Alternatively
Alex = Avex
Jakob = Jakov
Michael = Rikhael
etc, so on, so forth it’s even more fun when you decide that a culture is going to be based on another, and then taking those culturally specific names and splicing em together.
EDIT: And if you wanna get real crazy, think of the language that these people speak–the easiest way to sort it out is the “hiragana way”, thinking of specific sounds and combining those into a name. Hiragana is composed of several different sounds per symbol–Mi Ni Hi etc. Making your own sounds, such as Lek, Rist, Pan, then combining them with feminine or masculine denotations (think spanish vowels, such as -o -e or -a) can make some neat stuff too
Take, for example, you decided that feminine/masculine sounds are respectively Vin and Vus, and starting with a base Car: you get a feminine name, Carvin, and a maculine name, Carvus.
Nope! But I find that looking into the whys or how things are is definitely the easiest and most believable route to go. Even if my reasoning might make a real linguist groan, the end result is pretty believable, and you get a familiar sounding pattern for names.
Dialects are all based around familiar sounds, so knowing little bits about how languages and accents are formed can give a lot more depth and deliberation into creation of fantasy names
Which isn’t the end of the world. Yes, it’s nice when they cohere… But much of the world is about to go celebrate a universe where the names are a mishmash of European and Japanese and barely-disguised English words (“Dark Invader”).
Course, you’d say that. I imagine knowing a whole bunch of languages, including ancient Greek, does tend to give one a bigger reservoir of knowledge to draw from. It also depends on the world, I imagine that if you go to Vancian and Tolkien-esque levels of world design, like @Cataphrak@Havenstone and quite a few other authors here tend to do you’d want your names to cohere, If you’re just writing a funny, silly little romp it is not really that important and it may in fact be helpful if names do not cohere. Lastly in a more contemporary, or real world historical setting you can just draw from common and less common names of the period, that you can find all over the internet, or in most decent libraries.
it’s even more fun when you decide that a culture is going to be based on another, and then taking those culturally specific names and splicing em together.