"Samara" was another alternate name for her.
Memory Alpha said:
Human Name Origins
- Thread starter Laura Cynthia Chambers
- Start date
So it sounds as though even Nichelle wasn’t quite sure of the time when a first name was decided upon.
I have to say that I don’t always go by what Memory Alpha says. I remember coming across something there once which was inaccurate. Wish I had made a note of what it was, because it was pretty pronounced.
Rotsler is the first source for "Nyota" that I'm aware of. I doubt Nichols was remembering accurately if she thought they came up with it back in the '60s; if it had been decided on then, it probably would've been mentioned in the Star Trek Concordance, which gave a lot of behind-the-scenes names for things based on production notes.
William Rotsler is definitely the person who came up with "Nyota" as Uhura's first name. He has an essay in one of the Best of Trek collections about writing his Star Trek books where he talks about coming up with it and Nichelle Nichols' reaction when he first told her. ("Hey, I came up with a first name for your character. Nyota." "That's nice." "It means 'star.'" "Oh, WOW!!")
Nichelle's recollections were questionable on a number of subjects, but I feel like half of my own life was made up, so who am I to criticize?
A girl I went to high school with had the phonetic spelling of "Shivaun" that her German parents liked and gave her. The actual Scots/Irish spelling is Siobhan.
Which is how we got Kathleen from Caitlín.
Knew that. Caitlin is my niece's name.
Well, we're trying to fix all that, one edit at a time.
Knowing it's also a human name, it'd be funny if in a scene on a show, Spock got mistaken (briefly) for a human with the last name Spock. (And yes, I already know about the real times it was spoofed:
and this:
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And how about Kirk's old flame Areel Shaw from "Court Martial"? That's definitely not a run-of-the-mill name.
The Web claims it's a masculine Urdu name meaning "brave" or "strong." In this case, though, I suspect it was more like a variant spelling of "Ariel."
I suppose some of TOS's writers were trying to coin "futuristic" names, thinking that language would evolve over time so you'd get names that were mutated forms of familar names. Nobody seems to do that anymore.
I think a lot of that is writer's conceit. We often get stories where some character is from the far future, and translation devices have trouble with what they're saying because "It IS English, but from the future!" They don't bother with the names because they get translated as well.
In Trek, maybe. There are all kinds of unconventional spellings and newly coined names in the real world.
It's funny, because in my mind I usually think of TOS Trek as (in regards to European-style names, anyway), using names that probably would have been popular first names for people who were the same age as the characters. So Richard, Samuel, Janice, Leonard, Ann, etc
Zephram, though...Cochrane is the first thing that comes up when I google the name.
I remember being outraged as a kid that my mom referred to Mister Spock as DOCTOR Spock, probably confusing him with the real-life baby doctor.Well, we're trying to fix all that, one edit at a time.
Knowing it's also a human name, it'd be funny if in a scene on a show, Spock got mistaken (briefly) for a human with the last name Spock. (And yes, I already know about the real times it was spoofed:
and this:
Well, Mr. Spock might have a doctorate in something, after all, being a scientist.
Can you imagine McCoy if he found out Spock was technically a doctor?
Can you imagine McCoy if he found out Spock was technically a doctor?
McCoy probably has a PhD in xenobiology or something. He was the head of the Life Sciences Dept, IIRC.
Might be several PhDs on a Starship, So I doubt McCoy would care if Spock or any of them were addressed as "Doctor" as long as they didn't try to give medical advice.
Then how come he was so clueless about Vulcan and Klingon biology?
Although VGR established that he wrote a book called Comparative Alien Physiology. I posited in my novel Ex Machina that he eventually devoted himself to gaining a better understanding of nonhuman biology than he'd shown in TOS, implying that it would eventually result in that book.
He was sick on the days they covered Vulcans and Klingons. He also erased the scans he got from Arne Darvin by accidents
Real world: Needs of the plot.
Recall your Earth's history. There were often several PhDs aboard a Space Shuttle with a crew of seven. Records of that period are fragmentary, however. The mid-1990s was the era of your last so-called World War.
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