Subject: Re: Heh.
Author:
Posted on: 2013-06-14 00:53:00 UTC

So far in my high fantasy world I've been using a combination of your approach and a couple others. I'm working on a conlang to be the language of magic, which will be used to name a few ancient species, so at the moment I'm putting in placeholders like "[ghoul]" to be replaced when I flesh out its vocabulary later on.

Place names, on the other hand, come from an archaic language (somewhat like how some place names in England derive from Old English) that's never actually going to be fully explored, so I either play around with root words until they sound good — for example, city names all end in "mas," presumably the old word for a city — or I just throw in something euphonious that doesn't quite work knowing I'll come back to it later and improve it.

I don't run much risk of getting attached to the placeholder names because they just don't feel right, if that makes any sense, and when I use them or read them there's an overwhelming desire to sit around and fix them. The only reason I haven't is that I want to at least get a rough draft finished before I start polishing up place names that I know aren't going to stay the way they are.

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