you learn just enough linguistics to make a language skeleton with consistent names that don't sound like 1) english but not or 2) what an english person thinks language X sounds like where X is Arabic for people in an arid climate, etc. this is much less complex than making an entire language with a full enough dictionary to express complex thoughts and grammatical rules just to have names for places
Pretty much. Phonotactics, important geographic terms that are likely to be reused in multiple place names, a little bit of word order rules - like whether it would be the “Black River” or the “River Black”, and so on. As long as you keep some consistency, you don’t need to get into deeper stuff like conjugation, pronoun systems, how clauses are structured, and so on. George R.R. Martin is actually pretty decent at it, despite not being that interested in languages. Looking at random words from his books, you can usually tell whether something is supposed to be Valyrian or Dothraki just based on the aesthetics and the fact that there are some clearly related words.
you learn just enough linguistics to make a language skeleton with consistent names that don't sound like 1) english but not or 2) what an english person thinks language X sounds like where X is Arabic for people in an arid climate, etc. this is much less complex than making an entire language with a full enough dictionary to express complex thoughts and grammatical rules just to have names for places
So what you throw together a subset of the IPA and some basic phonotactics and then just create names that fit that as needed?
Pretty much. Phonotactics, important geographic terms that are likely to be reused in multiple place names, a little bit of word order rules - like whether it would be the “Black River” or the “River Black”, and so on. As long as you keep some consistency, you don’t need to get into deeper stuff like conjugation, pronoun systems, how clauses are structured, and so on. George R.R. Martin is actually pretty decent at it, despite not being that interested in languages. Looking at random words from his books, you can usually tell whether something is supposed to be Valyrian or Dothraki just based on the aesthetics and the fact that there are some clearly related words.