fantasy is so fun until you have to name your countries and make a map someone please end my misery
all you need to do is come up with 3-4 unique names. then come up with a meaning/translation for those names. now that you know what they mean, you can combine their elements with eachother and add new random sounds in.
eg: "mir/miel" means lake in my conlang, "da" means hill, and "guu" means bear. now that i know that i can name something daguu/guuda (bear hill) or guumir (bear lake). and i can go "hwa" (which means white but in this case pretend i came up with it at random) sounds good with "guu" so what if i name something hwaguu or hwaguumir? and then just repeat the process
some of the things i recommend having words for when it comes to naming locations:
- hill (you can have so many variants that mean hill)
- lake
- river/creek
- valley
- directional words (north, east, south, west)
- road/path
- forest/wood
- clearing/plain
- rock/cliff
it doesn't have to be extremely overwhelming! you can just start with a few small and common words and slowly expand
countries are definitely a bit harder then average place names, but they usually name themselves either after the people who live there or something symbolic!
a fun little read, sometimes only covers their exonyms in english though, let me see if i can find one that goes into country's names in their native languages
still not quite what i was looking for, but covers groups of people!
this is closer to what i was looking for, it shows the countries' endonym and english exonym next to eachother which is a good start, but doesnt provide a translation of meanings. better than nothing though
country names... have meanings... oh my god that makes everything so much easier
Saving for reference.

























