A long time ago, I wrote a program for generating passwords called mkpasswd and, based on that, I came up with a name generator for gaming and other uses. The basic idea is an old one. You take a list of words and you chunk them up into word-parts. You then string chunks together in ways that, statistically, match the source list. What you get out are words that, while not likely appearing in the source list, actually sound like they would fit.
When your source word list is a list of names from a particular culture, what you get out are words that sound like valid names from that culture. For fantasy roleplaying and other, similar uses this turns out to be a huge timesaver and a really cool toy.
Just recently, I've updated this generator. It's available at:
http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/cgi-bin/mkname.cgi
When your source word list is a list of names from a particular culture, what you get out are words that sound like valid names from that culture. For fantasy roleplaying and other, similar uses this turns out to be a huge timesaver and a really cool toy.
Just recently, I've updated this generator. It's available at:
http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/cgi-bin/mkname.cgi
The new verison has lots of advantages over the old. Highest on this list are: its generated names more often sound like they're from the right culture and it runs much faster. I also fixed a bug that was bypassing the controls that prevented printing out duplicate words in the same run.
The current version has source name lists for everything from American to 15th century French to Aztec to World of Warcraft to generic science fiction and fantasy, so it should be quite useful no matter what setting you need a name for.
Coolness. I like the language options. I too have a random name generator at http://namethingy.com - so can appreciate the effort you put into this. It can do real names, but mostly it was written for domainers and brainstorming.
Cheers.