Cloud Map

In a previous post I referred to people making up maps of imaginary lands.  Well, yesterday I took this photo of some massed clouds that looked uncannily like a map of the world.

So I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a try myself.  I cleaned up the photo somewhat to make the edges of the 'continents' a little less hazy, added a direction thingy in the corner like some maps have, and finally a bunch of made-up names.

(click on the image to check out the result)

By the way, here's my pet peeve with imaginary words and names in science fiction and fantasy -- they're supposed to belong to exotic characters and things, but so often, they just sound like unfamiliar but possible words in the author's own language.  Some of the authors I have read made valiant attempts to at least break out of the Indo-European rut -- Poul Anderson, for example, had an extraterrestrial character named Chee Lan;  but even those names are only exotic because they belong to nonhumans (Chee Lan was described as sort of a cross between a monkey and a cat) -- the names themselves are quite familiar-sounding;  in fact, I'll bet anything there are actual people named Chee Lan living in China at this moment.

I suppose it's inevitable;  after all, even fantasy does not spring out of a complete vacuum.  Imaginary bestiaries from olden times listed all sorts of weird creatures, but they tended to be conglomerations of parts of other animals.  The manticore was a lion-man;  the chimaera, a goat-lion-snake; the harpy, a woman-bird;  the cockatrice, a dragon-rooster. Fantasy is ultimately based in reality.

And so I knew it would be impossible to come up with totally strange yet plausible-sounding (and consistent with each other so they would sound like a single language) place names for my cloud map. Still, to help make certain my made-up names would be 'fresh', and not sound like curses or body parts in somebody's native tongue, I did a quick internet search for each name I came up with -- and in doing so, acquired a more charitable attitude toward fantasy & SF writers, because it's maddeningly difficult to make up a name or word that isn't already in use somewhere!  Staying within the bounds of ordinary rules of vocalization for most languages (nothing like an FZTRPSK combination, for example, unless you happen to be Georgian or something), I would say that for words up to three syllables long chance favors the made-up 'new' word already being in existence.