A short story on inventing names without a CS or linguistic major.
Still working on a 4X space game with multiple races. There are leaders, ships, planets and stars to name. Each race has its language. Their names have a certain sound and melody. A human player should able to associate entities with another player based on their name. Sounds terribly complicated. Doesn’t have to be.
?
For each language we create a list of sets of name fragments. Each fragment is one or more letters. Fragments, sets and lists are not uniform in any way.
[ { "a", "be" }, { "ce", "d", "ehf"}, { "t" }, ... ]
To build a random name pick a random element from every set and concatenate them in list order. Almost done.
To allow for short(er) names add a probability for each set that states the chance you pick a fragment from that set at all. Yield a random chance to see if the set is skipped.
[ { 90, "a", "be" }, { 75, "ce", "d", "ehf"}, { 50, "t" },... ]
To avoid duplicate names remember all composed names already used and generate new random names until a new one is found.
Possible names from the example: "ace", "bed", "becet", "at", …
The algorithm is trivial. Picking fragments that always can be pronounced when concatenated with any of the next possibly picked sets members is the tricky part. As we can play with the fragments in our minds easily this allows for the fun of a design activity.
Through the nature of the algorithm the names created always have a particular sound and rhythm. Different styles can easily be desigened.
With lists of 4-5 fragment sets, each having about 7-8 members on average and fragments of 1-2 characters there are several thousand names possible.
I found it most useful to think of a few concrete names that should be possible and divide them into fragments. Than add more fragments that fit the fragments already there.
Some examples of different languages I use: