Ben 10 Alien Names
Jacqualine Henington
What I would like is a technique for developing consistent-sounding, alien-sounding (or foreign-sounding) names within the context of a (sub)culture. Are there existing, documented techniques or tools for doing this?
To not have anything in mind about a particular language is asking a bit much. If the names are to be spoken, and thus based on the sound of the language, you need to know something about that. Similarly, for written names, you'd need a minimal idea about the language's building blocks and their composition. This can't be avoided since it is at the heart of asking for consistency.
That said, many readers don't mind if you take short-cuts. They'd be satisfied with a small part of the language, just enough to make names and still sound like a credible part of a language. To invent names, you could create a set of similar names like this:
I'll call the building blocks elements, since it would be constraining to make assumptions about their complexity. They could be letters, sounds, syllables, or even whole words; either works but produces a different kind of similarity between the names.
Feel free to ignore the syntax unless you want to computer-generate names in the next step. Of course, actual lists of elements should be larger. It might take a bit to come up with good elements -- these are just me typing in anything that first came to mind.
but this is Stackexchange, so let's add a program to output all allowed words of a given count of elements. But feel free to do it by hand instead. (The following is in F#. You can paste it, together with the element lists, on the website tryfsharp.org if it works on your browser, or any F# compiler or console.)
For three elements, we get a longer list, with names like "Riunen", "Neriud", or "Iyanel". If the rules and elements are chosen carelessly, many combinations will be unusable, but that's not a problem as long as you can find enough usable ones.
The count of possible names increases rapidly when using larger element sets, shorter elements, or longer words. Choosing a large set of possibilities adds some realism, but might make the similarity of the names less apparent. You can use much more restrictive rules for making names than would be reasonable to make words of a language. (Seeing how similar names in some cultures are, this is quite realistic.)
We need context before adding meaning, so I'll make up something. The Ahl are a mysterious society. Their cities are shrouded in thick fog; they have excellent hearing and can navigate by sound. In their view, strength is knowledge about one another: deception is defense and surveillance is offense, the cautious is wise and the noisy a fool and a nuisance.
Someone important in Ahl society would be a keeper of secrets or something along that line. So I just take one of the short combinations to create a title for that: Nesh. A Nesh is the one who decides what can and can't be told to outsiders.
This method can be used in a very simple way, say, by writing down a dozen syllables and combining them arbitrarily. Spending a little more time, one can think of a few rules on how to build words and how to use them. It should be easy to create names that are distinct from the names of other cultures in the same setting.
The difficulty lies in making the names credible as something alien, not something an author just came up with on a whim. There is, of course, much more to this; a major problem lies in sounds and phonetics. It is very unlikely that an alien language can be transcribed into an English text without an elaborate explanation how to read it. But that is a broad topic and this post is already too long. Also, I'd have to ask Nesh Ryunen if I may disclose any more.
In this answer, evandentremont suggested a fast way for the first two steps if you have a sample for which you want to generate similar-sounding text. In a first step, calculate the probability for letters depending on the previous letter(s). Then, output random strings that follow the same distribution. (This is a Markov chain approach.)
Here is an F# program to do this with selectable amount of considered characters per character placed (order). An order of one produces results of limited quality, since the actual sounds comprising words are more than single letters. higher orders require longer samples to work well, but the output looks more sane.
This method has its downsides, as you aren't consciously creating the sounds and words. This makes it harder to interpret meaningful patterns into them and design distinct alien features. It is still fun to do and a very fast method. Here is what it does for an order of two:
A lot of place names in English actually have meaning. Many of these are obvious such as "ford" or "bridge" in a name (i.e. Watford, Cambridge) but others had old-english meanings. For example "ton", "by", and other sounds at the end of a name actually meant something. So you can pick a few sounds that mean something for these aliens and then end all place names with one of those sounds.
Perhaps they use something like a click or a stop in the word, Tr'lk, Ptr!nk, etc. You need to be careful doing this though as readers may well not know how to sound out the word if it's written like that.
One partial technique is to create an a posteriori language - that is, to base it off an existing language. Here, J. R. R. Tolkien is quoted explaining how he was inspired to create some of his languages:
Another method is to find a set of letters - may it be a dipthong, a few consonants, or just a random combination - and use it in different names, possibly as a prefix or suffix. Again, drawing on Tolkien's work:
The IPA chart show below describes every sound that the human body uses in verbal languages. Every language uses a subset of these sounds. (Other sounds are possible such as Mongolian throat singing.)
As you can see there are a great many sounds that English just simply does not use and, if you are targeting an English audience, you shouldn't expect them to pronounce your new names "properly". They may not even be able to hear the difference.
As you can see, it's incredibly easy to choose a selection of sounds that are completely unpronounceable by your target audience. Don't make that mistake. If your audience can't even say your character's names, they are less likely to talk about them.
This same process can be used to generate a new language too though that will require generating an entire new set of words. Just start with translating the ten hundred most common words of Up-Goer Five.
The larger the corpus of text, the better the results. You can (and should) also group letters. The larger the group, the more realistic the words sounds. If the group is too big, it will fail to generate new words. I find two or three usually works best.
Now, for sounding alien, find a set of words that have the same 'tone' that you're looking for. For elvish words use a list Lord of The Rings words. For alien, use a list of Star Trek planets. For foreign sounding, just use a book written in that language.
If you have no interest in linguistics, or the specific characteristics of the aliens' language, then all you need is a convenient way of generating these labels. Each name is a sequence of sub-elements -- basically, syllables. So "Obi-Wan Kenobi" breaks down as OBI WAN KEN OBI. You need to identify some syllables as your building blocks, and string them together. The basic requirements are:
Two quick-and-dirty methods that I have used myself, or have seen used. These are not suitable for conlanging, or any story dealing extensively with concepts of language or communication. They are, however, suitable for monoglots and/or English speakers.
(1) Simple names made up of a small number of consonants. Repeating certain consonants with regularity emulates the look and feel of a distinct phonology. Certain vowel or vowel combinations, when placed regularly in the same part of a word, also create a sense of regularity. Choose four or five of your favorite consonants and make sure that at least one of them appears in each name you create. If you're a fan of the Avatar-verse, think of the water tribes' names, almost all of which contain the letter K. Quick and dirty, as I said.
Vowels are only slightly more complicated. Q&D rules like 'lots of names ending in A' or 'lots of double vowels for extended sound' can make a strong impression on a reader. With regards to both vowels and consonants, what makes the strongest impression is that which seems least familiar. If you are writing with an Anglophone audience in mind, hard consonants like K and Q create a feeling of alienness, as does liberally sprinkling the least-common tiles in Scrabble.
(2) An even simpler (but dirtier) trick is to generate a series of prefixes and a series of suffixes, and mix and match them as appropriate. This is actually a pretty common way of generating new names IRL, and not just in the last century, either. You can populate your lists with morphemes taken from rare or archaic names, or take common morphemes and swap out one consonant for a similar-sounding one, such as N for M. This can create names that are vaguely familiar, but not on a 'my next-door neighbor' level.
Don'ts: avoid apostrophes, diacritics that you're not sure how to pronounce, ligature letters that you're not sure how to pronounce, and capital letters in the middle of names. These are also quick and dirty tricks, but they lack the versimilitude of the others and tend to stick out like a sore thumb.
I am going to take a simpler route than some of the other answers here, though I have an insane amount of respect for the linguistically talented out there that really get into the sounds and sound combinations that create names.
I usually choose a language for each area or culture so that my names have some kind of similarity. I have used Spanish, Latin, Greek, German, and other western languages. (I have little experience with eastern languages, but have been dabbling a bit recently).
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