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.