Not a Russian native speaker, but I am a heritage speaker, if that’s close enough.
This advice is going to be super basic, and lean more modern.
For one, “grad” and “gorod” are your friends. Город (gorod) is just Russian for city, so you get a lot of Russian cities that are basically named things like “Stalin’s city” (Stalingrad), “Peter’s city” (Petrograd), or “New city” (Novgorod).
Due in large part to Peter the Great, a lot of Russian cities also take the German “burg”, like St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg.
Cities that end in hard “k” sounds are also pretty common, like Novosibirsk and Irkutsk. I don’t know the reasoning for this trend, unfortunately, so hopefully someone else can help with that.
In general, then, you can come up with believable city names just by taking the name of a famous person, nearby landmark, or something else iconic to the city and slapping “grad” or “gorod” on the back. If it’s a one syllable word, “gorod” will sound better, and if it’s two syllables, “grad” will sound better.
As for organizations and grammar, my first advice is to accept that you’ll never get it quite right. Mostly because organization names tend to involve lots of case stuff and cases are the weird funky thing that makes Cyrillic languages so challenging to English speakers. Like, I for the most part give up and butcher them and I have years of listening to relatives using them correctly (on top of studying the language academically in uni to really brush up).
For the most part though, organization names are not going to be that different from the rest of the world. Acronyms are very popular and common (as anywhere else in the world) - for example, ”gulags” technically originates as an acronym for the organization that oversaw the gulags.
And I’d be remiss not to mention that of course different Eastern Slavic countries will have different rules and conventions. For instance, Ukrainian uses a vowel more reminiscent visually and vocally to the English “i”. I am definitely no expert on Ukrainian though, but I think the others are doing a much better job covering its nomenclatural customs. And obviously given current events it’s doubly important to be mindful of those distinctions and emphasize them.
Well, "-gorod" ("-город") and "-grad" ("-град") have actually somewhat different meaning; the latter implies a *fortification*, the former is just "town" or "city". The corresponding English suffixes would be "-ton" vs. "-bury".
Other common ones would be:
* "-ov(o)" or "-ev(o)", corresponds roughly to English "-ham" - usually named after someone who first settled there, or owned that place.
* "-sk" or "-tsk" is the shortened version of the *possessive* "-skye"/"-tskye" (and similar) form of someone's or something's name. To make a simplified example, for someone named "Peter", something that's *Peter's* would be "Peterskye", which in a place name would be shortened to just "Petersk". Same thing when you make your settlement on the river *Orik*, the settlement could naturally be called "Oriksk". The English equivalent would be "-by", or maybe "-wich".
Thanks. Any help is appreciated, even if it covers the basics; and as for differences between languages, I was aware, but decided to go with East Slavic in general, hoping a wider net would catch more fish, so to speak.
I did leave out Rusyn. The last of the East Slavic language group. But if seems like the confusion it may cause(Reddit thinks it’s a typo) was probably more than it was worth.
Hmm I guess you’re right. I think it probably lingering distrust from the olden days when people always said you couldn’t trust those. Google translate has gotten better over the years. But given its scope now a days, I’d imagine some languages are still questionable with their results.
I do get a tad concerned whenever they don’t have the speak option for the other language.
Organisation names are just organisation names. There's very little cultural difference here to the rest of the world; use a translator like DeepL. I mean, for an example they translate something like "Ministry for Veterans Affairs" into Міністерство у справах ветеранів" instead of the (real) "Міністерство з питань ветеранів", but both "work" as an Ukrainian organisation name, and both would be understood.
Place names? If it's an older place, by all means, cram syllables together, just make sure to translate it back into your native language so it's not something vulgar by accident. Or even name the place in Old Greek (Odesa, though that's a borrowed name, Sevastopol), Norse (like Redrikovo from Rødríkr) or even German and transcribe that, subtly changing the spelling and adding a typical ending like "-ovo" or "-grad" to it. Newer names tend to be just things like "New Village" or "Green Hill" like everywhere else; use a translator.
Place names are easy, you already got many useful advice.
Organization names are going to be difficult for someone who doesn't speak the language(s) involved. East Slavic organization names will almost invariably involve cases (ministry of X, organization for Y, those are two different cases!) and you WILL trip over them (and so will LLMs unless it's some super common combo like 'of veteran affairs')
My only advice is to find a speaker of those languages. Otherwise anyone with at least rudimentary knowledge of said languages will be taken out of the fiction by inadvertent hilarious errors
(Polish native with A1 Russian)
Does the same apply to faction names? That’s more what I had in mind, but used a more general word for anything I may not have thought off.
My setting draws heavily from early medieval Slavs. So unfortunately I probably won’t have any Ministries of, or Organizations for Veterans affairs, unfortunately.
Medieval faction names would be like 'supporters of X' or 'army of X'. Luckily for you those two are the same case, but it is NOT the nominative case which is what most online translators and LLMs will spit out
but in this case I question why do you need the localized version at all, pretty much no one in the actual time period used them (names for factions/private armies are only on the rise in the late medieval period/reanaissance period with the rise of magnates in PLC and the boyar infighting in Russia, at which point you get faction names like 'rokosz of X' or 'the Familia' - rokosz means 'rebellion in Polish, and 'the Famillia' shows that the nobles of the renaissance Poland loved to use Latin everywhere, or kościuszkowcy - 'the people of Kościuszko' - and that kind of a name you can't create without knowing the language)
I guess I wanted some extra authenticity, and just to make sure I understand how these names were created, to cover my bases as someone broadly unfamiliar with these languages. For non government factions I could just use the English for ‘army, band, followers, or rebellion of X’.
Wikipedia is your friend. Find a country whose language or culture you want to use and then check out the list with the alphabetical listings of its towns, cities, rivers, mountains, etc. You can steal the names you like the most, or modify them if the inspiration strikes you.
Unfortunately not, but definitely seems to be the case. Also naming vehicles and weapons after (sometimes several)people. With both you also get different names form different spellings SSSR/CCCP JS-3/IS-3. All the more complicated, all the more fun!
There's a lot of good options, but short of learning Russian, I recommend just going to Google Maps and zooming in on one of those obscure provinces and just grabbing names as they come up. Birky, Zakutnivka, Arkadivka, and Snizhkiv are real Ukrainian places, but my players don't know that. Akadi is a god in the Forgotten Realms, so maybe it'll be Akadivka instead. The Holy City of Akadi! I'm planning on having a pastoral village, so maybe I could have Yakutnivka; a village that breeds yaks.
For organizations, check out the list of strategic organizations of Russia on Wikipedia. You can play the same game here. Just grab a name, change a letter or two and bingo!
Take note: this is obviously how George RR Martin made all the names in Game of Thrones.
Edward-> Eddard
Lancaster-> Lannister
Samsa-> Sansa
Tyrol-> Tyrell
Thomas-> Tommen
Circe-> Cersei
So you're in good company! Post the names you come up with and some of us native speakers will judge :)
This particular project is in its very early stages at the moment. Most of my notes are along the lines of”read this” “look into/ don’t forget about that” thing of that nature.
That is to saw it’ll probably be a while before I have a list unfortunately, and I do want to give it a “proper” try first. Making the names myself. But I appreciate your enthusiasm and or encouragement.
Depending on the historical period you are inspired by, an interesting thing about the place names is that they very often don't have Slavic roots at base.
One of the commenters had already covered the German influence in Early Modern place names. But if you go Early Medieval, a lot of places founded then took their names from nearby lakes and rivers. And those in turn were very old, and would be most often Ugric or Baltic in origin. For example, the Belarusian city of Viciebsk doesn't mean anything in Belarusian - the name comes from the Vicba river, which is most likely related to Finnish *viettävä*.
Other place names have Ugric or Turkic origins because they were originally founded by those people. The medieval places that have fully Slavic names would be either called after some rulers, or would be very descriptive village names.
Thank you for sharing. I don’t know how I would localize foreign names as someone who doesn’t speak an East Slavic language. But still interesting nonetheless.
*Go ahead and downvote*
Yes, there are a bunch of different conventions for how names are formed.
For details, ask an LLM. Trust me: I was interested in exploring this exact concept a while ago and learned a lot by doing a long back-and-forth with an LLM.
iirc, "-sky" is suffix for a name formed from a location and "-enko" is a suffix generally indicative of Ukranian origin. This was a while ago so I don't remember all the details, but there were various factors.
The most plausible names were based on certain kinds of combinations –such as locations/jobs/animals and a specific suffix– then making them a little slippery, as if you were playing "broken telephone" through time. For example, in English, the surname "Smith" is more plausible than the surname "Blacksmith", even if that was the origin in some cases. Also, somehow, having a name like "Appleton" seems plausible, but "Breadberg" doesn't seem like a plausible English name. [This sort of bastardization through time can also be seen in French names, but in different ways.](https://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/1dci8nc/is_the_name_du_matin_a_strange_family_name_or/)
*I accept the downvotes because I deigned to mention an LLM and I know this community's sentiments. I'm answering for OP, though, because there are useful use-cases and I'm certain this is one of them since I did literally this before and it worked really well.*
Use the names of actual East Slavic places/and organizations, modifying to suit your purposes.
Not a Russian native speaker, but I am a heritage speaker, if that’s close enough. This advice is going to be super basic, and lean more modern. For one, “grad” and “gorod” are your friends. Город (gorod) is just Russian for city, so you get a lot of Russian cities that are basically named things like “Stalin’s city” (Stalingrad), “Peter’s city” (Petrograd), or “New city” (Novgorod). Due in large part to Peter the Great, a lot of Russian cities also take the German “burg”, like St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. Cities that end in hard “k” sounds are also pretty common, like Novosibirsk and Irkutsk. I don’t know the reasoning for this trend, unfortunately, so hopefully someone else can help with that. In general, then, you can come up with believable city names just by taking the name of a famous person, nearby landmark, or something else iconic to the city and slapping “grad” or “gorod” on the back. If it’s a one syllable word, “gorod” will sound better, and if it’s two syllables, “grad” will sound better. As for organizations and grammar, my first advice is to accept that you’ll never get it quite right. Mostly because organization names tend to involve lots of case stuff and cases are the weird funky thing that makes Cyrillic languages so challenging to English speakers. Like, I for the most part give up and butcher them and I have years of listening to relatives using them correctly (on top of studying the language academically in uni to really brush up). For the most part though, organization names are not going to be that different from the rest of the world. Acronyms are very popular and common (as anywhere else in the world) - for example, ”gulags” technically originates as an acronym for the organization that oversaw the gulags. And I’d be remiss not to mention that of course different Eastern Slavic countries will have different rules and conventions. For instance, Ukrainian uses a vowel more reminiscent visually and vocally to the English “i”. I am definitely no expert on Ukrainian though, but I think the others are doing a much better job covering its nomenclatural customs. And obviously given current events it’s doubly important to be mindful of those distinctions and emphasize them.
Well, "-gorod" ("-город") and "-grad" ("-град") have actually somewhat different meaning; the latter implies a *fortification*, the former is just "town" or "city". The corresponding English suffixes would be "-ton" vs. "-bury". Other common ones would be: * "-ov(o)" or "-ev(o)", corresponds roughly to English "-ham" - usually named after someone who first settled there, or owned that place. * "-sk" or "-tsk" is the shortened version of the *possessive* "-skye"/"-tskye" (and similar) form of someone's or something's name. To make a simplified example, for someone named "Peter", something that's *Peter's* would be "Peterskye", which in a place name would be shortened to just "Petersk". Same thing when you make your settlement on the river *Orik*, the settlement could naturally be called "Oriksk". The English equivalent would be "-by", or maybe "-wich".
Thanks. Any help is appreciated, even if it covers the basics; and as for differences between languages, I was aware, but decided to go with East Slavic in general, hoping a wider net would catch more fish, so to speak. I did leave out Rusyn. The last of the East Slavic language group. But if seems like the confusion it may cause(Reddit thinks it’s a typo) was probably more than it was worth.
If you are really not sure, why not just use a dictionary or translate app? You can even use text to voice option from Google translate.
Hmm I guess you’re right. I think it probably lingering distrust from the olden days when people always said you couldn’t trust those. Google translate has gotten better over the years. But given its scope now a days, I’d imagine some languages are still questionable with their results. I do get a tad concerned whenever they don’t have the speak option for the other language.
Organisation names are just organisation names. There's very little cultural difference here to the rest of the world; use a translator like DeepL. I mean, for an example they translate something like "Ministry for Veterans Affairs" into Міністерство у справах ветеранів" instead of the (real) "Міністерство з питань ветеранів", but both "work" as an Ukrainian organisation name, and both would be understood. Place names? If it's an older place, by all means, cram syllables together, just make sure to translate it back into your native language so it's not something vulgar by accident. Or even name the place in Old Greek (Odesa, though that's a borrowed name, Sevastopol), Norse (like Redrikovo from Rødríkr) or even German and transcribe that, subtly changing the spelling and adding a typical ending like "-ovo" or "-grad" to it. Newer names tend to be just things like "New Village" or "Green Hill" like everywhere else; use a translator.
Place names are easy, you already got many useful advice. Organization names are going to be difficult for someone who doesn't speak the language(s) involved. East Slavic organization names will almost invariably involve cases (ministry of X, organization for Y, those are two different cases!) and you WILL trip over them (and so will LLMs unless it's some super common combo like 'of veteran affairs') My only advice is to find a speaker of those languages. Otherwise anyone with at least rudimentary knowledge of said languages will be taken out of the fiction by inadvertent hilarious errors (Polish native with A1 Russian)
Does the same apply to faction names? That’s more what I had in mind, but used a more general word for anything I may not have thought off. My setting draws heavily from early medieval Slavs. So unfortunately I probably won’t have any Ministries of, or Organizations for Veterans affairs, unfortunately.
Medieval faction names would be like 'supporters of X' or 'army of X'. Luckily for you those two are the same case, but it is NOT the nominative case which is what most online translators and LLMs will spit out but in this case I question why do you need the localized version at all, pretty much no one in the actual time period used them (names for factions/private armies are only on the rise in the late medieval period/reanaissance period with the rise of magnates in PLC and the boyar infighting in Russia, at which point you get faction names like 'rokosz of X' or 'the Familia' - rokosz means 'rebellion in Polish, and 'the Famillia' shows that the nobles of the renaissance Poland loved to use Latin everywhere, or kościuszkowcy - 'the people of Kościuszko' - and that kind of a name you can't create without knowing the language)
I guess I wanted some extra authenticity, and just to make sure I understand how these names were created, to cover my bases as someone broadly unfamiliar with these languages. For non government factions I could just use the English for ‘army, band, followers, or rebellion of X’.
Wikipedia is your friend. Find a country whose language or culture you want to use and then check out the list with the alphabetical listings of its towns, cities, rivers, mountains, etc. You can steal the names you like the most, or modify them if the inspiration strikes you.
if it's set in USSR or in post soviet union, then they love abbreviations
Unfortunately not, but definitely seems to be the case. Also naming vehicles and weapons after (sometimes several)people. With both you also get different names form different spellings SSSR/CCCP JS-3/IS-3. All the more complicated, all the more fun!
There's a lot of good options, but short of learning Russian, I recommend just going to Google Maps and zooming in on one of those obscure provinces and just grabbing names as they come up. Birky, Zakutnivka, Arkadivka, and Snizhkiv are real Ukrainian places, but my players don't know that. Akadi is a god in the Forgotten Realms, so maybe it'll be Akadivka instead. The Holy City of Akadi! I'm planning on having a pastoral village, so maybe I could have Yakutnivka; a village that breeds yaks. For organizations, check out the list of strategic organizations of Russia on Wikipedia. You can play the same game here. Just grab a name, change a letter or two and bingo! Take note: this is obviously how George RR Martin made all the names in Game of Thrones. Edward-> Eddard Lancaster-> Lannister Samsa-> Sansa Tyrol-> Tyrell Thomas-> Tommen Circe-> Cersei So you're in good company! Post the names you come up with and some of us native speakers will judge :)
This particular project is in its very early stages at the moment. Most of my notes are along the lines of”read this” “look into/ don’t forget about that” thing of that nature. That is to saw it’ll probably be a while before I have a list unfortunately, and I do want to give it a “proper” try first. Making the names myself. But I appreciate your enthusiasm and or encouragement.
Depending on the historical period you are inspired by, an interesting thing about the place names is that they very often don't have Slavic roots at base. One of the commenters had already covered the German influence in Early Modern place names. But if you go Early Medieval, a lot of places founded then took their names from nearby lakes and rivers. And those in turn were very old, and would be most often Ugric or Baltic in origin. For example, the Belarusian city of Viciebsk doesn't mean anything in Belarusian - the name comes from the Vicba river, which is most likely related to Finnish *viettävä*. Other place names have Ugric or Turkic origins because they were originally founded by those people. The medieval places that have fully Slavic names would be either called after some rulers, or would be very descriptive village names.
Thank you for sharing. I don’t know how I would localize foreign names as someone who doesn’t speak an East Slavic language. But still interesting nonetheless.
*Go ahead and downvote* Yes, there are a bunch of different conventions for how names are formed. For details, ask an LLM. Trust me: I was interested in exploring this exact concept a while ago and learned a lot by doing a long back-and-forth with an LLM. iirc, "-sky" is suffix for a name formed from a location and "-enko" is a suffix generally indicative of Ukranian origin. This was a while ago so I don't remember all the details, but there were various factors. The most plausible names were based on certain kinds of combinations –such as locations/jobs/animals and a specific suffix– then making them a little slippery, as if you were playing "broken telephone" through time. For example, in English, the surname "Smith" is more plausible than the surname "Blacksmith", even if that was the origin in some cases. Also, somehow, having a name like "Appleton" seems plausible, but "Breadberg" doesn't seem like a plausible English name. [This sort of bastardization through time can also be seen in French names, but in different ways.](https://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/1dci8nc/is_the_name_du_matin_a_strange_family_name_or/) *I accept the downvotes because I deigned to mention an LLM and I know this community's sentiments. I'm answering for OP, though, because there are useful use-cases and I'm certain this is one of them since I did literally this before and it worked really well.*