How do you find fantasy names for your geography?

[LoA]

I reallized that I really suck at finding names for my fantasy lands. I know that everyone's gonna laugh at me, but I really like using autorealms and I've been coming up with maps. However I can never figure out interesting names for my worlds or continents, nations, oceans etc. etc.

Do you guys have any tips?

[Kindling]

Unhelpfully I have to say that a lot of the time names "just come to me" and I like the sound of them.
However, when I'm struggling I usually turn to the culture of the people that inhabit the place to construct a name. This is easiest when that culture is imitative of a real-world culture - or at least imitative in their naming conventions. So for example if I needed to name a settlement in the Grimdowns of my Dark Silver setting, I know that the culture uses Anglo-Saxon/Viking inspired naming conventions so... how about I look at some real-world Anglo-Saxon place names? Eoforwic was the old name for York, I could swap out the -wic suffix (meaning the produce of a farm) for another typical Anglo-Saxon place-name suffix. How about -hurst, meaning wooded hill? Eoforhurst doesn't really roll off the tongue that well for me, how about -stowe, meaning meeting place? Still not great, but Eoforstowe will do until I come up with something better.
If you're less imitative of a real world culture's naming conventions this takes more creative work on your part but there's no reason this same method couldn't be applied to wholly imaginary names in one way or another. Maybe one of your fantasy cultures uses lots of i's y's and l's in their place names... so they could live in the shadows of the Illinlyth Mountain Range, with their major settlement being on the banks of the River Lynrillyn. I haven't necessarily come up with any meaning for those words, I've just strung together syllables that fit the culture's "theme" in a way that seems vaguely pleasing.
Maybe for another culture I do give meaning so certain words along with the vague idea of the kinds of letters and sounds that should crop up a lot. So for this culture, in addition to using, say, z's and u's a lot, I decide that Urzth means "holy" and Zauruz means "high place." So this culture's capital sits atop the Uzru Zauruz plateau which rises from the sun-baked desert of Urzth Azazu, famous for the number of prophets and holy men who have wandered it in search of enlightenment over the centuries.
So that's kind of how I do things when I need to come up with names and inspiration isn't striking - I turn to the culture that inhabits the space. It works for me, anyway...

[Xeviat]

Considering that so many names in our world translate to descriptive names, I'm probably going to go with descriptive names until I start coming up with manufactured languages for my setting. When I want names in other languages, though, I'm deciding upon real world languages to copy cat, translating stuff, respelling it phoenetically, then mispelling it (by playing with the vowels a bit), then going with that.

[Polycarp]

I alternate between different modes of doing this.

Sometimes I make "quick" manufactured languages by creating nonsense words with a similar theme or sound, sometimes based on sounds in a real-life language.  Wikipedia is pretty helpful for this - you can find lists like "Mountains in Hungary" or "Rivers in Armenia" or something and immediately have a coherent-sounding list to build off of.  I usually do this in worlds created for a single campaign or game, when I want to convey the linguistic difference between cultures but don't want to spend time building actual languages.

In more involved settings I tend to use descriptive names for places more often, though not exclusively.  In the Clockwork Jungle, for instance, I often use descriptive names for natural formations, landmarks, and regions (e.g. Duskwine, a river; Sea of Ink, a region; Forge of the Dawn, a mountain range).  Populated areas, however, have a descriptive name or a "native" name based largely on how diverse they are.  Racially and culturally diverse cities tend to have descriptive names because it would make less sense to express them in the tongue of a single people (e.g. White Lotus, the Rookery, Koldon's Well), while villages and mono-cultural communities tend to be untranslated and based on the "sounds" I consider typical of that race's language (e.g. Orymul, Fesshen, Kengal, Sarmyk).  Age can also be a factor; ancient populated places more frequently get untranslated names than recent creations, as one presumes the meaning of the names of older places is more likely to have been forgotten or corrupted.

Of course, as Vreeg suggests, you can always have both, starting with a descriptive name and translating it later.  The only problem with that is that this forces you to actually start making a word list in another language which is not necessarily desirable, depending on what parts of worldbuilding actually interest you.

[LoA]

Huh, I never even thought about language. Are there any interesting resources for language making? Also I began thinking about something. I created a Redwall-esque world a while back, and I named one of the continents Urthlind. Basically "urth" came from Urthstripe the badger lord of Salamandastron in the Redwall novel of the same name. However after this I named the ancestral badger realm Urthheight, and so on and so forth. I dunno why I'm saying this, it just interested me that this was one of the few times I've ever named something, and was satisfied with naming something.

[Xeviat]

One trick I did was digging around in my Civilizations 4 files. I found a list of all the city names programmed into the game. I knew I wanted a Romanesque naming feel for my main nation, so I took the names of the Roman cities and randomized the vowels and normalized the phonetics.

[LD]

Are there any interesting resources for language making?

http://www.zompist.com/

http://www.zompist.com/kit.html

It may be difficult to navigate. And it is web circa 1995. But it is the source.


...And his world: http://www.zompist.com/virtuver.htm