I have a new obsession. It occurred to me, today, that names from radically different places should sound radically different. You should be able to tell, when a new character is introduced, if they're from a totally different part of the world because their name is strange. However, I am totally stumped on how this is done. Suggestions?

Current scenario. The Elloi, who live east of the mountains, have some strange... powers, live in endless peace, and never, ever associate with mortals.

The mortals, who live west of the mountains, believe the Elloi to be fairy tales, and resemble your typical feudal fantasy European type place. Of course, there are the northern kingdoms, who are more superstitious, and the border lands, touched by a bit of magic, and the place in the south without a name yet which nobody trusts, but that should go into 'Culture' not here.

My naming currently looks like this.

ELLOI:
Meline
Rynaud
Helen
Janin
Yancy
Terrance
Herene
Peliodares (but he's a mage so I'm not entirely sure his counts)
Darlene
Tell
Ian
Widar (another mage)

MORTALS:
Derek
Fredrick
Katherine
Myra
Richard
Leslie
John
Charles
Lemuel

They just don't seem... different enough to me. I was thinking, maybe if the mortals all have usual names and the Elloi made up names, but that isn't the case. So how do you go about creating different names for different cultures?

Well, I can give you the hard answer. In my cultures, each has a distinct language/dialect. Naming follows rules and traditions of the language. Names of people from the Derrâ language (e.g.: Srugoz, Parnâ) and Зaru language will naturally sound different then names from the Anacci language (e.g.:Periacci) or the Cuilian language (e.g.: Culrias).

For example, in the Enclave it is traditional to name your son with svar. 'Svar' means strong in the language, so naturally the names Samsvar, Horsvar, and Forsvar (all very common names in the Enclave, by the way) were given to children their parents wished to be strong, often their first child. For girls, a similar "Yá" is often an extension to the name; such as Numaryá and Relayá. This word is hard to translate, but the English equivalent would be graceful/good homemaker rolled up in one.

Names are often kept in the family. For example, Numaryá was given her name when Forsvar adopted her, so to speak. Numaryá was the name of Forsvar's grandmother.

Anyways, hope that helps. Maybe you could give one culture a certain peculiarity for boy or girl names. Maybe I wasn't very helpful. Whatever you end up doing, I strongly suggest that the people names end up with the 'normal' race. Wouldn't do to have a race of really weird people with names like Bobby, Jane, and Sue.

eruheran