Zitat von Magical World Builder's Guide
By, Stephanie Cottrell Bryant
Culture-Building
Most of this world-builder's guide is dedicated to building the physical world, and to building magical systems that make sense. But a question was raised to me recently-- how do you come up with names that don't make your readers laugh at you?
Note the question isn't how to name things so that your reader doesn't laugh. One need only read a good Terry Pratchett book to earnestly want to create names that make your readers laugh. Nope-- the question is how to keep your reader from laughing at you, the writer. Because, let's face it, all too many names in fantasy literature are convoluted to the point of absurdity.
So I pondered this question recently and came up with the only answer I was comfortable with; don't invent a name, invent a culture. See, names are the most visible and vocal component of a society, a culture. Humans name everything-- the planet they're on, the things they eat, touch, do, love, hate, kill-- everything. They name each other, and they name the places where they live. And all of the names that humans use are born from our constant fascination with language-- we're always inventing language and have been pretty much since we became homo sapiens.
When you start populating your world with sentient people-- whether they're human or otherwise-- start addressing the question of language right away. It's an awful lot of work to create a whole new language for a culture of people who don't exist, never have, and never will. Tolkein did it-- more than once-- but he was a linguist by training, a genius, and for him, it was a ton of fun. If you love inventing whole languages, then have fun with it. If you're like me and just want to slide in a few new words because they sound "right," then do that. By all means, though, create a lexicon for your fantasy world's languages, though-- if the people of the S'nnari Desert tend to liquid sounds (lots of r's and l's), then any word with a "k" sound should be somewhat foreign to them, or have a particular impact when they say it (as in a curse word). People often say that German rarely sounds "nice," and it's somewhat true-- many hard sounds in the German language give it a much harsher "sound" to Romanized ears. The Star Trek producers were not stupid when they created the hard-sounding syllables of Klingon, either.
I can't suggest too many resources for this, except that Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook has a chapter on sound that is amazing. It's all about the sounds of words-- the differences between vowels and different kinds of consonents, and what effects they have in poetry. Use this, or something like it-- Oliver actually took most of her information from an old primer on language she had lying around her house. Learn about how language sounds.
You can also feel perfectly justified stealing liberally from Earth worlds and languages. In fact, that's what most writers do. In fact, that's what Tolkein did; most of the Lord of the Rings is a re-told version of the Rheingold, but without all the sex.
Most of the time, you'll be writing in your native tongue, and so you'll have automatically "translated" whatever your characters are doing into the language you're writing in. You need to know what your characters' language sounds like only for those words that you want to add in, to give an exotic flair to your world. In general, these will fall into three categories: people, places, and things. Verbs, being very abstract, should not be presented in the fantasy-language unless it's absolutely necessary. Even then, try to make those verbs sound as close to your own language as possible.
