Last night, by the magical wonders of the internet, I was watching some Jeeves and Wooster (featuring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry). I always thought the books played with words quite well and the series, though rather old now, is excellent.
The names where also good too, as recent posts have shown I'm a bit fixated with names at the moment. The names bandied about in this program - along with the language is obviously upper class. These names belong to certain strata of society. I wondered if I could get a grammar going ... :D I only watched one episode but I managed to note down a few of the names that came up mainly last names. Today at school I came up with the following rough grammar:
[start] -> [S1][mid][e2] | [S1][V][e1] | [S2][V][e1]
[S1] -> "gl" | "br" | "f"
[S2] -> "wo"
[V] -> "a" | "e" | "i" | "o" | "u"
[mid] -> "ith" | "ains" | "ipps" | "iggs"
[e1] -> "ssup" | "ster" | "gget" | "n" | [e2]
[e2] -> "ley" | "wauld" | "worth" | "wick" | "bottom"
Which gave some reasonably good outputs even though it's obviously rather limited at the moment.
Fithley
Woan
Glogget
Woester
Woen
Briggsley
Brester
Glithbottom
Woussup
Woin
Bregget
Figgswauld
...
These are pretty good names but I'd like a little more variety. I'm thinking of creating possibly fifty or so grammars like the above for upper and lower classes. On top of that I may add a random grammar generator that will probably create truely unusual but not impossible name-sets.
Of course at this point you may be thinking Why why why all these names? Well I find it entertaining and interesting. Also the scope of my game is rather large and name thirsty. I'm not the only one[2, 3] of course people writing MMORPG will want name generators perhaps as leveled as mine (or even more complicated)
Nothing else interesting to report at the moment though.
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