Hi! So...for my story, my world is inspired by American and European influences. The entire Kingdom is named after gemstones, but I'm having trouble with naming states that the kingdom has and I had described it the best way I can in my previous post, but I'm not sure how can I name the towns, districts, and cities with gems and minerals.
What is the trouble though? The real world has loads of places named that way - even mundane minerals like Flint have made it as cities, and dangerous ones like Asbestos One thing that might be odd though is if -all- the places are named that way. A problem fantasy kingdoms always have is that unlike the real world all their names get chosen at the same point in time by the same person (I mean the writer), and that is one thing that can make it immediately obvious it's an artificial fantasy kingdom. People have done generators for this apparently, so others are grappling with similar challenges: https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/gem-mineral-names.php And I couldn't think of a 1970s series that had used the same naming-scheme, but there are some more recent ones:- https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/172459/book-series-where-they-collect-either-stones-or-gems I would think this would have made an appearance in the 1970s wave of fantasy stories though, in line with the New Age crystal healing rising in popularity
Would naming the districts based on their similarities to gemstones work? Or by how the name sounds when applied to the place? For example, a state that's inhabited by mostly middle class citizens (referencing the gem's worth) and known for the red color of its dirt and landforms (referencing the gem's color) could be called Carnelian. Also, (going off of evild4ve's point) it would make sense for the names to have changed over time, unless there's a reason why the names have stayed the same over years, or the states were only recently named after gemstones. After a few centuries or so of being a state, Carnelian could be known as Cernalia. Of course, this is all assuming that the kingdom has been around for a long time and was named after gemstones at the very beginning.
Brilliant yes - human habitations last a lot longer than words, so over the course of time the pronounciation and spelling would shift, and unless they have the internet already or it's a very small kingdom the city names would have shifted in different directions due to dialect. But a potential source this gives the OP might be to put the gem names into wiktionary and see where words like diamond/ruby/etc came from. If a city was named after a diamond 1000 years ago, its name now might be "Dyamaunt", or it might have evolved into a doublet form alongside the word diamond, maybe something like "Jamont".
I live in place called emerald next to a place called gemfields and a place called sapphire. I was kind of disappointed that it's not color coded when I moved here.
