Designing Names for Aliens Using Letter Tiles

You all play Scrabble, right?  Well, did you ever do anything with the letter tiles that the inventors of the game didn’t plan on?  I used a character naming generator site to name my characters. The names all sounded like they’d belong to your neighbors down the block.  I needed names that you would know just by looking at them that they are not of this Earth. I had started with small paper letters, but they were too small.  Once you hit forty, you start being afflicted by what optometrists and ophthalmologists quaintly call presbyopia, or elder eye. I acquired my first pair of bifocals and started wearing them constantly, from the time I opened my eyes in the morning, until I retired for the night, with breaks taken out for showers, naps, and putting the hair around my face in curlers.  

One day I was idly clicking through Amazon when it hit me.  I started looking for Scrabble games, then just the letter tiles by themselves.  .I could get a set with the last few dollars of the gift card my daughter had sent me as a combined Xmas and birthday gift.  To make a long story short, I ordered a set of 100, and 2 of those tile holders. When they arrived, I took a handful of letters out of the bag, and arranged them facedown on the holder.  Abdioueat. Looks Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Or maybe Native American. But sprinkle a couple apostrophes in there, and you get , Abdi’ou’eat Starts to look pretty alien doesn’t it, and if you are an ethnographer or a Kulturologist, you discover that this is the name of the chief of a hilltop village/tribe.  Never mind how you would pronounce it, unless you are reading it aloud. Now, I suppose you could cheat and change the letters around, breaking up that string of vowels with the few consonants provided. It starts to look more like this:. Baouteidai .Use your faithful apostrophes, and it starts to look more like this: Bao’ute’idai .  The ‘can stand for letters or sounds not present in our English/Roman alphabet, much like the clicks and pops in the X’hosa language of Africa. Don’t consider yourself limited to just apostrophes. The `or ~ can be used to represent other sounds not present in our alphabet. Ba’ou`teid~ai starts to look pretty exotic, doesn’t it? Pronounce it how you Will, you’re the author, after all. 

With these tools, you can come up with . people’s names, place names, and even your own alien language.  It’ll probably never compete with Klingon, but your only limit is your own imagination, and isn’t that what you’re using to write your own novel/novella/story anyway? I’ll be using this system while plugging any holes in Takuhi’s Daydream as I edit and revise it, and during April as I complete my intergalactic novel during Camp NaNoWriMo.  Patricia says she’s going to release each installment of the Takuhi trilogy one at a time, once I complete Takuhi’s Daydream, so be looking for those to come out on your favorite platform.