DS9's Bajoran name
- Thread starter Hando
- Start date
I don't see why there should be a "Bajoran" name for Terok Nor/DS9. It already had a name, why wouldn't the Bajoran use another? Even in the real world not all places get their own name in all languages.
That's not exactly true. Most geographical names are modified to accommodate each language's phonetics, otherwise a great many would be unpronounceable and sometimes the names are completely different.
Rendering a place name pronounceable isn't quite the same thing as giving the place a name in one's own language. I might call it Munich rather than München, but I didn't get my rendering from English.
Toward the bigger problem, there's no reason to think that the Bajoran name for the space station is anything more than "space station" in the Bajoran language. Two of the most populous cities in the world are named eastern capital (Tokyo) and northern capital (Beijing). Sometimes simplcity works.
Indeed, Earth is Earth and "Qo'noS" may well be the old Klingon expression for "Homeworld".
Whether Bajor really is Bajor, or whether the UT is just doing its usual tricks and refusing to translate the local name directly into "Earth" or "Home" to avoid confusion and instead calling the planet by the traditional (Human or Vulcan or whatnot) name of the local star... Debate can rage.
Timo Saloniemi
Whether Bajor really is Bajor, or whether the UT is just doing its usual tricks and refusing to translate the local name directly into "Earth" or "Home" to avoid confusion and instead calling the planet by the traditional (Human or Vulcan or whatnot) name of the local star... Debate can rage.
Timo Saloniemi
Edit: Typo in my first message. Was meant to read "many places in real life"
A small selection of gerographical features that share their names in many/most (European) languages:
Brisbane, Sydney, The Great Barrier Reef, Long Island, New York, Boston, Washington (all Australian and American cities, landmarks and states really), Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, London, Copenhagen, America/Amerika, Canada/Kanada, Mexico/Mexiko, the Mississippi, the Colorado River, the Rocky Mountains, Africa/Afrika, Johannisburg, Nairobi, the Sahara Dessert, the River Nile, Lake Victoria (again most African countries/cities/landmarks)
Within the European languages "translating" names has fallen out of favour in the last centuries and only old cities/landmarks/countries have different names in them.
There is nothing that indicates that the Bajorans would need to invent their own name for Terok Nor DS9 instead of using the names as loan words.
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Why is Japan known internationally as Japan anyway? Nihon is perfectly pronounceable in other languages.
It's literally an Americanizaiton of a Sinicization of the word, like a game of Cultural Telephone, when we could just as easily use the real one.
It's literally an Americanizaiton of a Sinicization of the word, like a game of Cultural Telephone, when we could just as easily use the real one.
Which is why many people think that being Nippophile is having a sex fetish of some kind instead of simply speaking Japanese.
There's millions of Geographical names in the world, this is like one thousandth of one percent of them...
And millions get their own name and millions don't. All I said was "many places don't get different names in other languages" there was nothing wrong with my statement. If you really want to split hairs we can discuss if three continents worth of names really constitute "one thousandth of one percent" and whether things like Australia/Australien/Australie should count as multiple names or one.
There is nothing in the real world that says the Bajorans must have had their own name for Terok Nor, as long as it was pronounceable in Bajoran. What I could imagine that it might have had dialect forms like Terek Ner or something.
There are (in)famous exceptions, the Polish name of Auschwitz is Oświęcim yet everybody calls it Auschwitz, even though it was a Polish place to begin with and it still is.
That does not make a convincing case for a uniquely Bajoran name for the station. Auschwitz is but a Germanic phonological equivalent of Oświęcim. Essentially, it's the same name. It matters to Poles, of course, because they want to distinguish what is Polish from what is German. That is why the town is called Oświęcim, but the memorial on the sight of the death camp is called Auschwitz-Birkenau. And if we follow the logic implied by these two names, they might have just found phonologically similar sounds that made "Deep Space Nine" more Bajoran sounding. Doing so would say nothing about Bajoran culture, Bajoran beliefs, Bajoran history, etc., because it would not essentially be a Bajoran name.
Odo was a Cardassian name, yet it was given Odo by Bajoran scientists (granted it was a bit of a joke though).
Well, if we take into account that according to the bible pretty much everything (that had a name back then) has been named in one day by one man, it's understandable that after a while he would run out of ideas.
The Bajoran scientists were required to give the samples they worked on Cardassian names so that the Cardassian managers knew exactly what they were doing. That was pure necessity.
^ When Odo was first found, he was a blob - hadn't yet learned how to work a humanoid form. So the Bajoran scientists put him in a container and labelled him "unknown sample." The Cardassian overseers translated it into their own language as odo'ital, which literally means "nothing." Even after it was clear that Odo was alive and sentient, the Bajoran scientists kept calling him that, structuring it like a Bajoran name (Odo Ital), which eventually got shortened to just Odo.
Precisely.
Or, to quote from the episode:
The facts are unambiguous there, insofar as we can trust the juvenile Odo and his earliest memories. There are nuances there that warrant attention, though.
We don't learn from Odo's delivery whether the "joke" was cruel or intended as such - or just good-natured humor of the awkward sort that nerdy scientists so often practice.
It's quite possible the joke wouldn't be on Odo's expense as such, but directed more at the Cardassian oppressors and their hated language...
Timo Saloniemi
The facts are unambiguous there, insofar as we can trust the juvenile Odo and his earliest memories. There are nuances there that warrant attention, though.
We don't learn from Odo's delivery whether the "joke" was cruel or intended as such - or just good-natured humor of the awkward sort that nerdy scientists so often practice.
It's quite possible the joke wouldn't be on Odo's expense as such, but directed more at the Cardassian oppressors and their hated language...
Timo Saloniemi
