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I think the best approach may depend on how many different pieces and movement types you use. One idea may be to use adjectives that are mnemonic. For instance, I am playtesting an unpublished variant of Falcon Chess with Peter Aronson in which the Falcon move is combined with other powers. When an otherwise normal piece also has the Falcon move, the adjective 'winged' is added to its name. If there were no more than four things combined together, a 'Winged Roving Leaping Whatever' might be easier to remember. Ralph Betza has taken the approach, in some variants, of trying to arbitrarily arrange his funny notation to be pronouncable, with mixed results. Similarly, you could assign an open syllable to each combining part, and form nonsense words that would at least be precise and pronouncable. So a 'Winged Roving Leaping Whatever' might be a 'WheeRoLee Whatever' or a 'WheeRoLeeWha'.
Personally, I prefer names that are 'real' nouns, but chosen with as much logic as possible. For instance, a Queen isn't called a Rook-Bishop, so I feel a Marshall shouldn't be called a Rook-Knight. The room this leaves for logic isn't very great, but I'd be inclined to give, for instance, names suggesting greater importance, authority, or strength to pieces that are more powerful: for example, 'Empress' would be a reasonable name for Q+N, but not for (say) B+N. I would give clerical names to pieces whose chief move is diagonal, such as 'Priest' to a one-step diagonal mover (um, that's a Ferz? or an Alfil? I can never remember). I like Cardinal for B+N, and would use Archbishop for a Bishop with a one-step orthogonal move. Animal names are well reserved for leaping pieces like Knights, Camels, Zebras, etc. But the problem with all this is that there seems to be no way to get everyone to agree to use the same terms, and some pieces already have several different names that each have considerable tradition behind them.
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