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Species with descriptive names

Extrocomp said:
Yes, they are. In the mission "Return to Babel" you travel back in time to the USS Enterprise during the events of "Journey to Babel", which is where the Violacean delegate appears. The word is never spoken out loud, but I imagine it to be pronounced "Veeolaseean".

In the same mission, the hooded aliens are called "Zambeans", which is hopefully not because one of them was played by a black guy.
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In my TOS novels, I referred to the purple folks as Icorians, because Bob Greenberger used the name for a purplish-gray species in SCE: Troubleshooting and I figured they might be the same species with different skin tones. I referred to the tall hooded species as Makusians, from Makus III, the Enterprise's destination after "The Galileo Seven."
 
Star Trek excels in stupid species names. It's just one of the things I try not to think much about when watching it, then everything is fine.

more examples
Borg: because they are cyborgs. Or they honor the memory of Danish pianist, conductor, and comedian, and father of all human-cybernetic conquerors: Victor Borg. Probably the latter.

Betazed: almost but not QUITE good enough to be alpha-zed.

Deltan: we're not running out of greek letters yet. (I guess it helps there are Romulans and not Greekians). It's amost like the Deltans were a Betatest of Betazoids..

iconians: We're not done with Greek derivative species names. A mysterious species form the ancient past, one might say almost iconic.

Kelpians: they farm seaweed. As a member of the cheesepizzan species, I understand this. Disco keeping dumb species naming strong into to the present.

Organians: ok, I don't know what to do with this. If you're a creature of pure energy are you organic? Maybe they play pipe organs. I got nothing.

Orion: one of many species named after the earth name of a star and who maintain that name on their own.

Remans: because Romulan wasn't bad enough. It needed a friend
 
XCV330 said:
Star Trek excels in stupid species names. It's just one of the things I try not to think much about when watching it, then everything is fine.
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In the Ben 10 universe, almost every alien species has a descriptive name. Probably because kids are not expected to understand the references.
 
XCV330 said:
Orion: one of many species named after the earth name of a star and who maintain that name on their own.
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We don't really know these species call themselves by these names; it could be that the universal translators are substituting their human-given names for what they're really saying.
 
Christopher said:
We don't really know these species call themselves by these names; it could be that the universal translators are substituting their human-given names for what they're really saying.
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giphy.webp
 
Extrocomp said:
Where are you getting that from? I tried googling it, but all I could find is elaichi, an Indian spice derived from plant seeds, which is also known as cardamom.
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Oh! I thought I remembered it meaning a type of particular mushroom back in the day when I googled it.

When D'Vex of Virinat talks about their first contact with the aliens, they encountered them in the Eridani Belt and called them Elachi.
 
Falconer said:
The TMP Rigellians are known in some fiction as Chelon or Chelarians.

The adjective form of turtle is chelonian.
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That's another case where it's unlikely that the species has phonetics similar to ours (given their beak-shaped mouths) and thus the name was probably coined by humans as a description, like "Saurian."

Again, just look at real life. There are dozens of foreign cultures on Earth that we English speakers refer to by different names than the ones they use for themselves, whether it's just a variation like French/Francais or a completely unrelated word like Indian/Bharati. So we can safely assume that any such descriptive name for an alien was coined by humans, even if the aliens do have a language that we could pronounce. Except, of course, in those annoying cases where canon establishes it as their name for themselves, as in "Minefield."


Markonian said:
When D'Vex of Virinat talks about their first contact with the aliens, they encountered them in the Eridani Belt and called them Elachi.
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The Romulans using a term like "Eridani Belt" is a similar problem. Eridanus is a constellation as seen from Earth, an arbitrary grouping of stars based on apparent proximity, and other species elsewhere in the galaxy would see the stars in different relative positions and would not group them the same way humans do. So only humans would use a term like "Eridani Belt," not that there is any such thing in real astronomy (googling for it just turns up references to Epsilon Eridani's dense protoplanetary disk, which is sort of like an asteroid belt).

Also, assuming this is an audio sequence, I would bet that they mispronounced it as "era-donny" rather than the correct "eh-ridden-ee."
 
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Christopher said:
That's another case where it's unlikely that the species has phonetics similar to ours (given their beak-shaped mouths) and thus the name was probably coined by humans as a description, like "Saurian."
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That’s a given, isn’t it? The OP was asking about “species with descriptive names.”

Not sure if you’re correcting me or just geeking out with me. :shifty:
 
Falconer said:
That’s a given, isn’t it? The OP was asking about “species with descriptive names.”

Not sure if you’re correcting me or just geeking out with me. :shifty:
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Specifically, the OP asked, "Cool in-joke or a problem that a later writer has to fix?" Which I take to mean that the OP was assuming the in-joke names were intended as the aliens' own names for themselves, which would be an implausible coincidence. They weren't just asking for a list of names, but trying to start a discussion about whether such names were a good or bad idea. My point is that the implausibiliity goes away if we surmise that the names were coined for them by humans.
 
I'll cop to occasionally using "descriptive" names for turtle people and such in some of my more humorous STAR TREK short stories, but those are comedies so I give myself more latitude there.
 
Greg Cox said:
I'll cop to occasionally using "descriptive" names for turtle people and such in some of my more humorous STAR TREK short stories, but those are comedies so I give myself more latitude there.
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It's natural to base character or species names on in-jokes, since we have to get the names from somewhere. But I try not to do it in a way that would be obvious or implausibly coincidental in-universe. I might disguise the reference with anagrams, or with a chain of word associations that nobody would get but me.
 
I personally like the idea that the names of species given in Star Trek is just the names humans gave for aliens in a lot of cases. As Christopher noted, it makes sense. There's a basis for that in history in fact, with English names being given to different peoples who call themselves something different.

We get used to most aliens speaking English in Star Trek so we just assume the names we hear are the names the aliens use as well. But we know in Star Trek for the most part universal translators are used that translate everything into English. I always liked that Star Trek at least gave us an explanation for why most of the time everything is in English. Most of the time in many sci-fi shows no explanation is given. And it's a lot less of a hassle than creating an entirely new language for every new species you introduce and then having to subtitle everything. First that would get cumbersome after a while, and second your audience would start to tire of having to continually read subtitles all the time.
 
Even the Klingon word for Romulans, "RomuluSngan" as heard in STV:TFF, came directly from the Terran English word for the Romulan planet. This raises the question of how that word got into the Klingon language in-universe. Did they first hear about Romulus and the Romulans from Earthican records or something? That seems kind of doubtful.

Kor
 
Kor said:
Even the Klingon word for Romulans, "RomuluSngan" as heard in STV:TFF, came directly from the Terran English word for the Romulan planet. This raises the question of how that word got into the Klingon language in-universe. Did they first hear about Romulus and the Romulans from Earthican records or something? That seems kind of doubtful.
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That was probably the intent at the time, since the Earth-Romulan War was a century in the past and the assumption prior to Enterprise was that Klingons had been a later contact, so perhaps Klingons didn't know about the Romulans before they met humans.
 
Kor said:
Even the Klingon word for Romulans, "RomuluSngan" as heard in STV:TFF, came directly from the Terran English word for the Romulan planet. This raises the question of how that word got into the Klingon language in-universe. Did they first hear about Romulus and the Romulans from Earthican records or something? That seems kind of doubtful.
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It's especially problematic when a Klingon uses the word romuluSngan in the alternate timeline of First Frontier, where humans never existed.
 
Leto_II said:
Surprised nobody's mentioned the Dooplers from Lower Decks in here yet.
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Surprised nobody's mentioned the Dooplers from Lower Decks in here yet.
Surprised nobody's mentioned the Dooplers from Lower Decks in here yet.
Surprised nobody's mentioned the Dooplers from Lower Decks in here yet.
Surprised nobody's mentioned the Dooplers from Lower Decks in here yet.

(And I haven't actually seen the episode yet.)
(And I haven't actually seen the episode yet.)
(And I haven't actually seen the episode yet.)
 
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