Naming + Placing of Land

[PhilyG123]

Hello there people of the internet.

So I wanted to write something for the first time so I sat down and drew a map of all the lands my story is supposed to take place on. I'm even quite happy about it so that must be my first accomplishment. And yet my very first problem is the naming of places and characters. Since at the beginning of the story my character reads a letter I need a name for the continent or rather the collection of all the lands in my story.

What would be a rather easy way to name it?
Should I just utter a word that popps into my head,
should its etymology be similar to the lands of our world
or should I mix 2 words of 2 different languages together?

Speaking of which, how does the name "Magerras" sound? I used to words "magic" and "terras" which should mean "the lands of magic".


The next thing I want to ask is about the placing of land. What I mean by that is that I have a really icy region west of the map and a desert region east of the map. Would that work if the sun and the moon work just like in our world or do I have to change something?

 

[TheKillerBs]

Magerras sounds fine.

The icy region and desert regions on the opposite ends of the map sounds weird. Can you post a picture of your map?

 

[PhilyG123]

Sure thing. Red is ice, orange is desert.

 

[PhilyG123]

hold on that was so wrong

 

[PhilyG123]

Hold on there was a mistake

 

[PhilyG123]

 

[CupofJoe]

Its a fantasy world so you can do what you want. If tilted the map a bit to make the ice lands a bit more "north" and the desert a bit more "south", then it would to some look more reasonable. Or [to confound our usual expectations] flip the whole thing and halve the ice in the south and the deserts to the north.
If you want to build a more realistic world [with a bit of magic and added oomph thrown in] it might be worthwhile looking at real world geography and see how it knits together.

 

[PhilyG123]

Its a fantasy world so you can do what you want. If tilted the map a bit to make the ice lands a bit more "north" and the desert a bit more "south", then it would to some look more reasonable. Or [to confound our usual expectations] flip the whole thing and halve the ice in the south and the deserts to the north.
If you want to build a more realistic world [with a bit of magic and added oomph thrown in] it might be worthwhile looking at real world geography and see how it knits together.

What if I say that the sun rises in the north and sets in the south? Would that work or is this unrelated to each other? What other impact would that have?

 

[CupofJoe]

I have no idea what effect a N-S sun would have on your world...
It would probably confuse the hell out of the birds...
Mind you they would probably have got used to it over the years.
Would it affect the story you want to tell?

 

[PhilyG123]

Would it affect the story you want to tell?

Well for the sake of realism, even in fantasy, it should affect something. I'm really hoping that way I can make the "ice in the west and desert in the east" thing work.

 

[pmmg]

What if I say that the sun rises in the north and sets in the south? Would that work or is this unrelated to each other? What other impact would that have?

So, before I answer with scientific mumbo jumbo, I'd first say, make the world anyway you think works well for your story, and if that does not quite match up to how many of us come to understand planet creation, so what. I am sure in the great expanse of the universe their might actually such a rock somewhere.

Anyway, a sun going North to south is unlikely, as its the rotation of the planet that causes the sun to appear to be over there, and then later over somewhere else. the stable part of the planet, the poles, would correspond to north and south, and would do so magnetically as well. Assuming they would want words that identified the directions as we have on earth (even if they choose to use different words), North would still correspond to the stable part of the sky, or magnetic north, and the sun would seem to rise perpendicular to that.

Calling East, South, and West, North, would make no difference to the planet or everyday life on it. It would just be similar to our own with different words for the directions.

 

[pmmg]

Anyway, I missed the original question, so let me revisit.

Some things about naming. Its common, I think to have a name for the world, but our own world did not really have a universal name that everyone agreed on until fairly recently, and even then we just called it a word meaning dirt. Different cultures would have different names for the same places. And depending on the age of your world, some may have no concept of the world as a whole, and so they may not even come to think the spinning ball of dirt needs a name.

Place names would also be called different things. In the same way Germany and Deutschland are the same place, it is referred to very differently by different peoples. Which is correct? Well...I suppose any word is correct if everyone hearing it has a similar understanding of its meaning. If the languages of other cultures were known, some places may be named according to the culture that is indigenous there, and if there is a dominate culture, well, it may just get to name everything. What sticks and what doesn't? That what you get to pick.

Personally, I would go for words that have a cultural feel to them. If I felt there was a dominate culture who had done most of the exploring, they would likely have created the first names, and made the first maps, and so they won the naming rights. If there were conflicting cultures competing, I would expect some places to be named by one culture, and some to be named by another. So, I would not really just go calling things whatever I wanted, I would want to know, to the degree that I felt it really mattered, why it was called what it was called. Cause nothing really gets called anything without a story behind it.

 

[pmmg]

So, before I answer with scientific mumbo jumbo, I'd first say, make the world anyway you think works well for your story, and if that does not quite match up to how many of us come to understand planet creation, so what. I am sure in the great expanse of the universe their might actually such a rock somewhere.

Anyway, a sun going North to south is unlikely, as its the rotation of the planet that causes the sun to appear to be over there, and then later over somewhere else. the stable part of the planet, the poles, would correspond to north and south, and would do so magnetically as well. Assuming they would want words that identified the directions as we have on earth (even if they choose to use different words), North would still correspond to the stable part of the sky, or magnetic north, and the sun would seem to rise perpendicular to that.

Calling East, South, and West, North, would make no difference to the planet or everyday life on it. It would just be similar to our own with different words for the directions.

Can I quote my own post?

Some more on this.

If we took our own world and toppled it over on its side and let it spin so that the sun rose in what we today call north, well, much greater stuff would be influenced (putting aside any cataclysmic forces that might be involved in doing so). For one, the wind and ocean currents would be very different, and the great ocean conveyor belt might not work in anyway. There might be very different regulation of the temperatures or feedback loops and all that. Further, as the rotation probably had some effect on how the continents drifted, they might not even be in the same places they are today. And the Moon passing over the land masses might pull the oceans in different ways, and maybe the tides would be greater or less. So, if this was true of our own planet, I would expect the planet would not be the same at all. It might not even support life.

 

[TheKillerBs]

What if I say that the sun rises in the north and sets in the south? Would that work or is this unrelated to each other? What other impact would that have?

You would make a right mess out of things, assuming it worked the same way we understand it does in real life. There's actually a much simpler workaround. Surround your eastern desert areas with mountains, that will cause a rain shadow effect that will turn that into a desert, although that will also turn everything westward into a desert unless you place significant bodies of water nearby. Something like the Great Lakes will do just fine. The ice region seems to be surrounded by water, is this the case? If it is, you can simply say that there's a frigid polar current coming from the north that makes this area much colder than the other landmass.

 

[SMAndy85]

When you're talking about "changing" things, like having the sun traverse the sky in a North/South direction, you've got to think about other things too.

Current day, the north and south poles never have the sun directly above them, or even truly "in the sky". That's what causes them to be so cold. If you're making the sun traverse in that direction, have you just turned the planet over, and now there will be an ice cap on the east and west pole? You get to pick where this is. Pick two points opposite each other on the equator, and play around with it.

There are land masses under the current north/south poles, and now they would be on the new equator, and possibly be deserts, or tropical rainforests.

If it was a sudden change, in that the Earth decided to flip and become how you're suggesting, then everything changes. You get to decide how that affects the people. If you're making your own world from scratch where that's the path the sun takes, then in essence all you've done is change the directions north/south/east/west are associated with.

I don't know of the real science behind it, but I would suggest that if the sun passed over magnetic north, you'd get the Aurora more frequently, perhaps every day for a short time, as the sun passes the correct angle for it to happen.