Custom City Name Generator

[Franz_van_der_Aaagh]

Hello all!

tl;dr
I'm looking for a modding partner/group who could help implementing Custom City Names to the Civ game.

Full
Once I've came upon @HandyVac 's mod. I've thought the idea of city name generation based on local terrain features is awesome and really imitate real life othonymic processes. Nonetheless, I've found the results often fairly disappointing. Not only the word list was quite short and, I suppose, not based on real locations nor real stems, the morphosytntactic order was mixed, not to tell about the morphology, or the names with mixed stems. It was a good place to start, but I believe we can excel it.

I've tried to create a simple name generator basing on Portuguese and Cabo Verde city and village names (with some additions). Attached preview has been created in Twine (usually used for another purposes). The goal was to make programme create possible (and sometimes actual) city names.

I know how the proper names should be created (more or less and in respect to some languages) but I don't know how they should be put in the code to make them pop out. I guess, it shall not be very tough as we would work on simple strings, variables or datamaps, not on AI behaviour nor any rocket science.

Also, as the works would progress, any sort of help from various languages users would be appreciated in order to validate the fruits or create a list of stems.

There's also one hidden benefit - once such generator is created it can be applied to another game series.

Long-term goals:
v.1 Creation of a general generation model for one language/civilization with the stem corpus and selected morphosyntactic rules.
v.2 Implementation of other language/civilization models.
v.3 Creation of "ethymology box" in the city previev box.
v.4 Establishing rules for literal translation between language families/Sprachbunds and implementation.
(optional v.5 - orthographic/phonetical transliterations/transformations between language families/Sprachbunds)

I'll much appreciate any sort of help, suggestions, comments etc.

 

[niklas153021]

This is such a great idea!
I had this very same experience after playing around with HandyVac's mod, which on the one hand implements this brilliant concept of generated toponyms that really adds to the immersion of actually building your own civilization in the game, but on the other hand the implementation left you with some very unnatural names in languages other than English (and even the English ones were a little wonky sometimes).

I've tried to create a simple name generator basing on Portuguese and Cabo Verde city and village names (with some additions). Attached preview has been created in Twine (usually used for another purposes). The goal was to make programme create possible (and sometimes actual) city names.

I'm really not sure what I'm looking at here as I don't speak Portuguese and... Polish? but if you already have a generator for Portuguese figured out, thats definitely something to start with and I would be willing to help out with other languages, especially Germany. Something that bothered me about the other city name generator was that it mixed very different, say, dialectical Morphemes of German place names, so you had a prefix you would only find in Northern Germany attached to some very specificly Southern suffix. I can only guess that this is not a Germany-only issue, so maybe some kind of regional or dialectal distinction could be added in a more elaborate generator. Also, I feel like the era should also have an effect on the city names, as colonial cities' names follow different rules than settlements from, say, the medieval age.

The only doubt I have is that there is a sufficient amount of information available to create a language model for languages like Maori, Cree, "Skythian" or whatever near-extinct or poorly documented languages are spoken by ingame civs that would match the quality of generators in e.g. English, French, German, Spanish.

Anyways, I would love to help you with this project, especially with a morphological model for German toponyms as there are already lots of ideas popping up in my head. I could also provide some help with coding. I'm not an expert in Lua scripting but have quite some experience in coding in general and there should be a lot of useful code to look at over at HandyVac's mod.

 

[Franz_van_der_Aaagh]

Hi Niklas!

I am glad you have similar observations and that you're signalising a will to collaborate I cannot speak that much on the quality of German place names, however they seemed to me little goofy as well. Such division between Hochdeutch and Niederdeutch could be resolved for sure by adding an initial variable that would define the source of roots, suffixes and compliments. Your help with coding is also much welcome! I believe the crux is to construct proper database, that would be easilly accessible and well-organised. Currently I'm experiment with different tools to create corporae and annotate text, so if these can be transfered with ease to some raw data format, it would be much handy for both coding and morphosemantic analysis.

You have tackled three vital questions:
1) if the generators should mirror languages or rather political entities?
2) How sensible shall such generator be in relation to non-terrain features?
3) How shall we treat languages/civilizations with few toponymic data in their proper language?

1) Observing e.g. the differences between Brazilian and Portuguese or English and American toponyms one can figure out two conlusions. First is that to some degree colonial states have different substrates that were less transformed as such by phonetic changes. Deer Creek is obviously much easier for an English speaker to deduce the reasioning of the founder upon christening. On the other hand Kirkby does not resemble "Church Village" unless you know Old English. Assuming that people that begin to habituate some land would more likely name it in intelligible form, also basing on the contemporary vocab and morphology. Second issue is that being quite conservative, old and foreign toponyms are being preserved along creating new ones. Therefore you'll have both portuguese São Paulo and tupí Curitiba or Santa Fe, Oakland and Milwaukee in the USA. So, I'd advocate for lists for each civilization regardless of the major language, that of course could be overlapping.

2) I would say that it can add some flavour, but in some specific cases can be difficult to implement. I am for little changes that could be introduced as a simple variable, like the civic system (monarchy Port Royal vs republic Port Ducal???, Angra dos Reis (Bay of the Kings) vs Presidente Prudente (President Prudente)) or religion. On the other hand whole new mechanics could be too much to start with, like consitency in Ruthenian root and suffix in Eastern Poland's toponymy. That's a thing to consider in long term, though.

3) I believe the toughest is the Scythian case or any other connected to nomadic lifestyle. Whether it would be better to generate names basing on archaeological digs, on historic names distorted by foreigners or rather focus on existing toponyms in closest related language (which would be Ossetian, I guess)? I don't know. Fortunately, Sumerian, Maori or Cree toponyms are much better preserved and described. Having 41 civilizations other than Scythia to work on (in CIV 6 only), we can postpone it. The key is to develop such structure that could conveniently cope with string changes basing on well-designed categories (and that was main problem, I believe, of HandyVac's mod. Text modules were strictly assigned to their absolute position without overwriting the main noun).