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T' - Does the prefix have to be feminine?

AFAIK, the idea of "Valeris" being a Klingon name was purely a J.M. Dillard invention.
I thought Cattrall herself came up with the name? :confused:
:wtf: ...Did you not read the next two sentences in my post?
When they decided that Kim Cattrall's part should be a brand new character instead the third iteration of Saavik, she suggested the name "Eris," the Greek goddess of strife, since her character caused conflict in the film. Either Nicholas Meyer or Denny Martin Flinn adjusted the name to "Valeris" so it would sound more Vulcan-like.
"Being a Klingon name" was the operative phrase in my first sentence. Dillard came up with the idea that Valeris was a name of Klingon origin, not the name itself.
 
^ Much apologizings, I misread who you were referring to when you said "she" suggested the name. I thought you were talking about JM.
Ah, gotcha. No worries. Sorry I wasn't clearer in my post. :)

Yeah, AFAIK, the novelization writers don't consult with or suggest things to the filmmakers, because they're busy making the movie.
 
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Ah, gotcha. No worries. Sorry I wasn't clearer in my post. :)

Yeah, AFAIK, the novelization writers don't consult with or suggest things to the filmmakers, because they they're busy making the movie.

And, generally, we're a few steps removed from the actual filmmakers. If we have any urgent questions, we're probably going through the publisher and/or the studio's licensing department. It's not like we're hanging out on the set, schmoozing with the director.
 
And, generally, we're a few steps removed from the actual filmmakers. If we have any urgent questions, we're probably going through the publisher and/or the studio's licensing department. It's not like we're hanging out on the set, schmoozing with the director.
Right. The only time I've ever heard of anything like that happening was when Peter David spent a day visiting the set of STVI and he suggested that they use the novels' first name of "Hikaru" in Sulu's first log entry on the Excelsior. But that happened because David and George Takei were already friendly from writing a Star Trek comic book together and David was there as Takei's guest. Not because David was writing the STVI novelization or anything.
 
The only other time I've heard of it was when James Cameron allowed (now much maligned) Orson Scott Card unprecedented access to the set and BTS of The Abyss, which Card did write the novelization of.
 
Maybe it's a 'religious' thing, for want of a better term - maybe we could postulate that males with the "S---k" pattern and females with the "T'P---" pattern, are, say, 'orthodox' followers of Surak's philosophy.
Sure. Just like a human man being named James, Jack, Jake, Jean-Luc, John, Jacques, Jonathan, Jerome, Jonas or any other name starting with letter 'J' is a sure sign that they're part of the same religious sect and no man with a name not starting with 'J' can ever be part of that sect.

Or, hear me out, they're just names, and there is no particular significance in the letter they start with.

These naming pattern discussions always seem so painfully stupid to me.
 
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Oh, it certainly is one of those things the writers could make use of. I mean, nothing connects people with a Mac- or Fitz- or O'- prefix name, either, right? They are just names. To the uninitiated, that is.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Sure. Just like a human man being named James, Jack, Jake, Jean-Luc, John, Jacques, Jonathan, Jerome, Jonas or any other name starting with letter 'J' is a sure sign that they're part of the same religious sect and no man with a name not starting with 'J' can ever be part of that sect.

Or, hear me out, they're just names, and there is no particular significance in the letter they start with.

These naming pattern discussions always seem so painfully stupid to me.
Ah, but Vulcan is not Earth. And surely we have naming conventions within sects - Catholics preferring saints' names for their offspring, for example. It doesn't have to be a phonetic theme, it can be a theme of some other kind. Hey, just spitballin' here.
 
Thing is this is just trying to come up with needless and convoluted theory to explain a thing that simply needs no explanation.

Yes, I realise what site I'm on...

But to me this makes about as much sense that if I went to England and five first people I met were men named James, John and Jack and women named Ethel and Emily and then I would assume that all English men have names starting with a letter 'J' and all women names staring with the letter 'E'. And then when I'd later meet people with variety of names not conforming to this expectation instead of shrugging and deciding that my weird assumption was simply incorrect and based on a coincidence I would decide that J-men and E-women are part of some specific group distinct of people named differently. This would simply be a completely bonkers conclusion.
 
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Perhaps it's a prefix (added by parents that desire the best for their child) that means something like

"The one who will be able to purge his(her) emotions and thus achieve the most lofty attainment of Kolinahr within his(her) lifetime, should he/she choose to dedicate all his/her energies and direct them to that goal most august".

(of course only a very crude "1st order" approximation, the entire meaning would be subtler than can be conveyed in our language. Also assuming here that Vulcan language might just be a mite more efficient and compact than our clumsy human languages :nyah: )

Though the above is clearly just in jest, it isn't completely out of the realm of the possible- we have it on earth too. Just think of the wide range of meaning that the "St." in (for example) "St. Paul" is intended to convey.
 
At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter anymore. Pretty much all the naming conventions that might have been established during TOS and the early movies have been long since forgotten or ignored by succeeding generations of writers and show runners.
 
At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter anymore. Pretty much all the naming conventions that might have been established during TOS and the early movies have been long since forgotten or ignored by succeeding generations of writers and show runners.

You’re imagining some kind of a post-apocalyptic world in which future writers a) aren’t former fans b) would never think of using an encyclopedia to research established Vulcan names before boldly creating a new one.
 
You’re imagining some kind of a post-apocalyptic world in which future writers a) aren’t former fans b) would never think of using an encyclopedia to research established Vulcan names before boldly creating a new one.
No, we live in a world where post-TOS writers realised that creating super restrictive naming conventions for an entire species based on handful of examples would have been fucking dumb.
 
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No, we live in a world where post-TOS writers realised that creating super restrictive naming conventions for an entire culture based on handful of examples would have been fucking dumb.

Whoever said anything about “super restrictive naming conventions”? My claim is merely that two patterns of Vulcan naming (where male names begin with S and female with T’) haven’t been consigned to history. There may be other patterns that fit names such as Tuvok.

137th Gebirg didn’t just say that the restrictive S…k pattern from The Making of Star Trek never took off — he made a sweeping claim about names from TOS and the early movies. If anything, those would’ve remained more prominent than whatever would later be established in TNG-era episodes (ST III: “Sarek… Child of Skon… Child of Solkar”), and of course the available reference sources are easier to use than ever.

A professional writer is new to the Star Trek franchise? No problem, they should go through a list of established names and come up with one that sounds right, even if it doesn’t necessarily fit the most common patterns.
 
Whoever said anything about “super restrictive naming conventions”? My claim is merely that two patterns of Vulcan naming (where male names begin with S and female with T’) haven’t been consigned to history. There may be other patterns that fit names such as Tuvok.
This 'pattern' is a Rosarch test. It is not any more real than 'pattern' of English male names starting with 'J'. There are female Vulcan names starting with 'S' and male names starting with 'T''. And of course these are translitered alien names, so who knows whether 'Tuvok' could just as well be T'vok'.

A professional writer is new to the Star Trek franchise? No problem, they should go through a list of established names and come up with one that sounds right, even if it doesn’t necessarily fit the most common patterns.
And this is probably exactly what they did.
 
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