Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

I go by Kelley now.

 

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that apartheid-era South Africa was cool with continuing to use "Adolf" as a given name.

I've encountered the first name "Khan" often enough that I never found that part unusual (I even encountered the first name "Temujin" once), but the latest Fact Trek article debunking the myth that Madlyn Rhue was left out of TWOK due to MS includes script excerpts showing that "Mister Khan" survived in some early drafts of the film.

 

It's a common name in Germanic languages. We didn't stop using the name "Joseph" because of Stalin or "Charles" because of Manson, so it's kind of ethnocentric to expect other cultures to give up a common name just because one bad person happened to have it.

 

Eh, Daenerys was right.

 

Would be interesting to know if La'an is a really existing name somewhere on Earth or a fictional one. Maybe it is even relevant for this discussion

 

I couldn't find it in a Google search. Though "Laan" without the apostrophe is a Dutch surname meaning "lane" or "avenue."

 

The "name with an unnecessary sci-fi comma" strikes again.

 

Yeah, darn those made-up names with unnecessary apostrophes, like "O'Brien" and "D'Amato." Never happen in real life!

 

Fairly common in certain quarters for family names as you say, rather less common in given names though, AFAIK.

 

So? The usual complaint is about fictional alien names, which don't have to be bound by human conventions. The point is that there are a variety of valid reasons to include apostrophes in names, so the complaints about their use in alien or other fictitious names are somewhat disingenuous. Yes, like any trope, it can be overused, but that doesn't mean that every single instance needs to be pounced on.

 

Obviously, from a Doylist perspective, the showrunners are not factoring real-time linguistic drift in naming these lore-based Trek characters, but from a Watsonian perspective, La'an could possibly be an adjusted spelling of Lan, which is used for various things. Alternatively, it might be an evolution of Leen or Loon, or Ran or Nan or Wan and so forth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_(disambiguation)

 

Maybe it's unfounded but i have the impression that most of the times when apostrophes are used in fictional first names in many science fiction novels and shows, the person is a telepathic alien or has other uncommon supernatural abbilities

 

I don't know where you're getting that. There are plenty such characters without telepathic powers -- Stargate's Teal'c and Bra'tac, Babylon 5's G'Kar and Na'Toth, Titans' Koriand'r (Starfire) and Komand'r (Blackfire), etc. Also quite a few Trek characters -- Klingons like K'Ehleyr, K'mpoc, and B'Elanna, Caitians like M'Ress and T'Ana, and at least one Orion, D'Vana Tendi.

In my Arachne duology, the Chirrn from the Shilirrlal habitat have apostrophic names, e.g. L'chellin and R'nilinnath, but it's a hard-SF universe with no psychic or supernatural elements (although the Chirrn's brains are networked with their computer systems into a loose collective consciousness of sorts).

 

Yeah, there are a lot of counter examples. But it feels like if an alien species is telepathic or has some other uncommon abbilities that there are at least always some members with such names.

But perhaps it could also simply be, because these aliens with special powers or abbilities tend to stay in ones mind (no pun intended), when they appear

At least for me.

 

I think that's just because sci-fi includes a lot of telepathic aliens and a lot of names with apostrophes, so naturally they often overlap.

Although I checked Memory Alpha, and Trek has plenty of telepathic species with no apostrophes:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Betazoids
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Ocampa
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Aenar#People
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ullian#People
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Enaran#People
etc.

Indeed, it seems the Vulcans are the only telepathic species in Trek canon whose members' names include apostrophes.

 

Yep, Star Trek (and B5), with the exception of the Vulcans, seem to be different about this.

 

Or maybe it's not really a trend at all. Like I said, both tropes are so common that it's inevitable that they'd often overlap without the need for any intentional correlation.

 

Or maybe the apostrophe's are serving as a type of diacritical mark in the language.

 

From a Doylist perspective, I think the showrunners just noticed that "L" comes after "K" in the alphabet.