Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centuri

No more deliberate than Shatner calling his communications officer "Yuhura".

 

It's interesting: these stars, of course, did not grow up with tv. They, like the generations before them, grew up with regional dialects, and when it came to scientific terms, had often read them but not heard them aloud. There are a few times (and unfortunately I can't think of any examples right now) where I caught De Kelley repeating something someone had just told him but with a different pronunciation - which does not happen in conversation, but does happen when one has memorized a script.

 

Really, nearly all of the founding worlds FJ posited in the SFTM seem to have been intended as Earth colonies. The Star Empire of Epsilon Indii [sic] has a seal with "EI" in the middle, and the United Planets of 61 Cygni has a flag with a Roman numeral and a swan (Cygnus) motif. They're clearly meant to be of human rather than alien origin. Only the 40 Eridani flag looks alien, probably because Blish cited 40 Eri as Vulcan's star in his "Tomorrow is Yesterday" adaptation. (It was the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual that first identified 61 Cyg with Tellar and Epsilon Indi with Andor, as far as I know.)

 

In "The Corbomite Maneuver" if I recall, everyone is saying Bay-lock and Kelley says Bail-ock.

 

Good points. But didn't ENT establish the Andorian home system Procyon? Don't recall if or where the Tellarites were said to be from, though. In any case, that would certainly leacve things open for Ep Eri and 61 Cyg to be human colonies. On the other hand weren't all those systems said to be the founding members of the UFP (at least in the SF TM)? That would make things just a bit too human-centric, wouldn't it? I can see a UFP being founded with two human-dominated systems (Sol and A Cent - helps explain why Starfleet seems to be so primarily human occupied most of the time), but more seems to be too much.

 

I love the smell of torn apart fan assumptions in the morning.

 

He also does it "Journey to Babel." He pronounces "Sehlat" differently than Spock and Amanda. But since that's a Vulcan word that McCoy just heard for the first time, it works for the character.

In "Arena", Shatner calls the alien race the "Met-TRONES" when everyone else calls them the "Met-TRONS."

 

So if he's human, what on Earth kind of name is "Zefram," anyway?

Kor

 

No, it didn't canonically identify any of the founding species with a real star (the closest it came was stating that Vulcan was 16 light-years from Earth, consistent with 40 Eridani). It was the non-canonical reference book Star Trek Star Charts that put Andoria at Procyon, presumably because ENT had established Vulcan and Andoria as neighboring systems whose longstanding conflict had been unknown to Earth until 2151, and Procyon is better positioned for that than Epsilon Indi is (Eps Indi is farther from 40 Eri and on the wrong side of Sol).

That's Epsilon Indi, not Epsilon Eridani. But Epsilon Indi is canonically the home star of Triacus in "And the Children Shall Lead," so it's spoken for. (Although Star Charts identifies it with Draylax for some reason.)

Well, the Federation did appear very human-centric in TOS. Vulcan wasn't even established as a Federation member until "Errand of Mercy," and we didn't see any other nonhuman member worlds until "Journey to Babel." Heck, until "A Taste of Armageddon" coined the term "Federation," the Enterprise was explicitly an Earth ship. The idea of humans founding colonial unions and empires across space, uniting into the Federation, and eventually letting other species join is pretty much consistent with how the UFP was portrayed in TOS. It's not the version we're used to, so it seems odd to us, but there was nothing established at the time that would've precluded FJ from using that interpretation. After all, "Journey to Babel" never said that the Andorians, Tellarites, and other aliens shown were founding members.

Maybe a variant of Efrem/Ephraim? It's not as if "Uhura" is a real name. New names do get made up from time to time. Maybe the idea was to represent a "future" name, or a name coined by a human colonial population (in the scenario where humans settled Alpha Centauri in sublight ships -- maybe DY-100 sleepers? -- before warp drive came along).

 

Maybe his full name was Zachariah Efram Cochrane. He turned Z. Efram into a nickname.

 

I think you just put ten times more thought into it than the writer. As I say, it's a throw away line likely there to add an exotic element to the scene.

"Welcome to the world of Tomoooooroooow!"

 

Better than most of the names parents are inventing these days.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo8CrY_ZfFk[/yt]

 

That's actually pretty good.

 

More than technically, I'd say. The folks of Epsilon Indi defeated the forces of evil that had a "seat" in Triacus. But those folks are not around - nothing indicates they would have lived on Triacus, as our heroes never consider them as an explanation for the "presence" or the events. An in-and-out job that leaves the "seat" empty would be the natural interpretation.

Further, the legend is about "again" sending it "marauding across the galaxy"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

It never occurred to me to interpret the symbols in that way, but I guess it's possible. Though there's no way of knowing whether FJ's intent was for the symbols to mean that in-universe, or if it was just an in-jokey way to design something "alien."

I guess that could work.

 

It's a rare variation of the name "Zephyrus" after the Greek God of the West Wind.

 

Seems to me that the exact affiliation of the "United Space Ship" Enterprise could have been open to interpretation, at least initially.

Somewhat comparable to the Stardate, which did not pin down which century TOS was set in.

 

No, there were numerous references to it being an Earth ship, e.g. in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" ("Did another Earth ship once probe out of the galaxy as we intend to do?"), "The Corbomite Maneuver" ("This is the United Earth ship Enterprise"), and "The Menagerie" ("the only Earth ship that ever visited" Talos IV). Plus references to Earth bases and Earth outposts, the Earth-Romulan War, the United Earth Space Probe Agency, etc. The first season leaves no doubt that the Enterprise and its service are affiliated with Earth specifically.

 

I Googled "Zephram" and it comes back as Greek in origin and the masculine version of 'Zephyr'.