World building—place names

A couple of years back, it seemed that much of the sci-fi I was reading had names or languages incorporating an apostrophe.  In particular, I found a continuation of a series I was reading quite tedious, as it seemed EVERY name had to have an apostrophe and/or a Y in it, many new planet names were words with “land” tacked onto the end, or they consisted of names already used that had one letter changed and were passed off as being new. 

Frankly, I was surprised that the series got approved and published, since it came on the heels of what IMO was much better work.  I thought to myself, “It’s hard to read a story when you’re disappointed that the names suck.”

In the age of the internet, there is no excuse to skimp on details like names (and constructed languages) because there are many tools out there to help you.

First get an idea about how you want your alien language to sound.  Consonant and vowel clusters are easy to pair using a word generator to give you syllables, and then run it again with some additional syllables to get larger words.  Once that’s done, you can use a fantasy name generator to come up with name ideas, and then translate some of your fantasy names into the alien language you generated.  Viola!  You have a nice selection of names to incorporate into your universe.  (I personally tend to use something descriptive of the area where I envision an evaluation team landing.)  If that’s not enough for you, you can manipulate a name to “age” it, so that it closely resembles but doesn’t exactly match the conlang words you created, or it can undergo major changes so that it doesn’t remotely resemble the original name you created, since dialectal changes are inevitable in any language over a long period of time.

So do your readers a favor by putting an hour or two of work into creating names instead of misusing an apostrophe to cobble together a couple of unpronounceable consonant clusters.