1. vintage_fairy

    vintage_fairy Member

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    World Building: Naming a Capital City for an African-inspired World

    Discussion in 'Setting Development' started by vintage_fairy, Dec 7, 2021.

    I'm still struggling with coming up with a capital city for my African-inspired world and I had changed up a few things about it as well while I'm working on it. I heavily inspired the capital city with elements from Zimbabwe and Uganda. Such as hills, mountains, and lakes. Since I had tossed in influences from Zimbabwe, the culture that this nation has is that of pottery, basket weaving, jewelry making, etc.

    I'm a bit stumped on what to do now, with the name. The world-building is easy, and I'm slowly getting it. Not only that, but women also weave fabric and pay a price by using shells and rocks and men are hunter-gathers, while recently, women have joined to be part of the army.

    I'd forgotten to put the summary for my story since it's confusing to know what the plot is about. Sorry in advance if I confused anyone. The story's called The Lion King II: Defenders of the Pridelands, an AU of the second movie.

    Premise:

    Founded by a lioness named Yamina and taken in as her daughter, a human girl named Dalia grows up to be a bright and spirited young woman with dreams of going off to distant lands and meeting new people. However, one day, she meets and befriends a human explorer and becomes not only by his good looks, personality, and fearlessness, her heart yearns for a sense of adventuring and exploring.

    Soon enough, Dalia and Emelyn's friendship grows deeper and stronger each day, until the two have visions of a long-forgotten past which leads to more questions than answers.

    Now, with the help of her new friends, Dalia sets out on a quest to discover who she is and what role she plays. Suddenly, all that comes to a brief halt when an ancient evil rises up from beyond the ashes, threatening to destroy everything Dalia holds dear.

    This is the summary of the story that I've written and I had revamped it so many times to make it perfect and now that I'm satisfied with it, I'll keep it. I'm still stuck with naming the main shopping district and town, in general, that is the largest city in the world. It has street vendors from all over, such as expensive cloth, textiles, jewelry, pottery, weaving blankets and baskets, fruit and vegetable stands, etc.
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2021
  2. evild4ve

    evild4ve Critique is stranger than fiction Supporter Contributor

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    I can't imagine how one funds the construction of multiple cities with a currency pegged to two infinitely-abundant natural resources. Are there massive disparities between urban and rural areas?

    But IMO nothing about any storyworld holds interest value except as the border or frame or trimmings of a story about characters. Any suggestions I could make would have negligible value unless there is some idea of what the story is about. Straight away, if some of the settings are European/American and others are Zimbabwean, and if there are no fantastic aspects to these imaginary places... why is it even useful to set the story in a fantasy world? There might be all sorts of advantages to using the real places, even if there will be magic and monsters.
     
  3. J.T. Woody

    J.T. Woody Book Witch Contributor

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    Lookup the Shona and Ndebele languages of Zimbabwe.

    Or the dialects spoken in Uganda.

    Maybe you'll get an idea of what to name your capital city.
     
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  4. Robert Musil

    Robert Musil Comparativist Contributor

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    Applicable to any world-building discussion, a reminder not to overthink things:

    20211207_173538.jpg

    We spend so much time thinking things through, but of course real life is really just kinda stupid sometimes. So if your setting doesn't have at least a sprinkling of stupidity as well, it won't feel as authentic.

    I've been thinking similar things about characters recently--how we spend so much time thinking "would this character do _____ in this situation", trying to make it plausible and logical, when of course real people do illogical, out-of-character things all the time.

    I mean you have to use this kind of thing as seasoning, you can't build a whole story out of just stupidity (well...actually...hm)

    OK, rant over.
     
  5. J.T. Woody

    J.T. Woody Book Witch Contributor

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    lol, i literally have a place called "The Continent" because.... well..... its a continent :bigtongue:
    and the villages my MCs come across on The Continent are simplistic like "Green River" and "Goat Run"
     
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  6. Robert Musil

    Robert Musil Comparativist Contributor

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    I would read a story about Goat Run. Sounds like the kind of place where a humble, salt-of-the-earth protagonist might receive a call to adventure...
     
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  7. Lawless

    Lawless Active Member

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    To find a suitable name, how about you open Google Translate, choose one of the African languages, then pick an English word you think describes your capital and check out the possible translations into that language? Maybe one of them sounds right to you, possibly after changing a letter or two.

    Before the Google Translate era, I needed names for two kingdoms in a fantasy world. I took the dictionary of a certain language and looked up the words "good" and "evil". They looked very suitable, so I just used them unaltered. The readers who happen to know that language will understand where the names come from, to the overwhelming majority they will be just some made-up names.
     
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  8. hmnut

    hmnut Member

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    Naming landmarks is one of the coolest and should be simplest ways to really make your world building pop.

    It is a case where less is more or simple is better than complex. I think once you zero in on language the rest falls into place.

    Landmark names usually fall into 1 or 3 categories. Description, Named after a person/event, convenience.

    Description - The big lake is named 'Big Lake'
    Named after person (or event) - Johnson Lake is named after King Johnson who founded the city.
    Convenience - the 3rd street in a series of streets is called "3rd Street"

    While you DON'T want to go too deep down a world building hole with naming, you can do a lot here. I would say the obvious is you can sprinkle in a lot of hints about the history of the world without info dumping.

    First obvious, you can name some of the stuff after some of the famous people in your world's history, that fleshes out the world. But what is really cool is you can use it to set up curve balls too, the names should be based off of what the people believe their history is, the characters might learn the truth.

    NOTE: when you name a landmark after a historical person you should not then info dump the history of that person, the benefit of using their name as a landmark is just to let the reader know "hey pay attention, the people of my world named this street a name, clearly this name means something to them, if you see this name again it probably matters."

    Another way, which directly uses language if everything in the area is a traditional English sounding name, but then one or two landmarks have a French sounding name, without a single word of exposition that subconsciously tells the reader, that there was at a French influence at one point.

    Again you can do a lot with naming landmarks, and it can beef up your world building but best of all it actually doesn't have to be to complicated. When in doubt you can name your main street... 'main street' (in the language of your choosing).
     
  9. Alcove Audio

    Alcove Audio Contributor Contributor

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    I've been using a few "imposed" conventions for naming places in my current WIP. The planets in my sci-fi story are based upon the primary industry of the planet. For planets that are mostly agricultural in nature I use the scientific names of plants.

    As an example, the family of one of my characters are tree farmers on the planet Quercharum:

    White Oak tree ( Quercus alba), Sugar Maple tree ( Acer saccharum) === Quercharum

    Another character's family are berry farmers on Lonirubus:

    Honeyberry (Lonicera caerulea), Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus) === Lonirubus
     
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