I think in NF: Cold Wars there was an Ensign Pheytus whose name was pronounced "fetus".
How do you name alien characters/species?
- Thread starter Laura Cynthia Chambers
- Start date
A few of 'em are written by Star Trek authors, too...
Including one of my favorite Stargate Atlantis stories.
Though I enjoy Melissa Scott's too, especially when she's writing with Jo Graham.
Are you talking to yourself?
Trying to get everyone back on the original topic. Would you say that's a lost cause by now?
But seriously, do alien names break the so-called mold as often as Human ones?
Not sure what "mold" you mean. But human names come from thousands of different linguistic and cultural traditions, while aliens tend to be portrayed as having only a single global language and naming pattern, and the only times we get more diversity are when different writers are concocting their own separate naming schemes for the same species (like Andorians in canon and tie-ins before the modern book continuity started retconning all their names to fit the naming pattern introduced in the DS9 post-finale novels). So generally you'd find a lot less mold-breaking of any kind, if you mean individual names that diverge from a species-wide pattern.
Yeah, like Asil as a Vulcan name instead of T'whatever
I will cut the next person who insists there is a character named "Hravishran th'Zoarhi".
Errr.... *runs away*
In my Rise of the Federation novels, I've retconned the retconning of Andorian names by establishing that the novelverse convention represents "Imperial names," presumably based on the language of the dominant Andorian culture, and that names from other languages/nationalities are converted to Imperial forms, but some Andorians choose to keep their localized names. So it's sort of like how a lot of people with non-Western names adopt Westernized names when living in the West, or are assigned Westernized names by the Western media.
Hmm. In his Humanx Commonwealth milieu, ADF managed to come up with a Thranx naming convention that was both utterly alien and completely pronounceable, e.g. Truzenzuzex, his younger relative Sylzenzuzex, their ancestor Ryozenzuzex, and the utterly unrelated Desvendapur, among others.
I wouldn't call that utterly alien, since you could simply split off the first syllable and it'd be essentially identical to Western naming patterns -- Tru Zenzuzex, Syl Zenzuzex, and Ryo Zenzuzex in the same family and Des Vendapur in a different family. (In fact, that last name looks downright Indian.)
In Tears of Eridanus, I was pretty insistent (not that there was an argument) that there should be a diversity of Andorian naming practices. All the new Andorian names we coined followed the "imperial" style, but we didn't retcon any preexisting names like Phelana Yudrin or Vanda M'Giia into the DS9 system. (Well, almost. I guess we did change The Klingon Gambit's "Threllvon-da" to "th'Rellvonda." But that was too easy! In retrospect, I wish we'd made it something like "ch'Rellvonda," a relation of a different sex. It's clearly not the same guy anyway.)
EDIT: @Christopher, when you posted this, had you already written the "imperial names" retcon into the then unpublished Choice of Futures?
Written? No. That post is dated after I turned in the outline but before I got approval to start writing, and I didn't mention it in the outline. But I probably already planned to use the idea. I did use the name Thy'lek Shran in the outline, so I must've already decided I'd use that version of his name, and I'd no doubt given some thought to how to reconcile that with the Hravishran whatever from the books. But when I expressed the idea in the thread, I cast it in more general terms because I wasn't yet cleared to talk about the novel. It wouldn't be the only time I've done that.
Getting back to the question of apostrophes in alien names and languages... I'm proofreading my new story for Analog right now, and it features two alien species, one of which has apostrophes in their names, the other of which does not. I started to second-guess whether the apostrophes were really necessary, but I realized that they help to differentiate the one species's names from the other, which probably makes it easier for the readers to keep track of which weird names belong to which characters. So maybe that's part of the reason so many SF alien languages are heavy on apostrophes -- because it's a handy visual hook to distinguish them from other alien languages. Although in that case, of course, it only works if you don't use it with too many species. Also, I think the apostrophes help suggest that the aliens' speech sounds are sharp and staccato, as well as making their consonant-laden names more legible.
In fact, come to think of it, the apostrophe-using aliens in my story have gender prefixes rather similar to the Andorians', although they're capitalized and there are only three of them, Ch', Kh', and Sh'. And it's coincidental, since as far as I can tell from my notes, I came up with this species' naming scheme in 2000, less than a year before the novelverse Andorian names debuted in Avatar. (This is an old, unsold story that I recently rehabilitated.)
In fact, come to think of it, the apostrophe-using aliens in my story have gender prefixes rather similar to the Andorians', although they're capitalized and there are only three of them, Ch', Kh', and Sh'. And it's coincidental, since as far as I can tell from my notes, I came up with this species' naming scheme in 2000, less than a year before the novelverse Andorian names debuted in Avatar. (This is an old, unsold story that I recently rehabilitated.)
So it's either becomes a clever shout-out or now all your readers will picture Andorians when they read the book. What do your characters look like?
I suspect there are probably quite a lot of Analog readers who are not Trek Lit readers, although there is a degree of overlap.
Trust me, nobody's ever gonna confuse any of the aliens in this story for actors in makeup.
Based on name recognition alone. Or just plain confusion. ("Wait, this isn't Trek?") Read the cover.
I could also imagine a randomizer would be helpful. Filled with angry or exotic syllables to mix and match.
Analog is a magazine. It's the oldest continuously published science fiction magazine still in existence, one of the few print SF magazines that still survives. Nobody's going to mistake a monthly fiction magazine for a Star Trek novel. A lot of authors get their names on the cover of Analog -- typically three or four contributors per issue. My name has been on the cover of only three of the six issues I've appeared in to date, including the last two, and if my name is on the cover this time, most of Analog's subscribers will presumably recognize it from my prior Analog appearances.
So did you write the wiki entry on that or did you just do the age old practise (well since ctrl+c became really easy) and paste that in and reword it a bit because that is (un)surprisingly similar.
