[quote=”Kelemelan” post=3578]I see. Funny how languages work.
Just out of the blue, I would have had them sound very different. What can I say, guess I’m just used to the romance languages. ;)[/quote]
Indeed.. I’m going to guess you tried pronouncing it as if it were French? Bet that was a tongue twister lol. French I might have written it Derouché, or something like that (Dare-ou-shay).
English pronunciation would “De Rork” (De with a short ‘e’ sound, not “Dee”)
Generally in most of my writing I play pretty loose with names. In southern Ardanya I stuck to familiar Greek and Anglo-Saxon names for given names (typical of what you’d see in modern day Canada, United States, England, etc.). For Kharunia I stuck to older Greek and Roman names for given names. I don’t think I established any conventions for Valwyre.
For surnames I’ve generally gone with what roles off the tongue well while trying to be consistent with some made-up grammatical rules (at least for the Kharunians). Thus Kharunian names are a Greek or Roman derived given name, an intermediate (such as ‘ser’ or ‘fe’), and a full word that’s derived from nothing more than what sounds good. But on paper it gives the impression of a consistent cultural naming convention.
Kembria I’m being a little more consistent with both forenames and surnames. Aaeron, Annabel, and Isobel all slightly more modern versions of Irish Gaelic names, and De’Rourke is a variant on a old Irish Gaelic surname.
Ludfordshire is also a combination variant on two town names found in Ireland (again, retaining their Gaelic names) with some Welsh influence thrown in.
I’ve stayed largely away from Romantic names because I wanted to play around with some less familiar influences.
I basically used similar conventions when coming up with the Kharunian language. The term Bea mae literally translated would be Goodbye friend (a common parting in Eldar/Kharunian), but both those words are actually derived from their English synonyms. For simplicity’s sake I didn’t write new grammatical rules for Eldar, mostly because I’m not a linguist and have no idea how to even go about doing it, and I never use enough of the language in my writing for anyone to notice.
I’ve used the apostrophe a few times instead of a conjunction to tie two related words into a single phrase, such as the case of Tali’Centi (which, I just checked my notes, and it should have been Taly’Centi… oops, I’ve been writing it wrong since I came up with it lol). Both taly and centi have unique meaning (again, derived from their English synonyms), but I combine them together using an apostrophe into a single joined word that means something else. Some real languages have similar conventions.
I stayed completely away from gendered nouns. They annoy me.