: Re: How to create a consistent feel for character names in a fantasy setting? Recently while doing some world-building for a role-playing game with a friend we were seriously struggling with naming

@Kristi637

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I dealt with this issue in my most recent novel by training neural nets to generate the names for me. I trained recurrent text-generation neural nets on names from combinations of different cultures--the combinations that have made it into the novel so far are Arabic/Gaelic (for the fictional country of Almeredh), French/Gaelic (for Calonheil), and French/Japanese (for Kaizene, but I only have a few characters from here). I got the names from Wikipedia name lists by culture.

I found this surprisingly effective in creating plausible-sounding names that sound like they all come from the same place, without being immediately recognizable as one of their source languages. I generated a few hundred or thousand names for each combination and cherrypicked ones that actually sounded good for the novel. For some examples, the main characters from Calonheil are named Sithmina, Ausiar, Valentile, Ecraiph, and Chalaith. The mains from Almeredh are Gilleashar, Satris Saida, Aenzular, and Flairnach. (Almeredh and Calonheil are meant to have closely related languages, which is why I had them share one source language, so they do sound similar.) You can do place names and assorted nouns the same way, using place names and common nouns from the source languages.

This strategy will probably work better for Earth-ish, historical or contemporary settings, rather than far-future settings, distant planets, or languages spoken by aliens with non-human sets of phonemes.

The Python 3 code I used is here. It'll take as many source files as you want, and filters out words that were recreated exactly from the source files, so all the returned words are original. It can run on a laptop given around 30-45 minutes for training to finish.

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