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I'm no linguistics expert, so take this with a healthy grain of salt, but it seems pretty easy to come up with new carrier names based on parts of real ones. Here's the list I've come up with.

First part:
So - Blue
Hi - Flying
Sho - Happy or Flying (maybe flying happily?)
Zui - Lucky
Tai - Great
Jo - Heavenly
Un - in the clouds (?)
Chu - going speedily to Heven(?)
Kai - Sea
Shin - Godly

second part:
ryu - Dragon
yo - Falcon
ho - Pheonix
kaku - crane

using the above I came up with the names for my three new Unryu class ships for my scenario - Tairyu (Great Dragon), Kairyu (Sea Dragon), and Shinryu (Godly Dragon). Yeah, it gets a little redundant, but so do the real ships - I doubt I'm the only person who gets the Ryujo and Ryuho mixed up.

Anyone know any other Japanses suffixes or prefixes. Particularly flying creatures, since I could only find four.
BS

ps. Sometimes the order is different than the above, like Hosho is "Flying Pheonix," but Shoho is "Happy Pheonix." Go figure. Ryujo is also different - "Dragon Pheonix" And then, of course, there's the converted carriers; they are named after provinces and mountians, depending on whether their hull was based on a BB or a BC/CA.

I found a handy Japanese-English translator -

http://poets.notredame.ac.jp/cgi-bin/jedi-inon

It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, but I may have figured out a few more words. They may or may not be right.

first word
Kuro - Black
Dai - Big (I am pretty sure about this one)
naito - Night
Kin - Golden

second word
washi - eagle
jou - castle
yama - mountain
you - ghost

through derivatives of castle and fortress I was able to name my (fictitous) armored CVEs -
Kyojou - Castle of a Daimyo
Fujou - Floating Castle
Kenjou - strong fortress
kojou - old fortress
oujou - royal fortress
Kinjou - impregnible fortress

I couldn't find enough examples of, say, "Ken-" meaning strong to be sure of it fiting in the list, but the above are direct translations. In fact, I found enough Kin-something translations to give me a pretty good feeling about Kin- meaning gold or golden. However, Kinjou doesn't mean Gold Castle. Oh, well, they sound good.

Try this link for some hints.


http://www.combinedfleet.com/ijnnames.htm

thanks. I was getting my info from - http://www.hazegray.org/ - and a book I have somewhere in this mess. I didn't have CL or DD names though. This helps.

A good source for fictitous DD names is the modern Japanese Navy's web page. Some of their names are repeats, but most are not.

US and England are easy and France isn't hard, but I can't come up with Dutch names (of course it's not like I need many). My fict CA class is currently the "Van Halen" class. The ships are the "Van Halen" and the "Van Hagar;" they're just alike, but they probably never sail together. [:D]

Oh dear, one would think that there were a lot of hippies in the jap shipnaming comittee. With all those high flying names... [:D]