio River also means "River river."
Is everyone ignoring the fact that Sahara literally means desert.
@@QualityPen Genius!
@Joshua N. Ajang yeah. Belgrad for example. I can guess it means "white city" in Serbian. In Russia there is Belgorod and it means that
@@KateeAngel Belgrade in Serbian is *Beograd* (Beo-white Grad-city)
Panda means bear so a Panda Bear is a bear bear.
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'
I love that
More accurately given that logic it be more likely the name would change to Hivenfalls (or just Hiven) as the people would not know what that word means but do know Polm means water, a element that no longer exists.
But if they don't know what Hivenfalls means why would they remove it when the waterfall is destroyed?
*capital
And then it gets taken over by a group of people who cannot pronounce the letter L and substitutes all Ls with Rs so the city is now known as "Porn" lololololololololol
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).
Second largest country in the world. "Ah yes, that one village."
I heard they named it by pulling letters out of a hat. "C, eh? N, eh? D, eh?"
another example would be yucatan; when the spanish arrived there, they asked the natives who, since they obviously didn't know spanish, replied with "we don't understand"
There is a joke in Germany, why Canada/Kanada is called so...
The first european settlers saw no indigenous people and said: " Kaana da!" (Keiner da! = Nobody there!)
Or, you could take another city name, add "new" to it and BAM! new city.
Or just follow in the footsteps of the founders of London, Ontario and don't change the original name at all!
New Orleans 😂
Combine it with prefix and you could name a city new new, like New Novolondon. Or maybe even postfix, though I don't know if any language make new words this way.
@@mytiliss682 Well in my country of Malaysia, when the southern state of Johor made a new state's capital they called it "Johor Bahru". They added "Bahru" which mean new in our language so that people could distinct the name of the state's capital and the state itself. This mean Johor Bahru mean New Johor.
It was how our language work like for example Bukit Nenas mean Pineapple Hill but a realy straight up direct translation would be Hill Pineapple (Hill of Pineapple) since Bukit mean Hill and Nenas mean Pineapple.
We also have one state in the east coast of the peninsular called Kelantan which was a simplification of it's original long name which came from the old form of the local dialect (as the local dialect there also continue evolved) and at one point on it's history the tragedy fall the rullling dynasty which end up dividing the state and a warlord from Pattani came to unified the state and established a new rulling dynasty the Kelantan. Since the old capital of the Kelantan was destroyed alongside the fall of the old dynasty, a new capital was established and it was simply name "Kota Bharu" mean new fort or new city which the name remain until nowaday and it was still the capital of the state of Kelantan.
Well if you noticed the different spelling of Bharu and Bahru, both name appear at different time which mean the spelling evolved.
Just steal names.
"Names in your fictional land aren't just Big Battle" stares at how the town that is where the Battle of Hastings happened is literally called Battle
Yo dawg, I heard you liked battles.
Yeah i was thinking the same thing when he said it, their is litterally a place called battle near hastings lol
The Battle of Battle
"Batalha", Battle in Portuguese, is a town founded after and around a Monastery that was built to give thanks for a victory in a very important battle.
In the region of Veneto in Italy there are many towns which have "della battaglia" after their name. It means "of the battle" and it was added after WW1 and the battles of the Piave river.
Nonono, I will share the greatest secret to coming up with names for a fantasy setting:
1) Use a crappy placeholder name until inspiration strikes.
2) Become attached to the placeholder name.
3) You're now attached to the placeholder...
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.
I nevee thought about that...
Me, thinking of my planet names in a sci-fi fantasy setting literally just going by what sounds semi-ancient and cool.
"Yeah, step by step process,"
Sci-fi is a complicated can of worms since you've basically got the entire set of steps, across an entire world, and it's already happened, and it's spread out beyond their home
The scope is positively ludicrous and it's incredibly hard to go down into step-by-step creation for a space-age society beyond the critical points because of how much culture is represented by an entire planet. You gotta remember, you could host an entire campaign on just one island on that entire world, let alone a continent, *let alone the world* and that's assuming it even *has* continents.
It can help to do it for some things but trying to do it overall is an exercise in insanity lol
Me who just gets a idea then searches up baby names that had its meaning: HOW
You could literally just name each planet whatever the word for Dirt, Ocean or Home is in the dominant cultures home. Or if it's mostly uninhabited you could simply just copy an actual planets name, for instance: HD 224693 b. That's a planet name and is unlikely to change, or if the planet is a hot spot for mining or something, it could have a colloquial name, such as "Herdee Twenty Two B" or something that rolls off the tongue a lot easier than HD 224693 b
Maybe name it 2nd earth in your language and then have descriptors as the rest
You can also play around with vowel shifts. literally just draw a couple lines on the IPA chart from a naming lang (devolve by bringing some towards a "centre", diverge to evolve). Can do the same thing with consonants, just shift them around on the chart to where they make sense (following general conlang rules).
Singapore had its name evolve from myths and legends before being renamed by colonial overlords. Temasek is one of the oldest known names for the region, before the fall of the Majapahit (no one can pinpoint the exact etymology behind the name today).
Then according to legend, some prince called Sang Nila Utama 'discovered' the island and renamed it "Singapura" (singa=lion; pura=city or port) because he allegedly saw one roar at him after he landed (he and his advisors must have been high though, since the region has no recorded sightings of lions ever. Plently of tigers though).
Then the British came by did some colonial stuff and adjusted the name to "Singapore" probably cuz it reduces the sylables by one.
Singapore is the official name used today; Singapura in Malay documentiation or coats of arms; Temasek as a legacy name in places, buildings, streets, etc.
It's fun breaking down names and the history behind them, especially for the places you live in.
In Portugal we still call Singapura cause it’s easier to say it in our language. I think it’s because of how we pronounce vowels. It’s closer to our Latin origins
Actually that 'g' was pronounced as 'h' nearly 400 years ago
lion roars are known for being very dissapointing so its very likely, in my opinion, that they heard a tiger roar and just mistook it for a lion
Funny that in portuguese, it is actually refered to as Singapura.
@@metrifiko_magsingapura or singha pura comes from Sanskrit.
In Germany, you have a plethora of places called "big" or "small" something, such as Groß Hesepe and Klein Hesepe.
Of all the places named in this comments section, I hadn't thought I would stumble over my neighboring towns :D
@@christinaVennegerts 8D. I happen to live in the region, too. Also, fun fact: virologist Christian Drosten is a Groß Hesepe native.
what's the meaning of burg? i saw some of places have burg in their names end
@@presidentialsystemenjoyer It means "stronghold", or "city" if you look up the etymology of the suffix. It's present in several Germanic languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Old High German.
In England, we have lots of 'Greater' and 'Lesser'/'Little' places too.
As for Omashu combined name: a similar thing happened in the Polish capital. Legend has it that a knight called Wars fell in love with a mermaid named Sava, and now people live in Warszawa (w=v), which emblem is the mermaid. By the way, I've always found it curious how accurate the English translation is: Warsaw did indeed see many wars.
It is a late legend though, and the problem with it is that Sava is a male Ukrainian name. Wars (Varsh) is legit, and originally the name meant just "a village of Wars/owned by Wars"
@@pawelkoziol9544I doubt mermaids care much about what gender human names have 😅
Just take the legend and stop picking it apart. It's a legend and not historical fact for a reason.
Never did I know this… Fascinating
Hi from ukrainian!
Honestly the name Warsaw is super badass
In Chile we have the “norte chico” and “norte grande” literally little north and big north
@@QualityPen yes, it meants both, i think it goes something like this
chico =small
Children= are small
Chico= children
Slavik Chukhlebov yes is one of the many words with more than one meaning it all depends of the context chico could mean small, boy, budy, and probably more things that I’m not remembering now
Norte chicoooooooooo
@@vaiyt Middle east is getting complicated,maybe it's because it's in the middle of the east?
in Stall even crazier space dust
>making a video on art of naming things
>being called Tim
Some call him... Tim.
@@patrickardagh-walter6609 Others also might call him... Tim
Tim's a beautiful name for a beautiful good boy, I don't know what you're talking about.
But Tim is an abbreviation of his first name
@@elpretender1357 Timopher? Tim-tim? Timmy? Timathan? I give up.
So, i've tried to apply this kinda to my own scifi setting. The capital of this interstellar republic is called Miara Cora. The name comes from the fact that 1. the nation is about 300 years old, and 2. they named a lot of stuff after explorers. Miara is the name Mia, the a coming from the French particle to mean "at" (essentially Mia-a-cora). The predominantly english speaking crew of the UNS reliant found this difficult to pronounce, so over time the name "Miara" took place, slowly devolving later on into Mara Cora. The Cora suffix is a term thought up by the three explorers who discovered this small subsystem of planets in the Prycon system. Because of this, the two other planets were named Srednyaya Cora (Middle Cora (it being the central planet in the sub-system) in Russian) and Dreianna Cora (this planet was the third discovered, funnily by a women named Anna, most of the English cosmonauts naming it "Anna's Third" or "Third of Anna" which was very badly translated into "Drei" (Three) Anna, the Cora suffix again added to specify that it's in the Cora Subsystem. The reason the languages are so muddled is because at the time, and up to now, the Republic in this book is massively multicultural and cosmopolitan, coming from an era when the UN managed to somewhat loosely unify the earth and explore the stars.
I love the sound of it! Although that must have been a pain to work out
That's so cool you put in the effort for this.
0:59 - How Names Start
6:26 - How Names Change
9:38 - Power
14:28 - Migration
15:56 - Example Use of this Naming Process
17:44 - Summary & Outro
underrat
A breakdown of the English topographic feature of "Pendle Hill"
Pen = Brythonic word for hill
Dl = A corruption of the Old English word for hill
Literally we call this place "Hill Hill Hill"
Emperor Pepe Flavius Memus it is the duty of whoever is the next dominant language to do that
Pendlehill Hill
@S S Oh gosh
@@eelsemaj99 yes, for the meme
Sahara means desert.
Desert Desert.
I always think about a cemetery in Brazil called "Cemitério da Saudade"; the word "saudade" doesn't have a direct translation (it can have multiple meanings depending on the phrase) but here it's like that burning sensation of missing someone you'll never be able to see again, so it's like "Cemetery of the felling of missing someone you loved" and it's poetic and deep 😔
Longing?
Grief
@@scalkin but you can also feel "saudade" for things and people you know you're going to see again. Grief is different, the overall meaning is heavier, idk
@@julystrauss idk man just sounds like grief to me
no wait i figured it out, it's depression
There is kind of an example of a 'bigger' and 'smaller' something! Big Diomede and Little Diomede, a set of twin islands in the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska.
Also, Constantinople would have been a great example of your point if that had actually been what happened :/ Already in Byzantine times, when you were talking about going "to the city" you would have said "eis tin polin" (which is where Istanbul comes from). When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, the city's name didn't change officially, it was still "Kostantiniyye" in Ottoman Turkish. The official name change happened in 1923 with the foundation of the Republic.
Amazing video idea, keep it up!
PS: In part 2 of this, you need to mention Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Wales and Y in France.
Also Great Britain (small Britain being Brittany peninsula of France), Lesser and Greater Poland regions of Poland, and also lots of Islands/Archipelagos are called lesser/greater something (Antilles come to mind). Some branch rivers are called "Small 'name of the main river'".
Also thanks for saying that Istanbul is actually a Greek name. A lot of people don't know that or the fact that the name Constantinople stayed official until the Republic. New Amsterdam - New York would have been better. Or Tsaristyn - Stalingrad - Volgagrad. Königsberg - Kaliningrad, Pressburg - Bratislava, Leningrad - St. Petersburg. Really there are many much better examples.
There is also the Big Bend and Little Bend areas in South Dekota.
@@gokbay3057 Isn't it just called great Britain because it's the largest of the British Isles?
Switzerland has two towns, one called Polliez-le-Grand (Polliez the big) and Polliez-le-Petit (Polliez the small).
@@gokbay3057 Wasn't it Brittania Magna (or something like that) and Brittania Hybernia? For Bigger Island and Ireland?
"you can't name it treeland"
Holland: Hold my clogs...
Holt= wood
Cognate with our German word Holz
i think the name Holland (which is a province and not the name of the country btw) comes from "Hol" meaning low(?) same goes for the countries name "Nederland" Neder literally meaning Low so its "Lowland"
@@dutchdoggo Dat weet ik, is'n scherts 😋 aber wirklich het heet Holt-land (het hout). Ik kom uit Hamburg, wij praaten Platt. Ich kenn auf jeden Fall Nederland :).
Aber ja, Holland wirklich heißt Holt-land (het hout) dat is zieker.
nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland
@Platypus haha ne, neder is ook duits (nieder). Holland is Synekdoche, dat heet een deel geeft ook het geheel aan. Bijv. brood voor maaltijd.
hollywood = woodwood?
@@Jack-rk7jc hollen is old germanic meaning to prick. Holly bushes (prevalent in the area, the origin of the name) are prickly. So Hollywood is prickly wood/bushes.
Wow that was really enriching! This reminded me of three examples in my country, Saudi Arabia:-
1-Naming based on Geography:
The city that I live in is called Yanbu, and it's actually a verb that means "something that springs" in Arabic since the area is known for having many water springs in the past that have dried out. (Fun Fact: I once told my sister that if it was an English-named town I would name it Windy Shore, as it's a costal city that is mostly windy, she laughed and said that's a cringe video game name :).)
2-Naming based on Legends:
There is another famous costal city named Jeddah, some say it was driven from the Arabic word "Jaddah" that means Grandmother. Legend has it that when Eve died she was buried in this land, hence the name as she is the Grandmother for all humankind :).
3-Naming based on Historical Events:
The second holiest city in Islam after Makkah is called Madinah, the city originally was called "Yathrib" (whitch wasn't a very nice name) but it was the only city that accepted the migration of Muslims from Makkah as the rulers of Makkah made them flee, when the Prophet arrived to the city he named it "Al-Madinah Al-Monawarah" which literally translates to "The Enlightened City" to honor and bless it, now to simplify it people just call it Al Madinah "The City".
I named my world "Jai Vendaris" which translates to "The home of Vendaris", Vendaris being the god who created the world, and Jai, meaning 'home' or 'dwelling place'
I wish I had your creativity, lol.
Hey if you have a time or power change it could be Jaidaris
If there's anything humans are known for: laziness lol
Maybe call it Jaider, names usually change, like a home 🏠 used to be called a ham
@@spaghetto9836 I think the issue is being too creative. When coming up with names I often get way too caught up in my own head trying to think of a smart name for it, when in reality I should be thinking "this town has been here for a while so the people would call it Old Town"
I named the main world of my story "Araltor", after the god who created it. I'm still working on why it has the name of its creator
big pet peeve: When capitals are just named "the capital"
How about "The City"? Which actually happens in real life? People living close to NYC just call it "the city", I'm sure this happens in the vicinity of other big cities too
@@jebatman756 true, I'm more talking about when you literally hear no other name
Tokyo: East capital.
Kyoto: Capital city.
Julianne Stingray well alright I guess, I didn’t know that was actually something that happened in real life
@@elliart7432 It does happen, yeah. It's just that there are so many different languages that what seems like a fancy, neat name could be the simplest, most plain thing you can imagine.
There's the popular legend, which I don't know if it's true, of how a census taker was going around getting the names of the settlements in Alaska, and was told this one town didn't have a name yet so he wrote "No name" on his map, but the cartographers misread his handwriting when they were making the official map and that's how the town wound up being called Nome.
The best census story I heard is about weird fiction writer E.T.A. Hoffman, who worked in Warsaw as an office worker in the beginning of the XIXth century, when modern naming custom of using first name and family name was enforced. Allegedly, he made quite a business of giving names to the Jews, aking them to pay for "expensive" names like Goldstein or Rubinstein.
Nome I love it. It’s like saying name and no at the same time
A census taker once tried to test me...
"Auckland, New Zealand, the place of the orcs". Well played. 🤣
Auckland = Orcland if you pronounce correctly.
@@BelegaerTheGreat I come from Auckland haha it does sound the same.
@@BelegaerTheGreat That indeed was the joke.
The northwestern region of France is called Brittany, but to differentiate between that and their British neighbours across the channel the French added "Grande" to the beginning, so you have Bretagne in France and Grande Bretagne is Great Britain.
(Fun fact to describe a person from Brittany you would call them a Breton, and a British person is a Briton)
Yes, they are closer linguistically and genetically to the Bretons than the Gauls.
After watching this, I took all the advice and wrote a piece of world building that I am more proud of than nearly any other work that I have ever done. I only wish I could thank Hello Future Me for all the with he's done.
YES, THANK YOU I REALLY NEEDED THIS. I’ve been racking my brain for months finding the name of my overall continent. I’ve got towns and cities done, but I’m really hoping this will help!
Good luck!
Lettukana thanks! I’m finding it really difficult to find a name that is disconnected from all of my worlds cultures and different languages. 😞
@@moistslippers9726 Maybe let different cultures have their own names for the continent?
lilpeach101 huh... that’s actually a really interesting idea. Thanks for that!
@@moistslippers9726 ulfricar (northerners) amataria (southerners) a-cranius (outsiders)
these are just examples, or maybe something simpler
ulari amunt a-crian and so forth,
you know what, fuck it, make a whole new language.
Any plans on making a video about "Character Names", Tim?
I recommend looking into real life names and their meaning. They tend to be phrases in certain languages like tons of names in the Bible. A lot of languages also name children after virtues (Beauty, hope, Strength etc). Or perhaps something that is consider to embody a virtue (I have a warrior culture that likes the name Kuda meaning snake because they admire how quickly snakes strike their enemies). And finally you also have names that spread from different languages and changed pronunciation as it came over and lost common knowledge of meaning (or older names that lost meaning over time). Also worth considering naming conventions, such as order of names, do they have family names or are they given a second after where they are from, or who their father is. Do they ever rename themselves as part of their religion? Sorry this comment is so long, but this is something I find interesting.
@@Rainbowthewindsage Please don't apologize! I find naming extremely interesting and I really appreciate your comment!
Heyyy let's already do a part of the work for him then. Naming convention also depends on ruling power, most Ghanaians seem to have a Biblical first name, a second first name that indicates the day of the week they were born on, and then a last name (and I think I'm forgetting one, it's been a long time since I looked that up). In the Netherlands and Spain you have regions with separate languages and their own names that follow conventions of those languages, so if you have a Frisian or Catalan name, everyone's gonna know where you're from - which might cause you trouble if you ever try to find a job outside of that specific section of your country, so people might actually name their children more traditional names the whole country recognizes for that reason. On the other hand there's people who use traditional local names as an act of rebellion against 'the man' (see Catalonia right now). It's the same reason people from all regions of China might decide to only teach their children Mandarin Chinese (instead of for example Kantonese) and there's a political struggle going on on the island of Aruba, a former Dutch colony, about whether or not Dutch should still be taught in schools, because Aruba isn't a rich place and parents want their children to have the best possible chance at getting a job, possibly in the Netherlands if they manage to go there, and thus also parents who will give their children traditionally Dutch names... which some believe is slowly killing traditional Aruban culture. I've known Dominicans named George even though they knew no word of English for the same reason. Colonialism and wealth are big driving factors. There's a channel here on youtube called Say It Loud that explores black American culture that also has a video on where their names tend to come from (which is kind of surprising in some aspects).
@@trishapellis I completely forgot about day of the week names. Similarly, there are places ( I don't remember specifically where) where your middle name is a Saint based off of what day you were born on, so you have guys with their middle name Maria. Speaking of Middle names and gender specific names, my real life middle name is Michelle and I find it interesting that in english that name is considered female because it sounds feminine in our language, while in French it is a man's name, basically their version of the name Michael. There are other names like Ariel and Lindsey, which were once men's names but now mostly women's, and I am sure there are names that have done the opposite transformation but I can't think of an example off the top of my head.
@Quantum Last names can also come from where one's ancestors lived! For example, my own last name has two parts, one which means "small village" and the other which is a suffix meaning "small." I usually take it to mean that my last name means "really tiny village" or "puny village."
As a world-builder, naming places is probably my favorite part. In one of my worldbuilding projects, the Naufrages, the people intentionally named places with bad/forboding/off-putting names after liberating themselves from Portuguese rule. So there cities are called Condenaçao (Condemnation), Tempestadt (Storm city), Iscariot (as in Judas), et cetera
After the mixed Portuguese, Galician, Xhosa, Dutch, and Zulu population rejected Portuguese rule, they then tried to emulate and attract the then-Dutch Republic. So they decided rename their capital city of Santa Isabela. They fused Latin tempesta with -stad (or -stadt).
Welcome to Camp Greenlake
“Where’s the lake?”
Hehehe
lmao
That's an elite reference
The only thing I'll ever thank school for is making read that story (I watched the movie as well) so I can understand this reference
A+ reference
May I present the town of ‘Breedon-on-the-hill’, which translates to ‘hill-hill-on-the-hill’
Another one would be Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria.
Translated it means "lake lake lake"
@@theholyinquisition389 But In German you only say, Chiemsee and drop the Lake at be beginning
Portugal comes from Portu - Port in Latin and Cale - Port in Gallaecian Celtic
Therefore, Portugal means PortPort
Portugal=Port port
You could just drop the first "on" and end up with 'Breed-on-the-hill'. That should screw with some peoples heads.
We have a city in Peru call Callao, because the conquistadors thought that was it's name. It actually means "little sibling" because it was the smaller city next to a bigger city call collana or "big sibling"
Fun fact: Istanbul comes from the Greek phrase "εις την Πόλιν" which sounds like "istinpolin" and it meant "to Constantinople". So when Byzantines where saying "I am going to Constantinople" they said "πηγαίνω εις την Πόλιν" which pretty much sounds like . Istinpolin turned into Istanbul and so when someone says "I'm going to Istanbul" he is actually saying "I am going to to Constantinople"... Excuse the bad English please :)
I did not notice anything wrong with it. Your English is fine.
Seems all good to me. Although I think ‘Polin’ just means to the city in general, not Constantinople specifically; and if Istanbul means going to the city, then the phrase: I am going to the city of Istanbul kinda means I am going to the city of going to the city. ;)
@@machaiarcanum Yes, the word "πόλιν"(polin) means city but Constantinople was often referred to as "Η Πόλη"(The City).
@@chestermc9954 Huh. Well I guess you learn something every day. Cheers. I find it hilarious that the city was so well known that people didn’t even name it, if you talked about ‘The City’ everyone knew what you meant.
@@machaiarcanum there are regional cities like that all over. It's pretty common if there's one major city in a rural area for example. "I'm going to the city today", no one is going to ask which one. If you're going somewhere else you'd use the name alone, probably.
"let's be honest, who does understand Welsh"
As a Welshman not even we understand Welsh
@@BobDavies1 Slight correction: The first published Bible in Welsh was printed under Elizabeth I. This encouraged people to leave the Catholic Church in droves as they could finally understand the Bible in their own language.
@Fflur Efa As someone that speaks English as their first (and only) language, I agree that it is absolute nonsense. Most of the rules only work half the time, nothing is spelled the way it sounds, words can sound the same but be spelled three different ways with their own meanings, and a lot of it is just words we stole from the French and then seemingly decided to pronounce incorrectly just to spite them.
@@cjs4247 What's the saying, "English beats up other languages in dark alleys and rifles through their pockets for loose syntax"?
@@michaelbryant3640 Yeah that seems about right
"Lets be honest, who does understand Welsh".
About half a million of us, including me, coc oen digywilydd.
After years of worldbuilding, I've found that when I make up words for names, I have a specific style. Like, what consonants or vowels I use and how they're combined. Makes me feel like I have a legacy in my works and a unifying style.
"The Holy Waterfall of Water"
Checks out
I mean, i would prefer a waterfall of blood, but that's why i pray to the blood god.
8:54 "Is there any example of one place called 'bigger thing'?"
YES! Just down the road from my hometown are two villages called Great Chesterford and Little Chesterford. And many other place names in the region like Great Sampford. Let's also not forget that Great Britain was originally given that name to distinguish it from the Brittany region of France.
Greater Poland and Lesser Poland exist as well. Also Veliky Novgorod (not sure about the exact spelling but it means Great Novgorod, distinguishing it from Nizhy Novgorod)
Near my city there is "Mellösa". Some Miles away? "Stora (Big) Mellösa"
@@gokbay3057 Funny thing about Novgorods is it means NewCity so Velikiy Novgorod is basically Great NewCity)
He mentioned “greater” and “lesser”, he meant specifically “bigger” and “smaller”. Like, Bigger Chelsea or Smaller New Zealand
I think he was asking specifically about a place using the _word_ “Bigger” or “Smaller” in its name, rather than “Great/Greater” or “Lesser.”
10:08 , one of the given meanings of Istanbul is that it refers to ''eis tèn polin'' (to the city) which was the way the Greeks referred to Constantinople, since it had no real rival as a metropolis at the time the people simply referred to it as ''the city''.
Imagine two small villages. One by the river had an impressive arch over the door to their town Hall, and they named their community Arch Hamlet. There was a less impressive village inland known for raising goats which was called Goat Hamlet. As time went on the names were shortened to Arkham and Gotham.
Eventually Arkham grew into a trading hub while Gotham remained a farming community. However there was a cheese maker in Gotham who's famous Gotham cheese was traded through the port at Arkham.
People started to associate Arkham with the cheese and called it Gotham. To differentiate the thriving metropolis from a goat farm, they changed the name to Gotham City. And now you know the rest of the story.
Is that actually part of the batman lore?
Kind of doubt it
@@Rainbowthewindsage Not broadly. There are a great many Batman stories that retcon how or why Gotham got its name, but the general one is that Gotham is called that...because that's that the founders decided to call it and that "Arkham" is literally just the name of the family that founded the Asylum, and the ISLAND was renamed due to the asylum being the only thing of note.
Gotham, however, is, IRL, stealing an old name for New York...which in turn is stealing from a town in England...which IS named for that reason. "Gotham" in Old English is "Goat-home", and is a small town in England that supposedly, centuries ago, learned the king wanted to build a hunting lodge in the region, and (not wanting a royal highway made through their town/to have to deal with a king all the time) all pretended to be idiots when the royal surveyor came to see the town. This started a bunch of jokes about "the Mad/"wise" men of Gotham", which was later used as an insult for other big cities: To call a place "Gotham" was to call the people in it crazy. Washington Irving (the guy who wrote Ichabod Crane) used the joke as a dig at the Mayor of New York, and it kinda stuck.
So Gotham City in Batman is meant to be a crazier New York full of madmen and darkness, KIND OF based on the idea of "Goat Hamlet".
@@AllWIllFall2Me I see. I was just curious, although I did know that Gotham is to some degree based off of New York, I didn't know it was also an older name for it.
@@Rainbowthewindsage Nah, it was just something I made up. Thanks for asking. :)
Wow, so my thought to name mars colonies after the rovers they are closest to is actually sensible
Hey look a good idea , not sarcastic ,
Good on you
That good idea but i think if russia build Moon/mars Colonies they will the placed after Yuri Gagarin
Sojourner City
Three years later and the whole Divine Falls - > Hivenfalls Polm is still an incredible example on how to use the lessons learned in the video
At least the danes tried to pronounce Eoforwic somewhat instead of giving it a brand new name, good guy invaders.
You see that in several places in North America too. Washington has at least a dozen large cities (including the three largest) named after either a Native American place or people.
Seattle is the botched and misspelled version of Chief Si'ahl/Sealth.
Tacoma is named for Mt. Tahoma, the original name of Mt. Rainier.
Spokane and Puyallup are both named after local tribes.
Tons and tons of examples. I don't know if that makes them good guy invaders or if it was just easier to trade and negotiate with the people already there when they used recognizable names.
There are loads of places like this in Canada too. Our national capital, our nation's name itself, and almost half of the provinces' names are Anglicised forms of Indigenous names. There's a section of the Trans-Canada Highway called the Yellowhead, which is a translation of an Indigenous nickname for a white explorer who had blonde hair.
There are many places like that in the Midwest as well. And I'm sure there are all over the county, too, but most of my knowledge is of the Midwestern place names. Hell, over half of the state names come from Native American roots! 26 states in the US have names taken from or derived from Native American languages (and there's also Hawaii, which comes from, of course, the Hawaiian language, which is in the Polynesian family of languages).
@@BonaparteBardithion Yeah, there's loads of this in America. More than half of the state names have a Native American origin.
I'm from Chicago, a place that still somewhat keeps its Native American name, "Chicagoa" (something like that). 😊 It means "stinky onion", I believe. 😂😂😂⚰⚰
If World Anvil didn't threatened to dump everything I put on it into the "public" pool against my will if I miss a single payment, I might would consider using them. :(
That's why I use notebook.ai instead of World Anvil, I don't want all of my stuff public
Get 'local by flywheel' and make your own local wordpress encyclopaedia
@@lifeontheledgerlines8394 is notebook.ai free? Sounds interesting and I need a way to note down all my outlines and ideas
@@lesteryaytrippy7282 Yeah, the basic things are free, and they're basically all you need. The forums are also pretty cool. There's a premium version, but it's not really worth it imo. But yes, free
TiddlyWiki shill here to also recommend TiddlyWiki :D
"Orcland and New Zealand, yeah, land of the orcs." I love this line because it's subtle and if you blink you miss it, but I see you and I appreciate you
He said "Auckland in New Zealand" not "Orcland and New Zealand"
@Eidolon Ooooooh, so I just heard HORRIFICALLY wrong. Noted and I thank you for the correction!
@@Eidolon1andOnly But that was indeed the joke he was going for, so Pageturner was half right.
at 10:00 - 10:10 when you talk about Constantinople being changed by the Ottoman Empire to "Istanbul" in 1453, you are somewhat misleading: The Ottoman Empire after conquering Constantinople from the Byzantines, they didn't name it "Istanbul": they called it by a "ottoman turkish" name of Constantinople: "Ḳosṭanṭīnīye".
It was only around the 1930's Ḳosṭanṭīnīye [by the muslim majority]/Constantinople [by the christian minority] changed the name to Istanbul after the loooong collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Just a short history about the place and city itself.
Yeah that was my bad research there. Slipped under my radar and added a correction.
~ Tim
Also, cool fact that i learned from my grandfather, Instanbul also comes from Greek believe it or not. Because Greeks used to say "ης την πόλιν" or "Is tin poli" meaning, into or entering the city. This stems from the fact that Greeks sometimes called Constantinople "The City", due to the mere fact that everybody knew that they were referring to Constantinople.
Yuh! Thats what i was thinking too.
@@greekswaglord-dathistoryla201 That's super interesting, thanks for sharing!
Thank you
wow, it took him whole 3 minutes before talking aout avatar...
8:54 Mallorca and Menorca. (Major and Minor)
"Generally, in post-colonial countries, the exonym sticks."
Me: *laughs in Canada*
Half the US states.
@@DaDunge ehhh
What it means canada?
*Groans in America*
confused Canadian here?
This video singlehanded convinced me to buy your book. The whole "Hivenfalls Polm" thing is the best thing I've heard this month.
"Europe" is a good example of a place name coming from history/mythology.
I had a suspicion that it wasn't that simple, since someone had to _make_ that choice. According to Wikipedia, apparently the first real use was a description of the Holy Roman Empire, in an attempt to mark it as the Western Roman Empire reborn. Previously, the earliest historians were simply using the term to mark part of Thrace, the shoreline west of the Aegean Sea, so it's not clear why Anaximander/Hecataeus suddenly decided it was an adequate term to describe everything west of the Phasis. But it's _modern_ usage appears to simply be, "That which Charlemagne was allowed to claim according to the Church."
In Sweden sometimes when two places have the same name they get named after the province. There is Kil of Värmland and Kil of Närke. And Fagerhult of Skåne and Fagerhult of Småland
A similar thing happens in the UK, just with rivers instead of regions. So for example, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and Newcastle-under-Lyme
@@girv98 And in Germany: Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt an der Oder.
Yeah, Germany does this too, we do it with Rivers. So there's Frankfurt (Main) and Frankfurt (Oder), but also Nienburg (Weser) and Nienburg (Saale). etc. You either write it and say it like 'Frankfurt Main' or 'Frankfurt am Main'.
That's also common in the US, you have Springfield, Massachusetts, Springfield, Missouri, Springfield Illinois, ect. And you have things like Quincy, Illinois and Quincy, Massachusetts
@@cosmicostrich3657 We do the same in Norway. A lot of old names based on natural features are repeated, and are usually referred to by the administrative area they're in, though this is not a part of the official name.
One example of a confusing name is "el Yunque" in Puerto Rico. "Yunque" is the Spanish word for anvil, so one might think it was named by the Spaniards for its shape. But it was actually named by the Tainos, who called it something like "yuké" which means either holy mountain or white mountain, because it's always wrapped in mist and rain. The Spaniards adopted the name, had some trouble with the pronunciation and altered it slightly to "Yunque", which makes it seem like the mountain was just named after anvils.
Amsterdam: comes from 'Aemstelle Dam', 'Dam in the (river) Amstel'.
's Gravenhage (Den Haag/The Hague): 'The Count's Hedge' (because it was quite a wooded area and Holland was a county)
's Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch): 'The Duke's Forest'.
All these world building and writing videos recently have made me want a second volume of On Writing and Worldbuilding 😅
I wonder how well Tim and a few other youtubers would do as editors or proof readers
The biggest lake in Europe, Lake Geneva, is called by people that actually live by it (and not in the tini-tiny city of Geneva that only takes up 2% of the lake) "the Léman", or sometimes "Lake Léman". Léman comes from the celtic for "lake", so by calling our lake the "Lake Léman" we actually call it the "Lake Lake". Really deep symbolism over here in Switzerland
"Cester" actually means "city" or "town", not castle. Comes from Latin for camp or fort. Not to be too nit-picky, the video is great lol
Ye, or "fort" but in some cases for basically = thing will wall around it and city = town with wall around it. Hence the Welsh call Chester "caer" = fort = city with a wall around it. Hence Caerdydd = Cardiff.
Castra was a fortress or army camp but over time came to be used as a word that could describe many things. For example a political faction could be a castra or the army as a whole. But generally speaking it meant an army camp. That could be a permanent fortress resembling a castle or a temporary fortified camp.
@@hakonsoreide first off, "city" is not derived from the word for castle, both have separate etymologies. City comes from a word meaning citizenship, citizenry, or...a city. Castle comes from the word meaning camp or fort. Eventually castle went on to be synonymous with "town" or "city" but that doesn't mean it's the same. You're mixing up both etymologies and the timing. On top of that, it doesn't matter what the etymology of "city" is when we're talking about the etymology of "chester". Chester doesn't mean castle. That simple.
Suddenly, Churchester made a lot more sense.
That’s the Ice town from Galar, by the way.
Town/City came later as settlement grew up outside Roman Fort Walls ...Castra/Cestra = Chester ...Fort ...later in English becoming Castle ...so your "nit-picky" is factually wrong. The Latin word for Camp which also comes down to us as Campus meant a field.
Just wanted to say "thank you" for this video, I've been building a new nation for a story I am working on and it was a great help. I started knowing I'd want to call this nation the Doramin Empire, which led to deciding that its capital would be called Doram. Since I'd also decided that Doram sat on the banks of the area's major river and at the boundary between the mountainous highlands and the fertile lowlands. So I took your tip about coming up with a lexicon and decided that "Doram" would mean something like "gateway". Then the next city I needed to name was a major port city at the mouth of the aformentioned river. So I took the "Doram" root I already had, and added to that "Afar", a root I made up that means "ocean/sea". Then I used your tip about streamlining to compress "Doram Afar" to "Dorafar". And so on. So again, thank you for this.
I like places called something like “X’s Folly”, because you *know* there was supposed to be a lesson that the original namers thought was worth remembering. You also know that said lesson is just not present in contemporary understanding and also that when you look it up it’s always something like “do not ask your army to cross the river away from actual fording points” or “do not just build a tower on any old ground without foundations”
As an American, I challenge the "coke" comment. We do call everything "soda" however.
As a Midwesterner, the correct term is "pop."
I think it's only common in Georgia, where coke was invented. I've never heard this usage of coke instead of soda or pop anywhere else in the country.
@@lutilda it's fairly common across the South, even here in Texas.
Midwesterners scorn at you when you say soda instead of pop. I am a born midwesterner and I call it soda because a kid in my high school class transferred from the South, and in the South, where my grandfather was from, pop means a punch to the face.
@@slusheewolf2143 and don't forget what a holler actually is
New Zealand was actually named by the Dutch, and renamed a few times, before the British anglicized it into New Zealand
Zeeland is a Dutch province and the English translation for it is actually "Zealand", so really its just the original name (Nieuw-Zeeland, which is also how the Dutch still call it) but Englishified
@@dutchdoggo That's what I said?
3:18. The oma-shu legend was indeed a real legend. The episode shows that by exploring the actual caves they used with statues of them inside
"Is there a place with the name bigger?" Mallorca and Menorca? Derived from Latin Insula Majora and Insula Minora (Big island, Little Island).
Also, Rio Grande
After watching The Last Kingdom I was rather confused how "Eoforwic" evolved into "York". I now understand!
Yorkvic
I just practiced doing some of these and I have already figured out names for places that don’t even exist in my world yet. Truly great content
"Who gets to choose the name of a place of place is about who holds power there?"
I instantly thought in the Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien.
"'There is my home' Mim said 'You have often seen it, I guess, for it is tall. Sharbhund we called it, before the Elves changed all the names.' Then they saw that he was pointing to Amon Rudh, The Bald Hill." The Children of Húrin, Of Mim the Dwarf.
The fucking Sindar Elves commited genocide in Beleriand.
Poland has regions called 'greater' and 'lesser’ poland, which were originally the heartland of the country
Ye. And a lot of people from greater poland (mostly older folk) to this very day not consider anyone west from greater poland a Pole. And usually boast about their uprisings that were the only successufl ones in history of Poland. They are almost as full of their own shit as people from the capital.
I recently used some of the techniques from this video to name a region. The oldest name known to me for it is the Weald, being a forested region. It might've had an older, more specific, name once, but eventually it became just "the Weald." Then, it was conquered by a power roughly equivalent to the Roman Empire. They split the region into eastern and western administrative subsections, naming them Weald Aurora and Weald Vesper. These are the current names. I actually considered how these might change, becoming colloquilized as something like Dawnwood and Evenwood. If another power roughly equivalent to the Normans then conquered the region from the east, the whole Weald might become something like Dawnwood Forest.
I actually started the whole process as a sort of joke, trying to come up with really generic-sounding fantasy place names. But then the names Weald Aurora and Weald Vesper emerged and they sounded too cool so I had to ponder why the names contained two obviously different languages.
10:06 That's inaccurate, Mehmed claimed to be the successor of Byzantine Empire, so it wouldn't make sense if he renamed the city Istanbul right away, in reality he renamed the city Konstantinniye, as many former Greek cities did (Izmir = Smyrna, Gelibolu = Gallipoli, Edirne = Adrianople, Konya = Ikonia, Kayseri = Caesaria, Ankara = Angora, Antakya = Antiochia, Atina = Athens, Nigbolu = Nicopolis, Trabzon = Trebizond, etc.)
he's posted a correction in the comments
@@erin7800 Yes I helped explaining why it's not happened.
"Earth?" Do you mean HOLY TERRA SEAT OF THE GOD-EMPEROR?!
in before someone tells you what terra means
TERRA IS DIRT. WE ALL CALL THIS MASS OF DIRT EXACTLY WHAT IT IS.
see?
@@CinnamonCari Supposedly, Turks call it "world", although the word actually comes from an Arabic root meaning "lower (place)", contrasting us with Heaven.
@@CinnamonCari been a while since Latin class but I'm pretty sure terra means land, not dirt.
A lot of German villages exist twice in the same region and are indeed called "big[village name]" and "small[village name]" first that comes to my mind are Großbeeren and Kleinbeeren literally meaning bigberry and smallberry so perhaps those were named after berrybushes that peopled settled next to.
Old germs really be placing town centers next to forage bushes.
Dutch examples:
Amsterdam, a dam across the Amstel
Rotterdam, a dam across the Rotte
Blaricum, the Latin name for that area
Noord Brabant (North Brabant) without a south Brabant within the Netherlands because that region is in Belgium.
's-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch), literally the forest of the Duke
Groningen = green place
In a story I'm writing, it's told with everything translated, this results in most places having names that are meant to be translated when the story is told in another language, with some exceptions. Since my only real language is English, I've mostly only come up with English names for these places. Some have non-English names, but I've translated them as best I can to English. Some of them are purely geographic: Starside, Sunside, The Nest, The Desert, etc. Some include "Great" to indicate they're the biggest or most important of that type: Great Plains, Great Mountain, etc. Two of the mega cities are named after smaller precursor cities, which, in turn, were named after nearby permanent weather features: Hurricane City and Typhoon City. In the case of Typhoon City, it's located on an island formerly known as The Island, but the mega city completely encompasses it now, so the name was dropped and now the entire island is referred to as Typhoon City. In the case of Hurricane City, it's undergone some turmoil over the past hundred years, and so new undead inhabitants in the southwestern side of the mega city refer to their ruins as Necropolis, the city of the dead, and there's a make-shift mutant scientist district directly east of it that its inhabitants refer to as Abom Nation, a play on the term abomination, but outsiders still refer to these areas as part of Hurricane City, being southwest Hurricane City and southern Hurricane City respectively. Exactly 100 years before story start, The Imperial Capital was new enough that it didn't develop a unique name, and it was sacked, conquered, and given away by a different emperor, and was renamed The Old Capital in the process, and its new inhabitants still haven't renamed it because they just don't care about the name, yet. Meanwhile, the new imperial capital, the world's third mega city, was founded and given a different name, Central City, named for how it's the center of the known world, even having the magnetic north pole at its center, causing all compasses to point to it, and the south coasts of Hurricane City, Typhoon City, and Great Plains are all equidistant from Central City, as is the south side of Great Mountain. Central City is the central hub of the world, not just its own empire, since Typhoon City isn't part of said empire. A few additional places include: Dead Man's Road, Hidden City, Wastelands, Hurricane, Typhoon, Underworld, Noman's Land, West Tower, East Tower, Grand Imperial Great North Tower Tree, The Hidden City (not the same one from before), Skycity City, Grand Imperial Gardens, Cave of the Fallen Emperor (aka Home of the Righteous Wind or House R'ind), Snake District, Upper Cavern, Lower Cavern, Eternal Snake God (not related to Snake District), and The Incident Site.
A good translation can work with bent names as well. The translations of LotR were famous for that - Tolkien personally oversaw them to make sure they were done properly to invoke the same feel and meaning in the languages his work got translated to, and that includes placenames. For example, in German, Hobbiton became Hobbingen, The Shire became Auenland, and so on.
So don't be afraid to be as free with your naming as you want to be, just because you want them to get translated properly if you work ever gets translated into non-English languages :)
Sometimes ridiculously simple names are just as viable.
For example: the capital of the german state northrhine westfalia is Düsseldorf. Düssel is the name of the river that flows through it
Dorf is simply german for village
So it translates to village by the düssel. Not only does this show how utterly simplistic names can be sometimes (it just describes where it is) it also shows that the name has not changed as it expanded from being a village to becoming the state capital.
There's also two Kansas Cities, but there's distinctly a Missouri and Kansas side.
ua-cam.com/video/FPZi51GL3cs/v-deo.html
Also with St. Louis. However, in Kansas City, people call them Kansas City Kansas and Kansas City Missouri. In St. Louis, however, people just call it St. Louis (Missouri side), and East St. Louis (Illinois). Yeah, we don't prefer to acknowledge Illinois is a part of St. Louis here.
Kansas City is actually an interesting study of how places are named. Kansas City was named by the native American tribe that lived there (Kansa), which probably meant "People of the south wind". It was then people heading west passing through Kansas City and going onward "further into the Kansa land" that the state Kansas got its name. So the state was actually named from the city, even though the city was in another state at the time.
Also, regional names can move. For example, Saxony in Germany is nowhere near the Saxon homeland. This is because the Duchy of Saxony was divided in Saxe-Lauenburg and Saxe-Wittenburg. The former eventually being incorporated into Schleswig-Holstein, while the latter was later given the Electorate of Saxony and, through conquests and such, ended up 'migrating' southwards.
I read similar advice to this once a few years ago and it forever changed the way I feel about world building and inspired one of my most memorable fantasy cities. The innocuously named, Westport. Western most port of an old empire. Once you realize humans name things in ways that are familiar, nostalgic, or utilitarian, you become much less self-conscious about things like Milltown or Ciderville or Battle Vale.
"Hildesheim" as in "Hilde's Heim" literally means "home of Hilde"
Yeah but it is a sort of joke name because it sounds like Heldesheim (Heldensheim? It's been to long since I read German), home of the heroes, which is one of the flowery ways of describing Valhalla in norse mythology.
Example that hits a cross section of a heap of this- Motu Kōkako- Piercy Island/Hole in the Rock, up in the Far North, Aotearoa
Motu (Island) of Kōkako- a bird kept on the island as a sort of aviary since they were useful for hunting
Piercy- An admiral that Captain Cook wanted to honour, as he did with a heap of the exonyms he gave
Hole in the Rock- The notable land feature of it
The use of the island vs the shape of the island and who has power over it
Btw if you're visiting the area plz do not take the illegal tours through the Hole- they are breaking the Treaty in doing so
"illegal" lol
The Treaty isn't law you fuckwit
@@TomorrowWeLive Taking or using freehold land is illegal, as was initially guaranteed under the Treaty and enforced through land rights law.
I'd also encourage you to be introspective of why you'd be defensive about the semantics of whether someone technically can colonise and not
@@TomorrowWeLive it is illegal to break treaties you signed. For example, if a country signs an international treaty and ratifies it and then breaks it, it deserves sanctions or to be expelled from an international organisation, because if you don't like a treaty, just do not sign it, if you signed it, you have to follow it. And the treaty between British Empire and Maoris kinda fits, cause at that time Maoris were a separate tribe
Cornwall is a great example for place names! I take inspiration from the Cornish language a lot when writing fantasy. Most places in Cornwall begin with a prefix, such as Tre (meaning homestead, a town) or Ros (moor, heath) or Pen (a headland). So you have places like Tregony, Roskear, Penryn... No matter where you go in Cornwall, place names can offer you a wealth of information on where you're going. It'll tell you if it's a town, a beach, a moor, or if it has a mine or a church. Which would have been extremely useful for travellers I imagine.
There's a rhyme which goes: "By tre, pol and pen, you will know the Cornishmen!"
As soon as I heard "River River" I knew we were gonna get a "Moon Moon" joke!!
8:55 There was actually a VERY particularly funny case of this in late classical antiquity when Khosrau of Iran went to war with Justinian, and sacked numerous eastern cities. He had abducted the entire population of Antioch and was unable to ransom them back to the Byzantines, so he ended up building them an exact replica of Antioch in his borders, right down to the designs of each home and yard. The cherry on top of all of this, though, is that he named it "Weh Antiok Khosrow", or "Khosrau's Better Antioch".
Extra credit history I think did a video on this. Was awesome.
I remember that! It seems Khosrau also made the people bigger homes.
Khosrau: hey Justinian look at this city I have! It is the one you have, but better.
I remember that from Extra Credit. And was laughing my ass off, because it's such an awesomely petty thing between rulers.