When you are writing a story that is set in a fantasy world (maybe our world with just one made-up element, or a completely different world), what is a good way to come up with names for species that aren't just names of Earth species with minor variations? It's easy to call a bird of prey a Tlkachtian hawk, for example, if you have a region in your world named Tlkachtia, but it's not particularly imaginative, and lots of people are likely to focus on the "hawk" part when it might in fact be very different from a hawk. And what if there is nothing in Earth's fauna or flora that is similar in the respect that you want to emphasize?
I found a number of questions and plenty of good answers and resources centered around naming characters and places, but essentially nothing about naming species.
Answer
Any species you invent will have characteristics. Find yourself a creature with similar characteristics, get a good dictionary, and follow the etymology.
Using you 'hawk' example, the etymology says that the OE was habuc or heafoc; midle Dutch was hawic or havic, High German was habuh and Middle German habech: the Norse was hauk-r.
Take any of those, and form your species name from it. Your hawk could, as an example, be a hauch'r, a heafic, or something similar.
There is no special reason for using etymology. I happen to like it, that is all, so you could adapt it for personal taste (foreign words, random Scrabble tiles, etc) as long as it serves to get ideas flowing.
No comments:
Post a Comment