By Tre, Pol and Pen shall ye know Cornishmen.
It is on tea towels now, which is a shame, because underneath the tea towel it is a real and rather good piece of linguistics. Cornish place names are built from elements, and once you know a handful of them the map starts talking.
Tre is a farmstead or settlement. Pol is a pool. Pen is a headland or an end. Lan is a church enclosure. Porth is a cove. Nans is a valley. Chy is a house. Bos is a dwelling.
Which means Cornwall is, to a startling extent, self-documenting. Polperro, Penzance, Trelissick, Lanhydrock, Porthcurno. You can read them.
So I built something that makes new ones.
Type a name, get a place
Enter anything — your name, your band, the dog — and it returns a Cornish place that does not exist, along with a meaning that also does not exist.
Polvennick. Pool of the drowned orchard.
Trecarno. Farm of the seven gulls.
Penduack. Headland of the singing stones.
The important part is that it never changes
This is the one piece of engineering worth mentioning. The same name always returns the same place, every time, on every device, for everybody.
It is not random. It hashes the name into a number and uses different slices of that number to pick each element. So your place is yours, permanently, and two people can compare theirs and disagree about whose is better — which is the only reason a name game has ever worked.
If it were random, you would press it twice and stop caring. Determinism is the whole product.
What it is not
It is not a translator. It does not know Cornish grammar, it does not conjugate, and the meanings are drawn from a list of atmospheric phrases rather than derived from the elements.
Kernewek is a real language with real speakers and an active revival, and this is not that. It is a naming toy built out of genuine elements, which is a different thing and worth saying plainly.
If it makes anybody look up what nans actually means, it will have done more good than most tea towels.
Where it runs
Entirely in your browser. The name you type is hashed on your machine and never leaves it — no server sees it, nothing is stored, and there is no list anywhere of who typed what.