Character naming schemes

[Tulip]

I've recently gone back to building a world I'd been leaving on the backburner for a few months, and now that I'm really trying to design characters, I've run into an interesting problem: How can I build a naming scheme for my characters which feels reasonably fantastic, but is consistent enough that it doesn't just feel like I ran a name-generator a bunch of times?

The two obvious paths I can see to it are "steal from a real-but-obscure language" and "invent my own ruleset", but the former seems like a missed opportunity for worldbuilding, and all my attempts at the latter have produced names which are similar to the point of being hard to distinguish (which, if anything, is even worse than inconsistency would be, since it's more immersion-breaking). Is there some sort of trick to coming up with a good naming scheme, or is it one of those things which just comes naturally with practice?

[Kappa]

I tend to write my own name generators - I have a standard set of rules for producing a syllable, to which I add twists for particular languages, on top of editing the repertoires of sounds. If you happen to program in Racket, I'll happily dig it up for you to borrow and innovate on.

I hasten to add that my name generators are infamous for producing something like 60-90% laughable trash, but I've found that if I have it spit out names in batches of ten at a time, I can usually grab a few that catch my eye after giving it enough whacks. And I think it's easier to naturally come to a balanced-yet-unified aesthetic by picking pre-generated names out of a hat than by coming up with them out of thin air.

[Tulip]

At the moment, I'm not able to program competently in anything. I give a crack at learning a language every couple years, but it never seems to pan out. Thanks for the offer, though. :D

[Kappa]

Racket's pretty easy to learn, or it was for me; I tentatively recommend it for your next try, whenever that is.

Anyway, you could probably accomplish my generator algorithm manually, much slower but with more control. It goes like this, at the most basic level: Pick a list of sounds/letters your language contains. I'm going to take Thiyecine as my example because it has a super weird sound repertoire and contains exactly one special restriction on top of the standard.

Thiyecine vowels are as follows: "a" "i" "u" "e" "o"
Thiyecine consonants are as follows: "th" "c" "m" "n" "l" "r" "y"; "f" "v" "cs" "sh" "ts" "q"

Note the semicolon. That's because the ones after the semicolon have the special distinction of not being allowed to come at the end of the word.

Then my basic syllable structure is: Pick a consonant, or choose to omit one. Pick a vowel. Pick another consonant, or choose to omit one. Now you have a syllable! If you want another syllable, repeat this simple process. In the case of Thiyecine, make sure to constrain the choice of final consonant for the last syllable in your name. Through this method I get names like Fiyol and Luvathai, and also laughable trash like Tsotsotsatsa. Doing it manually, you can avoid the Tsotsotsatsa problem. XD

When I'm programming my generators, I put in specific percentage chances of getting a consonant at either the syllable-end or syllable-start slot - in the case of Thiyecine it's 80-20, except that the syllable-end slot at the end of a word has a 60% chance of consonant. (Get your linguistic umbrella!) You can probably eyeball it to a reasonably similar effect.

[PlainDealingVillain]

If you want to do roughly Kappa's method without programming, this conlang word generator will probably serve nicely. And if it doesn't, one of these probably will.

[Kappa]

Nifty!

Edit: I am now having tremendous fun with Gen and I might go so far as to implement it in Racket so I can play with it more. :D

[Tulip]

Oh wow that thing is awesome. I've just messed around with it a bit, and it's reached the point where I've got way more names than I need for now. And as long as I note down my inputs (which I have), I'm able to just run it as many times as I want and get different outputs each time, so I'm never going to run out. :D

[Bluelantern]

Hello, I also wanted to create some name schemes, but it is for an Alternate Earth so I want to make the names "similar but with their own personalities" and I don't know how to do that besides doing stuff like "try changing all 'l" to 'r' and see if you like the result" and that sounds sort of too simple? since I don't know much.

So far the only names that I have pinned down are "Ferix" and "Felix" for a set of twins.

[Kappa]

I did something similar to that for most of the characters I created in Gift. Aelise, Anneia, Sandre, all those. I don't think I can give direct advice on how to do it, though, other than "play with sounds and don't get too attached to strict rules if you can get better results by tweaking them".

[Anya]

Ferix sounds.... Off. Like an awkward mispronunciation of Felix. Idk, I suppose you could make it work if it's a new language sort of name.