The Naming of Places (Part 10): Towns (continued)

In the last posting, I covered a number of ways to generate town names:

1. An invented name plus a word for “village," e.g., “Schen Village"
2. A descriptive natural feature, e.g., “Blue Hill" or “Apple Woods"
3. An invented name plus a suffix for “village," e.g., “Schenley"
4. A city base name plus a suffix, e.g., “Woodford," “Hollyville"

That produced a pretty good mix of names, but there are a few other variants I want to add.

Many towns are named after people.  Variant #3 above is a version of this, where the name is invented.  But it would also be nice to have a scattering of “real names" or at least some typical medieval English names.  In medieval times most people were identified by first name, and towns reflected this, e.g., James-town, Louis-ville, etc.  I put together a list of about 500 common medieval first names (both female and male) and made a rule to combine them with the town and city suffixes.  This gives me names like this:

Michaelview
Athelinaley
Deniseview
Owenside
Margeryton
Celestriaton
Castortown
Constanceton
Orellason
Ralphdale

Some of these might seem a little unfamiliar, but for the most part they seem like reasonable town names.

The next variant is to take a descriptive natural feature name and run the words together, e.g., “Blue Hill" become “Bluehill".  This is just a matter of leaving the space between the words out and forcing the second word to be lower case:

Bestmarsh
Firstcanyon
Superiororchard
Desertedwasteland
Beguilingquarry
Emeraldspur
Pearlmoorland
Ivoryheath
Earlyspur
Youngsaddle
Cloudychasm
Wetneck
Quietbrake

About half of these are not too bad -- “Wetneck," “Earlyspur," “Bestmarsh" and a few others.  For some, the words don't match up very well, e.g., “Beguilingquarry".  “Desertedwasteland" is actually a good match, but just seems too long and labored to really be a town name.

However, I won't normally be using these words directly.  Instead, I will feed the two word names (e.g., “Early Spur") into a process of linguist drift that will mimic the sort of shortening and word changes that could turn a descriptive name like “Pearl Moorland" into “Pearlmoorland" into “Pearlmoor" into “Pearlmore" and finally into “Perlmore."  I'm sure there are many sophisticated models of linguistic drift, but my approach will be rather more adhoc :-).

The first step will be to reduce the longer word combinations by dropping some syllables.  To do that, I need some code to break words into syllables.  This is a little bit of a problem.  There are a number of Javascript packages to hyphenate words, but since you can't hyphenate at every syllable (e.g., you can't hyphenate the word “ivory" between the first and second syllables) that doesn't help much.  There are also a few packages to count syllables that seem to work fairly well, but they don't actually break the word down into syllables as they count, so that's not much help.  The best I found was the fairly simple and short nlp-syllables, although it makes mistakes:

Safe Mink (Safe-Mink)
Normal Bull (Nor-mal-Bull)
Lucky Hollow (Luc-ky-Hol-low)
Twin Hill (Twin-Hill)
Remote Plateau (Re-mote-Pla-teau)
Loose Ditch (Loose-Ditch)
Garnet Onion (Gar-net-Onion)
Busy Spur (Bu-sy-Spur)
Hidden Hedgerow (Hid-den-Hed-ge-row)
Weary Lagoon (Wea-ry-La-goon)

The idea will be to trim any combinations that are greater than 3 or 4 syllables.  I will do this by removing syllables from the middle, i.e., from the end of the first word or the beginning of the second word.  So trimming “Lucky Hollow" to three syllables and combining the words would give me either “Luckylow" or “Luchollow."  “Remote Plateau" would become “Replateau" or “Remoteteau."  It also works pretty well to sometimes trim from 3 to two syllables:  “Normal Bull" to “Norbull", “Busy Spur" to “Buspur" etc.

My current setting trims phrases to 2 syllables 25% of the time, 3 syllables 50% of the time, and 4 syllables 25% of the time:

Stony Bog (Sto-ny Bog)
   Stonybog
Merry Landslide (Mer-ry Lan-dsli-de)
   Merryde
Paltry Magnolia (Pal-try Mag-no-li-a)
   Paltrya
Key Quarry (Key Qu-a-rry)
   Keyarry
Jasper Foothill (Jas-per Foo-thill)
   Jasthill
Tourmaline Peak (Tour-ma-line Peak)
   Tourpeak
Magenta Snake (Magen-ta Sna-ke)
   Magenke
Burgundy Volcano (Bur-gun-dy Vol-ca-no)
   Burcano

The results are interesting.  It's not exactly what I expected, but the names have a good sound to them.

I sometimes get long single word city names as well, usually when the fantasy language generator spits one out.  I've done something similar to reduce the length of long single word names as well:

Shortened Reslonley to Resley
Shortened Gundreawood to Gunwood
Shortened Branwyneton to Branton
Shortened Bramblside to Bramde
Shortened Wrongfile to Wronle
Shortened Regsetken to Regken
Shortened Memkenfield to Memfield
Shortened Setslenti to Setti
Shortened Sutanken to Suken

The algorithm maintains the first and last syllable and randomly removes syllables in the middle of the word.  The result is often quite different from the original word, but if you squint can often imagine the name getting shortened that way.

Sometimes shortening words results in some wrong or unlikely spelling, like having three of the same letter in a row.  To address these sorts of problems, I created a small dictionary of regular expressions that are used to fix these problems.  Each entry is a regular expression to match in the word, and then a substitution for the match.  The entry for triple letters looks like this:

// No tripled letters

[ /([a-z])\1\1/, '$1$1' ],

This is a list in which the first element (enclosed in slashes) is a regular expression to match in the word, and the second element (enclosed in single quotes) is the string to substitute.  I won't provide a tutorial on regular expressions here, but the regular expression above matches any letter that appears three times consecutively, and then the string replaces that with the matched letter two times in a row.   Here are some examples of these rules being applied:

Applied rule to change Timrardan Castle to Timardan Castle
Applied rule to change Raenmeton to Ranmeton
Applied rule to change Plebmetittown to Plebmetitown

The first rule gets rid of hard-to-pronounce r-vowel-r patterns, in this case, the “rar" in the middle of the name.  The second one replaces “ae" with “a", and the last one gets rid of the awkward doubled t caused by adding -town to a word ending in a t.  Some of these are obviously a matter of taste, but I've picked a small set of rules that I think improves the readability of the city names.

The last set of modifications makes more substantive changes to the names.  I only do this to 25% of the names.  Some of these modifications try to give a “medieval" feel to the word, such as by adding an “-e" to the end of a word, e.g., “Memfield" to “Memfielde".  Other modifications randomly swap sounds, e.g., “Bududu City" to “Buwudu City."   Here are some examples:

Modified Tiunchin Manor to Tiufin Manor
Modified Shamsland to Shamslande
Modified Oranfore to Ozanphore
Modified Rare Cut to Rale Cutte

In the first name, “f" has been substituted for “nch".  (When substituting vowels or consonants, the rules always replace a string of vowels or consonants.  This prevents a substitution into the middle of a sound, so you never get something like “nch" to “njh".)  The second example has had an “-e" added at the end.  The next two examples have had multiple modifications.

At this point I have about 20 rules that fix names, and about 50 rules that do linguistic drift of one sort or another.  I'll use these for a while and see how I feel about the results.

The next thing I want to tackle are related city names, such as “Hampshire" and “New Hampshire" or “Virginia" and “West Virginia."  My approach is pretty simple.  When I'm naming a city, there's a small chance I'll name it after a nearby city.  If that happens, I'll pick the nearest city as a namesake and then create either a directional name or “New/Old".  The only slightly tricky aspect is that the namesake city might not actually be named yet.  To avoid that problem, I'll actually do this check as a second step -- I'll name all the cities as normal and then go through to see if I want to create any namesakes.

This happened during an early test run:

The city on “ke Te Island" got named after a town that had been named after a town...  I realized that I don't want to have multiple namesakes from one town (I don't want “North Goton" and “Old Goton" as well) and I don't want to create a namesake from a namesake.

Another useful constraint is to set a maximum distance between a city and its namesake.  It seems odd to have “North Goton" be on the opposite side of the map from “Goton."  A distance of about 1/5 of the map seems to work fairly well as a limit.

Finally, another version of related names is to name a city on an island after the island, so that you get “Gonlo City" on “Gonlo Island."  I've added a rule for that as well.

The Naming of Places (Part 9): Towns

I'm now going to turn my attention to naming towns.  The toponymy of city names is quite different from landscape features.  Geographical features in English typically have a descriptive name or phrase and end in an identifying noun (e.g., “Black Mountain," “Black Bay," “Black Point," etc.).  Less often, geographical features combine a proper name and an identifying nount (e.g., “Aberdaron Bay," “Zahn Point", etc.)  Town and city names are somewhat the reverse -- there are many proper names (“Chicago," “St. Louis," “Denver") and fewer descriptive names (“New York," “Long Beach").  In addition, town and city names don't usually end in an identifying noun (although it does happen e.g., “Oklahoma City," “Greenwich Village", etc.) but many of them do end in suffixes that mean town, village or some variant, e.g., -ton, -ville, -boro, etc.

On the other hand, although it seems like there are lots of proper city names, it turns out that many of them aren't really proper names at all.  To our modern ears, many English town names sound like proper names, e.g., “Ripley," and “Aldwark."  But in fact “Ripley" is a combination of “ripel" (Old English for a strip of land) and “leah" (Old English for a forest), and “Aldwark" is “ald"  (Anglian for old) and “weorc" (Old English for a fortification).  As you can see with “weorc" becoming “wark," over the years the language and spelling drifts until the original words are hardly recognizable.  The names lose all their underlying meaning and really do just become proper names to us.

Another factor is that towns have many names borrowed from other languages.  This is particularly evident in the United States, where names borrowed from Native American languages are ubiquitous -- “Chicago" (from the Miami-Illinois word for wild onion), “Appalachia" (from the Alpachen village in Florida), “Mississippi" (from the Ojibwe word for Great River), and so on.  But in England there are many names from Danish, French, Celtic and other languages.

Cultures also affect city names -- US names are different from UK names and both are different from French names.  Part of this is the difference in underlying languages, of course, but there are cultural factors as well.  For example, the suffix “-ville" was rarely used in the US until after the Civil War, but never became very popular in England -- where they have a less friendly history with France.

So there's a lot of room for creativity in naming cities, and in particular some interesting opportunities to tie culture and history to city names.  This is probably an area I'll be able to revisit many times in the future, but for now I want to get a basic naming capability in place.

I'll aim for generating a few different sorts of city names:

1. An invented name plus a word for “village," e.g., “Schen Village"
2. A descriptive natural feature, e.g., “Blue Hill" or “Apple Woods"
3. An invented name plus a suffix for “village," e.g., “Schenley"
4. A descriptive natural feature run together, e.g., “Bluehill" or “Applewoods"
5. A descriptive natural feature run together plus a suffix, e.g., “Bluehillton" or “Applewoodsly" 

For the first version, I need a list of synonyms for “village."  If I analyze my corpus of US and UK city names for the top synonyms for “city" that are used in names, I get this list:

estates: 8456
corner: 3933
acres: 3809
village: 3509
place: 2273
city: 2228
junction: 2162
manor: 1990
crossroads: 1808
corners: 1807
center: 1326
terrace: 1193
court: 1128
station: 854
town: 639
colony: 411
square: 363
castle: 92
commons: 84
hamlet: 54

I've edited out anything that wasn't a synonym (e.g., “heights") and some that were obviously unusable on a fantasy map (e.g., “subdivision").  A few that I've left in are pretty dubious -- I think of “estates" as a faux title to dress up an otherwise vanilla neighborhood with pretensions of style, but it's interesting that it is so popular.  (But I probably won't use it.)  It seems like it also might make sense to distinguish large cities from small villages -- words like “city," “court," “manor," and “castle" don't sound like they'll work well as village names.

In the end I have these synonyms for village:

Corner [3933]
Village [3509]
Place [2273]
Crossroads [1808]
Town [639]
Square [363]
Commons [84]
Hamlet [54]

and these synonyms for cities:

City [6228]
Manor [1990]
Court [1128]
Castle [92]

I've shown here the weighting taken from corpus data, but I'm usually unsatisfied with that distribution and tweak it extensively.  (I can tell you already I don't want most villages to be named “Corner.")

Here are some examples of these types of names:

Zhalzhul City
Ulil City
El Ir Manor
Dirch Court
Urgal City 

Orur Village
Orilm Town
Zhalb Place
Zirkulp Square
Urnal Town

Next is descriptive names based on natural features, e.g., “Blue Hill" or “Apple Woods."  For this variant, I'll be generating only an adjective plus a noun.  For adjectives I have quite a few from previous names that should work:  colors, weather qualities, etc., and I'll add some specific adjectives for cities.  Likewise for the nouns I can reuse landscape features, animals, fruits, plants and trees, etc.  Here are some example names:

Triple Quarry
Rocky Dale
First Fen
Drowsy Daffodil
Tired Copse 

Sunny Boar
Elegant Drizzle
Real Pony
Obvious Bilberry
Cold Wilderness

The first five are pretty good.  The next five not so much, usually because of a mismatch between the adjective and the noun.  It's hard to avoid a certain amount of that unless you're willing to break your word lists down to a pretty fine grain.  But I can trim out some of the more problematic words as I go along.

For the next type of village name I need a list of the suffixes used to indicate a town or a village.  There are some obvious ones, like “-ton" and “-ville" but there are many more than you might think.  I ran through my corpus of town names and pulled out the most common 3 and 4 letter suffixes:

-ton: 15029 (Abberton, Ripton)
-ville: 13248 (Reubenville, Ridgeville)
-wood: 6800 (Johnswood, Kenwood)
-town: 5230 (Kidtown, Meyerstown)
-son: 4281 (Michelson, Madison)
-ley: 3913 (Pilsley, Abbotsley)
-ford: 3645 (Abbotsford, Landford)
-dale: 3568 (Orangedale, Otterdale)
-land: 3344 (Lapland, Vineland)
-field: 3176 (Whitefield, Northfield)
-ell: 2966 (Nutwell, Tiprell)
-ngton: 2839 (Tissington, Chillington)
-ham: 2673 (Chillingham, Feetham)
-ter: 2604 (Finster, Hanover Center)
-ers: 2437 (Hanville Corners, Leon Corners)
-burg: 2429 (Leonardsburg, Middleburg)
-view: 2248 (Middletown View, Millersview)
-man: 1846 (Millman, Poorman)
-den: 1520 (Virden, Academy Garden)
-side: 1438 (Ambleside, Downside)
-more: 957 (Dunmore, Rossmore)
-well: 1393 (Ruthwell, Alumwell)
-mont: 1276 (Ashmont, Beaumont)

A few of these can be tossed out -- “-ell" is mostly an artifact of -well and -fell, “-ngton" is primarily “-ington" (which is actually a combination of -ing and -ton), “-ter" and “-ers" are artifacts of longer words like Center and Corners, and “-man" comes from towns named after men of some sort.  But it's quite a long list nonetheless.  Wikipedia also has an article on town suffixes (and prefixes) that is interesting and explains the origins of these suffixes.

I ended up with about 34 suffixes.  I can combine invented words with suffixes to generate town names like this:

Rarptown
Gullridge
Chalchall
Che Befield
Chemibdale
Sorbrarpbrook
Cheprarpill
Balkelzhand
Solmibton
Sol Geland

Some of these are pretty good; others not so much.  Mostly the problem is that the invented language is not much like English, so the combination with English suffixes doesn't always work.  I can make this better by tweaking the language generator to create more “English-like" languages.  It actually has a setting for this, but it doesn't work as well as I'd like.  After some tweaking:

Giville
Mukkouton
Dolgiill
Deton
Kouwood
Chokodon
Dolville
Mideland
Daburg
Guwood

These are better, without sounding too much like actual English names.

When I stripped off the suffixes to build my table of suffixes, I was left with about 7000 or so “base names".  To get more realistic town names, I can randomly combine these base names with the suffixes, to get names like these:

Woodford
Hollyville
Potterington
Garmanridge
Greenford
Kileley
Meadowtown
Edgeson
Ridgetown
Stanson

These are generally pretty solid names.  If I turn on all these variants I get a mix of names like this:

Bad Prairie
Bradton
Chaneydale
Cho Village
Davingview
Dotham
Far Hollow
Flat Vista
Gonneogill
Hematite Grotto
Julestown
Kadale
Kawood
Lapo City
Meadowwood
Offenbury
Parishson
Plumham
Proud Plateau
Wallley

This is a pretty good mix (I think), although you can see there are occasional spelling problems where words have been joined together.  More on that next time.

The Naming of Places (Part 8): The Sea

Next up on place names are oceans (or seas).  Currently there can only be one ocean name on the map, and it's hard-coded to be “Chrysalis Sea":

That name was borrowed from one of my reference maps.

The real world isn't much help in naming oceans or seas.  There are only 5 oceans in the world, and only a hundred or so “seas," many of which are actually bays, gulfs and the like.  The thesaurus isn't any help, either.  There are only two synonyms in English for large bodies of water -- “ocean" and “sea."  Even the historical thesaurus doesn't offer any additional vocabulary.  So it looks like I'm on my own.

To start with, I think weather qualities work for ocean names (“The Stormy Ocean"), water qualities (“The Glassy Ocean"), colors (“The Azure Ocean"), directional adjectives (“The Western Ocean"), climate adjectives (“The Steamy Ocean" / “The Frigid Ocean").  On these fantasy maps, the ocean is a place of mystery -- it's the edge of the known world -- so a lot of the mystery adjectives I used for the Lost Coast work here as well (“The Bloodstained Ocean").  Marine animals and seabirds should work too (“Amberjack Ocean" / “Albatross Ocean").  Some miscellaneous adjectives work as well.

Note that the ocean is usually singular on the maps, or at least distinguished, so using “The" with the name seems to work well.  I can also use the “Ocean of ..." form as well.

I went through all my reference maps and collected the ocean names to see how well it matched what I done so far (and to gather new ideas as well):

The Summer Sea
Eastern Sea
Western Sea
Southern Ocean (x4)
Endless Ocean
Eternal Sea
Vast Sea
Trackless Sea
The Great Sea
Black Sea
Silver Sea
Sea of Mist
Frozen Sea
White Sea
Twoways Sea
Ocean of Despair
Salt Sea
Sea of Glass
Sea of Narcissus
Dreamer Sea
Inner Sea
Twilight Ocean
Sea of Frost Ridge
The Jade Sea
The Silent Sea
Sea of Whispers
Chrysalis Sea
Sea of the Great Deep
Sea of Fangs

I'm surprised at how many of these I can already generate.  Here's a list of names generated using the ideas above:

Cormorant Sea
The Eerie Sea
Squid Ocean
The Peridot Sea
Codfish Sea
The Vermilion Sea
Hatchetfish Ocean
The Torrent Ocean
Jaeger Ocean
Sea of Maelstroms
The Icy Ocean
Razorbill Sea
The Dark Ocean
Sea of Cannibals
Oyster Ocean
The Ravaged Sea
Drum Sea
The Unlit Sea

This list seems a little heavy on sea creatures, but overall it seems a good selection. Unlike some of the other place names, I'm not generating any ocean names based upon invented words, but that's something I could easily add if I feel the need.

Generating the directional and temperature-related adjectives is a little challenging.  For something like a point or a bay, there's a pretty-well defined and small area, and the label is going to be close to that area.  But an ocean can stretch across much of the map, and so it's hard to pick a particular spot to serve as the reference point for temperature and direction.  In fact, I really want the temperature and direction to be based on where the label ends up.  So if I have (say) an ocean that stretches all the way from the bottom of the map to the top of the map along the left edge, I can call it the “Frigid Ocean" if I put the label up near the top, and the “Southern Ocean" if I put the label near the bottom.  But I pick the name before I place the label, so there's a bit of a problem here.

One workaround is to use the anchor point I select for the label as the reference point.  The label isn't tied very strongly to this point, but perhaps it will work for temperature and direction.

It isn't obvious, but this is a cold map (you can see some pine trees mixed into the forest), so “The Iceberg Sea" makes sense here.

When I implemented ocean labels I only created the one style shown above -- and angled, slightly curved label.  Since I'm working on ocean labels, I decided to add a couple of other styles.  First, a multi-line label:

And a single-line, horizontal label:

I don't much like this style.  One thing that might improve it is to let the label fall at an angle; that's something I've wanted to look into for some time, so I'll take this opportunity to implement it.

The basic implementation is to provide a range of allowed angles for each label, and let the label placing routine vary the angle along with the position as it is trying to find a good spot for the label.  (None of the evaluation code needs to change, because the criteria for a good placement hasn't changed.)  Generally speaking I will limit straight labels of this sort to the angle range of -45 degrees to 45 degrees.  Anything outside that range becomes hard to read, looks awkward, or is upside down on the map.

With that fix in place, I get this:

The red box here shows the original label placement (basically the same as the final label placement above) and the green dot marks the “center of the ocean" that is an anchor for this label.  The program has found an angle that allows it to slide the label up between the two islands to get the label closer to the anchor.

If I relax the pull towards the anchor point, this happens:

With less pull from the anchor, the label swings the other way and slides below the middle islands.  This is a better placement in some aspects (further away from other labels primarily).  

If I force a sea illustration onto the map, the ocean label will try to create some separation from the illustration, and this happens:

Now the label has swung back up between the islands, but pushed over a bit to stay away from the illustration.

The placement of the anchor point in this example actually isn't very good; it's near the center of the ocean, but too near islands in the ocean.  It would be better to find an anchor point that tries to stay away from land.  Also, it's nice for this anchor point to be close to an edge of the map that is largely ocean, so that the label indicates the greater mystery beyond the edge of the map.

At this point I realized that these are variants of a general case label that can move around, tilt, and have an arc to it.  And while I could always force a particular style by locking down any of those variables, I ought to just write the generalized label that would let the label placement algorithm change the location, angle and arc to try to find the best fit.  

(The exception here is the multi-line label.  SVG doesn't natively support multi-line text, so doing anything beyond stacking up a bunch of centered single-line labels quickly becomes very complicated.  In this case, I don't think multi-line labels work very well for oceans at any rate.)

Much hacking between that last paragraph and this one, but I have the general case working:

In this case, you can see the original label (the olive green outline) was arced upwards and fell partly off the map because the green anchor point is close to the edge of the map.  The final solution is arced downward and moved left and upwards so that it can both fit on the map and still be close to the anchor point (the bright green dot).

If I relax the requirement to stay near the anchor point it moves up and keeps the upward arc:

With that I'll declare victory on ocean labels.

The Naming of Places (Part 7): On Point

Next up in place names are points -- fingers of land reaching out into the sea:

Right now points are given place names from combining an invented word with “Point."  Let's try to improve on that.

I'll start at the usual place and gather some data about how points are named in the real world.  To start with, the common synonyms for “Point":

Point: 12674
Bar: 1123
Neck: 732
Ledge: 702
Rock: 542
Reef: 524
Shoals: 482
Head: 179
Peninsula: 158
Bank: 155

Unlike the other place names I've looked at, the synonyms for “Point" don't have anything like a power law drop-off.  In this case, “Point" is used overwhelming, with only a few other synonyms showing up.  A few other true synonyms show up further down the list:  “Flat", and “Horn" primarily.  There are also a few mountain-ish nouns mixed in; I suspect this is because you also sometimes see a mountain or ridge named “Point".

Here are the common adjectives used to directly describe points:

Long: 233
Middle: 106
North: 101
Indian: 91
West: 75
East: 74
White: 55
Grassy: 36
Big: 35
Great: 35

These are also familiar from bays.  (“Indian" was actually also on the bays list, but I didn't use it for the obvious reason -- doesn't really work on a fantasy map!)  Not a lot of creativity here; most points get adjectives describing their size or location.

One interesting type of adjective I notice is country-related:  American, Spanish, French, etc.  Since I do name countries/regions on my maps, I could conceivable do this same thing.  It looks to me that the rules for creating a “country adjective" from a country name are pretty simple (although there are many exceptions).

Now let's look at the most common nouns used in naming points.

eagle: 83
saint: 71
sand: 70
bluff: 63
oak: 54
birch: 53
tree: 52
neck: 51
goose: 51
pine: 49

Again, like bays, “saint" is a surprisingly popular choice.  In fact, there's a lot of overlap between bays and points -- all ten of these nouns already appear in my name choices for bays.

Finally, let's look at the adjectives used to modify those names:

old: 68
big: 57
lower: 38
long: 37
upper: 34
white: 29
lone: 26
great: 25
black: 22
green: 21

There's a lot of overlap here with both the direct adjectives above as well as the similar adjectives from bays.

My overall conclusion -- which matches my intuition -- is that points get named in much the same way as bays.  It probably isn't a perfect match, but I should be able to reuse most of the naming rules from bays for points.

There are a few bay-naming rules that don't work for points.  Most are just bay-specific vocabulary, like “Deep," but a more complex rule is the one that names a bay after a river that flows into the bay.  This doesn't make any sense for points (which at any rate rarely have rivers).  An alternate rule that does make sense is to name a point after a nearby bay.

On the left side of this map, the bay has been named after the city and the point has in turn been named for the bay.  (!) On the other side of the map, the point has been named directly after the city that is out on the point.

As is often the case, working on this surfaced a number of bugs in the point creation code.  For example:

I'm not sure what I think of naming geographical features after a Chicken Butcher, but the real problem here is the two co-named bays are too far apart.  I also found a number of problems where bays (and points) weren't being detected properly, and some cases where I thought there should be a bay and there wasn't.  I also added in some limits on the number of bays and points that can show up on a map.

I've fixed those, but there are probably still other tweaks I'll have to make for point names.  I'll deal with those as I see problems arise.

The Naming of Places (Part 6): Bay Watch

In the last posting, I mentioned that some of the common adjectives used for naming bays couldn't be applied randomly because they described aspects of the bay that could be determined from looking at the map.  If you name a bay “Big Cove" then it had better look big on the map.  In this posting I'll talk a little bit about how Dragons Abound will try do that.

Dragons Abound doesn't intentionally create bays; instead it identifies them on the coastline by searching for bay shapes.

The green line here on the coast shows a bay being detected.  At this point, Dragons Abound knows the start and end points of the bay, the coastline in-between, the center point of the bay, and the sinuosity.  I can also calculate the area of the bay from the outline.  This is most of the information I need to smartly apply many adjectives.

To start with, I'll look at directional adjectives.  From the location of the center point, I can decide where the bay is on the map.  If the bay is toward the top of the map I can call it  “North Bay" or toward the bottom “South Bay," and likewise for east or west.  Of course, that isn't exactly right for naming.  The map is presumably just a part of the world.  The top of the map isn't necessarily the “North."  And actually, places like “North Bay" don't alwaysget called that because they're in the North, but rather because they're north of some landmark.  For example, a bay on the northern end of a lake is likely to get named “North Bay."  All the same, it will make more sense to the reader if “North Bay" is in the top part of the map.  This also means that if I happen to get a “North Bay" and “South Bay" on the same map, “North Bay" will actually be north of “South Bay!"

I could divide the map in halves and call anything on the top “North," etc., but this would lead to bays just barely above the center of the map getting labeled “North," which is probably bad.  So I'll divide the map in thirds, and anything in the middle third won't be eligible for a directional label.  I can also name the areas that are both “North" and “East" to “Northeast" and so on.  Here's a map with three bays labeled that way:

These all happen to be in the corners so they get the compound names.  Here's an example where the bay falls in the middle third of the map:

If I want to use these directions as adjectives, I can tack “-ern" onto the end of them and then use them as a possible adjective directly on the bay name, e.g., “Northern Bay" instead of “North Bay."

However, directional adjectives don't really work in other phrases, such “Northwestern Bayberry Cove."  The problem is that a directional adjective would only be added to a name like “Bayberry Cove" to distinguish it from a similar location with the same name.  So unless there's another “Bayberry Cove" around, the directional adjective is not really needed.  And that's not likely to happen with my place name generator.

Unless I do it intentionally, of course.

The idea would be to find two bays on the map, give them the same name, and then add directional adjectives to distinguish them.  The directional adjectives in this case are a little different.  Unless we're amazingly lucky, the centers of the two lakes are going to be on a diagonal -- they'll be separated in both north/south and east/west.  So is we use the kind of directional adjectives I used above, they'd always end up “Northeast/Southwest" or a variant.  In this case, what we really care about is which direction has the most separation between the bays.   And then we use “North/South" or “East/West" as appropriate to name the bays.

I might want to only do this with bays that are within some distance of each other, and maybe only with bays that are on the same shared sea.  But for the moment, if I decide to do this on a map I'll just pick the two closest bays.

Now let me move on to another case:  size adjectives.  I can calculate the area of the bay and use that to decide that the bay is big and should be described as “Great" or that the bay is small and should be described as “Little".  Of course, big and little are relative terms; I'll have to try some examples and figure a cut-off size that works well.  I'm helped here that these are supposed to be names that people gave these bays; people are imprecise about things like size, so I don't have to worry too much about getting the cut-off exactly right.

You'll notice I've gotten the synonym “Narrow" on this map.  I could actually calculate the longest and shortest axes of the bay and decide if it was more oblong or round, but I don't think that's really worth it; people will use their imagination to fill that in.

Just as I could use the directional adjectives to distinguish two bays with the same name, I can use size adjectives the same way.  This works much the same way; I pick two bays near each other and call the larger one “Big Dolphin Bay" and the smaller one “Small Dolphin Bay".

Or in this case, Lesser/Greater Tapicer Cove.

Since I'm working with the bay sizes, I also want to distinguish the bay synonyms based on size.  I've generated a couple of test maps where a small bay gets labeled “Gulf" or a large bay gets labeled “Pocket," which is jarring.  So I'd like to divide the synonyms up by the sizes they imply and then use them appropriately.  Here's how I broke down the synonyms:

Small	Medium	Large
Cove [125]	Bay [166]	Gulf [17]
Inlet [42]	Anchorage [83]	Basin [8]
Hole [21]	Sound [28]	Reach [3]
Eddy [13]	Bight [14]	Refuge [1]
Pocket [8]	Bottom [8]	Arm [1]
Bend [6]	Slough [6]
Neck [4]	Gulch [4]
Hollow [3]	Lagoon [3]
Prong [3]	Wick [2]
Branch [2]	Firth [2]
Pool [2]	Voe [2]
Horn [2]	Gut [1]
Narrows [1]	Cut [1]
Gap [1]
Gully [1]
Indent [1]

The numbers in brackets indicate the relative probability of picking each option.  It's long been known that vocabularies follow a power law distribution (Zipf's law).  I don't know if synonym choice follows a similar pattern, but it seems reasonable, and power law distributions seem “natural" to people, so I used a rough power law distribution on the synonyms as well.

Another bit of information I have about bays is temperature.  I can use this to decide whether a bay is hot (“Jungle Bay") or cold (“Arctic Bay").  This works the same way as the other choices.

On this map (which is entirely in Arctic regions), I get “Winter Bay" and “Frosty Basin."

That covers the descriptive adjectives, but there's a similar case I want to implement as well -- naming the bay after a nearby map feature.  In the arctic map just above, both of the bays have cities on their shores.  In these cases, naming the bay after the city makes sense, e.g., “Winter Bay" could be named “Kigil Bay."  This could make sense for other features as well, for example, having a point and a bay with the same name.  But for the moment I'm only going to name after cities.

One tricky aspect of this is that there are often multiple cities on a bay:

In this case, it seems like the bay ought to (usually) be named after the biggest city.  Of course you can imagine situations where the bay would be named after one of the smaller cities, so I'll include that as a (lower-likelihood) possibility as well.

You might recall in my previous posting that I noted that the synonym “harbor" is a little different from the other bay synonyms because it implies that people have created a harbor on that bay.  So when I name a bay after a city, I include the possibility of calling it a harbor, e.g., “Chatgar Harbor."

Finally, I also want the option to name a bay after one of the rivers that flows into the bay.  So in this case:

the bay might get named “Ruzu Cove" after the Ruzu River that flows into the bay.  To do this, I need to make sure that I've named the rivers before trying to name the bay, and then look through the rivers that end in the bay to find the largest named river flowing into the bay.

Now the bay is named after the river.  In this case I've forced all the bays to be named after rivers, but note that the upper bay seems to have a random name.  That's actually the name of one of the rivers flowing into that bay, but the labeling algorithm has decided the river is too small to display that name, so it has been left off the map.

And that about wraps up my current plans for bay place names.  I'll keep adding vocabulary as I have ideas and tweak the probabilities of the different naming options, but that can wait for the future.  A test run with all the possibilities turned on: