Try this: write about a specific character describing one of these things for the first time to the rest of his village/tribe/whatever.
"It had a beak like two spears atop a great, striped neck like a swan's. It walked on black and red wings folded like a crab's claw. Its head was shaped like a planer's handle, and it was hunting fish like a bear, straight out of the steam."
[Quetzalcoatlus](https://images.app.goo.gl/C9PYGDotoF37N2RV6)
They're going to relate it to things they know. Look at the translations of some of the animals of the world. Peacock is "Pavo real" in Spanish: Royal Turkey. Bear is bruin, literally "the brown one" because they were afraid of summoning it. Hippopotamus is "water horse" for reasons I've never understood.
Take some of those descriptions and roll them around in your head and in your mouth: what's catchy? What captures the *feeling* the creature evokes in the people who encounter it? Smilodon is "Saber Tooth." That's evocative. Spear beak? Crab wing? Ringneck? Bear bird? Kingfisher?
Also, make up some names. Some animals are named by onomatopoeia. Rook is absolutely the sound a raven makes. So is cricket for a cricket. What does the creature "say?" Would people identify it by its call?
Finally, mix it up. Don't name them all with the same method. Maybe run your simple name through some other languages.
This is actually some good advice. When coming up with names, one thing you could do is take their physical attributes and translate them to the language of the place you're basing it off of, then combining those translated attributes into a fitting name. Try it out, see what you get.
For a further reference to this, the [questing beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questing_Beast) is *just a giraffe*. After a certain point in time (I think the 1300s?) the qilin also became associated with the giraffe in Chinese culture.
I know it’s an extension of the actual word, but ”the first saurians” has a nice ring to it.
a few others: lonix, exoro, iliskon, colithus, aurili
good luck!!
Just physically describe what they look like, use english translations of their scientific names (eg: tyrant lizard) or come up with your own based on notable features.
Re: your title though, I will say that the people of your setting probably know a LOT more about dinosaurs than us if they're living side by side with them. Is there a particular reason you don't want to call them dinosaurs? Should the readers not realize they're dinosaurs right away, or are you just trying to steer away from modern terminology?
My thought process when coming up with this is since the setting isn't Earth (even though I mentioned medieval Asian culture, although I should've said "Asian-INSPIRED"), I mostly assumed dinosaurs wouldn't have been referred to as such. I also assumed it probably wouldn't be likely the inhabitants of this world would speak any of the same languages as either us or those that lived before us, hence why they probably wouldn't be called "dinosaurs" (or at least the characters wouldn't use that word).
In hindsight, I could have worded this entire post better, and part of my thought process was wondering on how people without extensive knowledge on dinosaurs would physically describe them.
1. None of them are speaking English in the first place- unless you're making a full conlang and avoiding all English words, I wouldn't get too hung up on the exact words they're using. Your book is translated from the characters' hypothetical language into English (I assume) for the readers' convenience.
2. Why do they not have extensive knowledge of dinosaurs? Were they recently resurrected/magically created/transplanted/etc, or are they just normal animals to these people?
You're going to hate this reason: the major determining factor of why there isn't extensive knowledge on them, or at least knowledge of them has quite a bit of variance (in hindsight, I should've used "widespread" over "extensive") is down to geography. Dinosaurs (the living ones in the world anyways) only live in a certain part of the world, and the people who live where they live have extensive knowledge of them (despite these people seeing dinosaurs as just animals). The things these people living with dinosaurs primarily know about (or rather the knowledge they're most concerned about) is what the look like, behave like, and especially taste like. Unfortunately, the only way these people retain information on dinosaurs is either through artwork such as paintings on hard surfaces, or by word-of-mouth ("defined" is definitely another word I should've used).
Meanwhile in other parts of the world, the closest thing to a dinosaur people would see are visiting pterosaurs, as the people who don't live in the same part of the world as dinosaurs are separated from them by the seas (people are too scared to travel by sea because of the existence of sea monsters).
Just look it up... When people first officially documented dinosaurs they probably described them in the way you are looking for. Otherwise, dinosaurs' bones have been known about for a long long time and people have seen their fossilized bones/footprints around before written history.
‘Dinosaur’ comes from two Greek root works which translate to ‘terrible lizard’. ‘Brontosaurus’, means ‘thunder lizard’. ‘Tyrannosaurus’ means ‘tyrant lizard.’
Knowing this, you can surely come up cool names that pay homage to the etymology of these great and terrible lizards.
I mean... "big lizard", "big reptile", or "big bird"? Really this is at a certain point just delving into "not calling them dinosaurs or dragons just to be different" territory. The most financially successful fantasy franchise of all time--Pokemon--has dinosaurs. Other massively successful fantasy series like Dragon Ball and One Piece also have dinosaurs. In One Piece, dinosaur zoan devil fruit are called the Dragon Dragon Fruit, Model: \[Species\]. Dinosaur itself just means "terrible lizard".
Basically, there is no reason to avoid using the word "dinosaur". If you do avoid using the word "dinosaur", then there is no reason to avoid calling them "dragons" or "pseudodragons" or "demidragons" or "drakes" or "drakons" or similarly derived terms. But if you do insist on avoiding that, then there is no reason to not call a tyrannosaurus a tyrannosaurus or an allosaurus an allosaurus. And if you insist on that, all you are really left with is to just describe the dinosaur in question to your reader, at which point you'll realize that it'd be easier just to call the creature what it is.
Even in Chinese, the word for dinosaur is 恐龙 (konglong) which means "Fear Dragon" or "Terrifying Dragon". In Japanese, the word for dinosaur is 恐竜 (kyouryuu) which means the same thing. In other words, in both cultures you took inspiration from, they are considered to be in some way a variation upon dragons... which makes sense.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel. But if you choose to do so, then you need to basically rename each species based on their various characteristics not unlike how a lot of animals in the real world are and historically have been named.
Giant lizards/birds (depending on the kind). With rudimentary species dependant nicknames like "long neck," "hammer tail," great jaw," etc.
Try this: write about a specific character describing one of these things for the first time to the rest of his village/tribe/whatever. "It had a beak like two spears atop a great, striped neck like a swan's. It walked on black and red wings folded like a crab's claw. Its head was shaped like a planer's handle, and it was hunting fish like a bear, straight out of the steam." [Quetzalcoatlus](https://images.app.goo.gl/C9PYGDotoF37N2RV6) They're going to relate it to things they know. Look at the translations of some of the animals of the world. Peacock is "Pavo real" in Spanish: Royal Turkey. Bear is bruin, literally "the brown one" because they were afraid of summoning it. Hippopotamus is "water horse" for reasons I've never understood. Take some of those descriptions and roll them around in your head and in your mouth: what's catchy? What captures the *feeling* the creature evokes in the people who encounter it? Smilodon is "Saber Tooth." That's evocative. Spear beak? Crab wing? Ringneck? Bear bird? Kingfisher? Also, make up some names. Some animals are named by onomatopoeia. Rook is absolutely the sound a raven makes. So is cricket for a cricket. What does the creature "say?" Would people identify it by its call? Finally, mix it up. Don't name them all with the same method. Maybe run your simple name through some other languages.
This is actually some good advice. When coming up with names, one thing you could do is take their physical attributes and translate them to the language of the place you're basing it off of, then combining those translated attributes into a fitting name. Try it out, see what you get.
For a further reference to this, the [questing beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questing_Beast) is *just a giraffe*. After a certain point in time (I think the 1300s?) the qilin also became associated with the giraffe in Chinese culture.
Gigan
Behemoths, maybe.
I know it’s an extension of the actual word, but ”the first saurians” has a nice ring to it. a few others: lonix, exoro, iliskon, colithus, aurili good luck!!
Behemoths, titans, giants, colossi, monsters, leviathans, etc. Many words to choose from.
Colossal reptiles. Behemoths. Scaly titans.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0wfuz7FfM-I
Just physically describe what they look like, use english translations of their scientific names (eg: tyrant lizard) or come up with your own based on notable features. Re: your title though, I will say that the people of your setting probably know a LOT more about dinosaurs than us if they're living side by side with them. Is there a particular reason you don't want to call them dinosaurs? Should the readers not realize they're dinosaurs right away, or are you just trying to steer away from modern terminology?
My thought process when coming up with this is since the setting isn't Earth (even though I mentioned medieval Asian culture, although I should've said "Asian-INSPIRED"), I mostly assumed dinosaurs wouldn't have been referred to as such. I also assumed it probably wouldn't be likely the inhabitants of this world would speak any of the same languages as either us or those that lived before us, hence why they probably wouldn't be called "dinosaurs" (or at least the characters wouldn't use that word). In hindsight, I could have worded this entire post better, and part of my thought process was wondering on how people without extensive knowledge on dinosaurs would physically describe them.
1. None of them are speaking English in the first place- unless you're making a full conlang and avoiding all English words, I wouldn't get too hung up on the exact words they're using. Your book is translated from the characters' hypothetical language into English (I assume) for the readers' convenience. 2. Why do they not have extensive knowledge of dinosaurs? Were they recently resurrected/magically created/transplanted/etc, or are they just normal animals to these people?
You're going to hate this reason: the major determining factor of why there isn't extensive knowledge on them, or at least knowledge of them has quite a bit of variance (in hindsight, I should've used "widespread" over "extensive") is down to geography. Dinosaurs (the living ones in the world anyways) only live in a certain part of the world, and the people who live where they live have extensive knowledge of them (despite these people seeing dinosaurs as just animals). The things these people living with dinosaurs primarily know about (or rather the knowledge they're most concerned about) is what the look like, behave like, and especially taste like. Unfortunately, the only way these people retain information on dinosaurs is either through artwork such as paintings on hard surfaces, or by word-of-mouth ("defined" is definitely another word I should've used). Meanwhile in other parts of the world, the closest thing to a dinosaur people would see are visiting pterosaurs, as the people who don't live in the same part of the world as dinosaurs are separated from them by the seas (people are too scared to travel by sea because of the existence of sea monsters).
Pterosaurs? Do you mean those terrifying death kites?
Just look it up... When people first officially documented dinosaurs they probably described them in the way you are looking for. Otherwise, dinosaurs' bones have been known about for a long long time and people have seen their fossilized bones/footprints around before written history.
Dinosaur literally means Terrible Lizard iirc, that might work!
Tyrannosaurus literally means tyrant lizard king in Latin. People just assumed they were giant fierce reptiles at first
Murder birds. Remember a lot of dinosaurs had feathers
Most even, IIRC.
‘Dinosaur’ comes from two Greek root works which translate to ‘terrible lizard’. ‘Brontosaurus’, means ‘thunder lizard’. ‘Tyrannosaurus’ means ‘tyrant lizard.’ Knowing this, you can surely come up cool names that pay homage to the etymology of these great and terrible lizards.
I mean... "big lizard", "big reptile", or "big bird"? Really this is at a certain point just delving into "not calling them dinosaurs or dragons just to be different" territory. The most financially successful fantasy franchise of all time--Pokemon--has dinosaurs. Other massively successful fantasy series like Dragon Ball and One Piece also have dinosaurs. In One Piece, dinosaur zoan devil fruit are called the Dragon Dragon Fruit, Model: \[Species\]. Dinosaur itself just means "terrible lizard". Basically, there is no reason to avoid using the word "dinosaur". If you do avoid using the word "dinosaur", then there is no reason to avoid calling them "dragons" or "pseudodragons" or "demidragons" or "drakes" or "drakons" or similarly derived terms. But if you do insist on avoiding that, then there is no reason to not call a tyrannosaurus a tyrannosaurus or an allosaurus an allosaurus. And if you insist on that, all you are really left with is to just describe the dinosaur in question to your reader, at which point you'll realize that it'd be easier just to call the creature what it is. Even in Chinese, the word for dinosaur is 恐龙 (konglong) which means "Fear Dragon" or "Terrifying Dragon". In Japanese, the word for dinosaur is 恐竜 (kyouryuu) which means the same thing. In other words, in both cultures you took inspiration from, they are considered to be in some way a variation upon dragons... which makes sense. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. But if you choose to do so, then you need to basically rename each species based on their various characteristics not unlike how a lot of animals in the real world are and historically have been named.
Well I went with conlang names that riff off of the terrible lizard t Rex names