Aftermath of Destiny (SPOILERS)

[Stevil2001]

I think it's obvious who the new castellan is:

Spoiler: the castellan's identity

Macet, after he had that operation and changed his name to Lucinda.

Spoiler: the castellan's identity

Not just gays, but now transgenders? Russell T Davies is everywhere these days!

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

Even if they are variants on the same name, why should a retcon be necessary? Nobody would propose "retconning" Kathryn Janeway's name to Catherine or Pavel Chekov's name to Chekhov. If we can have different spellings of the same name, why can't the Cardassians?

Especially because Cardassians obviously don't use English lettering, so translating a given name from their language to ours is obviously going to be rather variable in terms of spelling.

Sure--but that's my point: shouldn't the transliteration system (since that's presumably what we're looking at here) be streamlined?

Obviously the fact that English is horribly variable in and of itself isn't helping, but to me that is all the more reason to streamline it so that someone reading the transliteration can figure out exactly what the heck they're dealing with instead of having to guess what the source word might be.

 

[LutherSloan]

NM, I can't get the spoiler tag to work for me....

 

[Christopher]

Sure--but that's my point: shouldn't the transliteration system (since that's presumably what we're looking at here) be streamlined?

Do you have any idea how many different transliterations there are of any given Arabic name? For Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, there are something like 37 recognized transliterations of his name into the Roman alphabet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_al-Gaddafi#Name

There are also the multiple contradictory ways of transliterating Chinese names, Wade-Giles and pinyin and Cantonese and whatever. The problem is that a single language can have multiple dialects, and its sounds may have only approximate analogues in English, so it can be impossible to define a single "correct" transliteration.