This is true, but I wonder if it would be accurate to Arelith. Arelith doesn't just have one river. Calling it "The Shyr" specifically, rather than "The River" might work, since non-Hin would understand "Shyr" to be the name of the river, despite it just being called "the river" in Hin. As Durvayas mentioned, though, "the Shyr" sounds way too much like "The Shire". I don't mind some Tolkien flavor, but just calling it "The Shire" is a bit too much, IMO.Xerah wrote: ↑Thu Sep 12, 2019 4:13 pmThey would 100% call it the Shyr. This happens often with things in human linguistics. A specific city becomes The City. A big island is called The Island. The nearby forest is called the Woods/Forest/etc. People assume if you are close to something, you have familiarity with it and can shorthand these things to descriptive terms. This is doubly so in the case of something unnamed when it is the only one of the THING in that area. Even if it were to get a name now, people would call it by the other name for a long time.
Or it can just all be retconned to whatever.
That said, even when geography has names in real life, they're often not really that interesting. There are about a billion lakes called "Fish Lake", or creeks called "Oak Creek". Only the hugely major things like mountain ranges, big mountains within those rangers, or large or interesting lakes/rives get interesting names.
We could also pick out something the river is known for. Good fishing, particular trees or plants that grow on the shore, some trade that depends on it (what interesting thing is shipped up and down it?).
On the other hand, since Arelith was settled in a burst, something like the Ambliss River might make sense, since the river might not have had an accepted name until then. No one had lived in Bendir Dale that long before he went tumbling in and got himself drowned, so that might have been the first notable event associated with it.
