Quote Originally Posted by Neyasha View Post
It's also very interesting to read all your thoughts and inputs to the subject of naming places.
As German is my mother-tongue I have a lot of "germanized" names in my fantasy world and often I'm really struggling with it. One reason may be, that most fantasy worlds are originally in English and when they are translated to German, the names often sound odd, so it's very rare to find fictional, but realistic sounding German names. Mostly because they sound just like modern names without any history or influence from other languages behind it.
I think the German version of the Lord of the Rings is one of the rare cases, where the translation of place names works really well - while the translation of The Song of Ice and Fire is some kind of disaster (at least for me) and I just stick to the english original. This also shows, that names are really important, when it comes to giving your countries/your world a certain feeling.
That's really interesting, Neyasha, I had not considered the challenges of translating story-relevant names into other languages (likely because when it comes to pop culture, I have Anglo-American privilege and usually don't have to think about it). I'm surprised that English-to-German translation suffers from this problem, though, since English is a Germanic language, although I suppose by now we've incorporated a lot of Romance/Latin words.

This thread motivated me to do an Amazon search for books about the etymology of conlang. I might check out Hobbit Place-Names and The Conlanger's Lexipedia.