How do i properly name a fictional species and describe it?

Let's start with description: how to describe a living creature, without referencing other living creatures. What does it have - scales, tail, wings? How many limbs? On how many does it walk, if at all? Describe what is. For example, if I described a creature as "covered with soft brown fur, possessing a bushy tail as long as its body and curling at the end, sometimes running on all four legs, other times standing up and holding nuts in its forepaws", you'd recognise it as a squirrel. I don't need to mention that it's "rodent-like", or "the size of a rat, but with more points in Charisma and less in Intelligence".

If your world doesn't have humans, you'd be telling the story, and describing individuals, from a non-human POV. That means that general physical features would be taken for granted by them, just as having one head, two hands, two feet is taken for granted by us. You'd need to introduce whatever features your creatures have in such a way that it wouldn't be comparable to "John had two eyes and one nose". Consider instead:

Tom looked at Alice across the classroom. Her scales were pink and glossy, her fingers were green and delicate. He would so much like to hold her hand, and then slide his hand down her long tail, to caress the golden tuft on the end. If he could summon up the courage to ask her to the spring dance, and if she said yes...
_{(No reason Dracanopi can't be creeps, OK?)}

In this example, the reader understands that at least the females of the species have scales, hands and a tail with a tuft on the end, that pink, green and gold are considered pleasant colours for those features (respectively), and that other colours exist.

Now to the name. In many of Earth's languages, at least one of the words for 'humans' just means 'people'. Basically, when we say 'humans', we mean 'us'. So it stands to reason that your creatures could also refer to themselves as 'us', 'people', unless there is more than one species in the story. I remember reading a fantasy short story, in which you very gradually realise that the first-person POV character is a dragon, and that the enemy, who's described as sort of disgusting and worm-like is human. No species names were given at any point - only "us" and the "others".

If you do insist on the creatures having a name, it should be in the language you're writing in. Consider: no people on Earth routinely use another language's word for 'people'. (There is a scientific name, in the language that's most associated with science, but that's separate.) Sure, your creatures won't really be speaking English, that's a translation convention. And you should be using it throughout, unless those creatures are not the ones from whose POV you're telling the story (in which case, use the name the POV species gave them, perhaps inspired by whatever they call themselves in their language.)

It's not a bad idea to use the 'Draco-' element in your species' name, if you use a name at all: it conjures an image of something dragon-like. Such an image would be helpful to the readers. I wouldn't, however, use any 'antropo-' element: it implies that humans not only exist, but are sufficiently dominant for a sapient species to be comparing themselves to humans. That's a bit strange.

posted over 5 years ago

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Galastel‭

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To me it seems that your main issue is not having decided a common background-language for your story. In fantasy novels, either you

• Invent a whole new language (cfr. Tolken)
• Borrow languages from the real world

Since the Lord of the Rings, a lot of authors have tried the first approach with various degrees of success (keep in mind that Tolkien was a philologist, so he was a little more equipped for the task than your average nowaday writer). With "various degrees of success" I mean that in the worst case, you can tell that the author is just making up words, with little care or sense for phonetic or grammatical coherence.

The second approach is equally viable and doesn't require you to be skilled linguist. You wouldn't be the first to use Latin in a setting were latins didn't exist. Language is a mean to an end: most readers will accept that you are using Latin-esque names to give off an aura of authority. Latin are greek are already used in scientific contexts, so your readers will fall in quickly.

It's not different from your characters talking in English, even if there is no reason for them to do so.

Of course, you're not stuck with latin or greek. If you want there are plenty of other languages to borrow - from arabic to sanskrit.

So, going back to your question:

How do i properly name a fictional species and describe it?

Either:

1. Invent your own language and use it coherently

or

2. Borrow from an existing language (and use it coherently)

With coherence here is that you have to take choices and stick with them. The readers will accept, for example, that the book is written in English and that most words will be English words. They will accept a foreign looking language used in a particular context, also. Those will be implicit rules between you and them.

If you start breaking those rules, eyebrows will start to rise. I can give a good example from your issue:

On the other hand, how do i describe them without taking humans as reference?. There are no humans in this world, so the statement "they have a humanoid form" can't apply to them.

Either accept "humanoid" as a term, or replace it with another term. If there are no humans in this world, probably the term "humanoid" could be replaced by whatever is the prominent race with four limbs and an head (Elfoid or Elfish for Elves, Goblinoid for goblins, and so on ...). But beware that if you ban terms like "human", you should avoid terms like "man" "woman" "mankind" "anthropomorphic" and so on, because they may not have sense anymore in your setting.

posted over 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Liquid‭

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