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Well in The Emperor's Gift we find out that Hyperion is named after one of Saturns(?) moons... and since these were named a long time ago(to my knowledge, i suck at history) they all sound epic and non familiar to us.

Hyperion was one of the Titans (parents of the Greek/Roman Gods), I think the moons of Saturn are all named for Titans.

Nearly all the planets and moons in our system have Greek and Roman names.

All of the names are from their corresponding cultures. Simple as that. The imperial culture correlates to Latin (or Greek, or whatever you want to call it) and is used for generic characters or for chapters that aren't based on earth's cultures, like Iron hands or Imperial fists. And I can't say for sure, but I think the Ultramarines might be something else. Roboute Guilliman almost sounds a little bit like French, but I don't know.

I only know for Space Marines:

Black Templars are German names.
Space Wolves are Viking.
UltraMarines are Roman.

Dark Heresey has a good name generator which is based on status and origins. Some are not names as you'd recognise and are certainly not latin inspired (usually the well to do character have more latin sounding names)

There is also a space amrine name generator app, not used it though so not sure if it's any good.

Good way is to take an existing name and just play around with changing a few letters, language naturally evolves over time. My surname is Atkins with orignally comes from Adam's Kin and is stronlgly connected to Adkins, Atkinson and a few others. Over time letter change especially if they are similar sounding ("th" and "f" and "y" and "I") look at the differnce between UK English and US, "Z" is a lor more prominant in the US, also words like "Centre" or "Center" (slight difference) also "Gaol" and "Jail" (huge difference but sound the same when said).

Also it's good to remeber that names are/were originally descriptive e.g. what Job you did (Cooper, Smith, Fletcher), where you came from (Wymondham) or who your father was (Magnuson).

Couple of good exampes of this in 40K are "Landerson" in GG series, which comes from Lander's Son as in he was a child of one of the original colonists.

"Bucheroc" (sp) which is a place in 15 hours and come from Butcher's Rock becasue the city was orignally used to process meat.

Like other have said the names depend on the origin/culture of the group in question. Catachans seem to have a fairly wide range of surnames similar to modern day english speaking cultures.

The origin of names is quite fun when you start looking into it,normal names you don't think mean anything do. For instance Barry means Spear like, Alex means Defending man or defender of men and "Mike" Michael means Who is Like God.

Also remeber names from history or popular texts are are very common (Biblical names in western culture) so I can imagine a lot of the loyalist primarchs, saints and generals names being used over and over again in 40K.

Personally I use a smattering of everything to embrace the true mongrel nature of human society.

Hunchkrot wrote:All of the names are from their corresponding cultures. Simple as that. The imperial culture correlates to Latin (or Greek, or whatever you want to call it) and is used for generic characters or for chapters that aren't based on earth's cultures, like Iron hands or Imperial fists. And I can't say for sure, but I think the Ultramarines might be something else. Roboute Guilliman almost sounds a little bit like French, but I don't know.

Some of the characters are named for real people, Perdro Kantor is named for a play tester with a more mundane name like Peter Canter. I wouldn't be surprised if Roboute Guiliman is named for some guy named Bob Williams or something.

There are Latin/Greek origins to a lot of names, but not all, by any measure.

I think they just avoid names like Mike and William because they're too modern and English sounding.