why does everone in the delta quandrant call it the delta quadrant

[KelisThePoet]

There's the land and there's the sky and the sea, and people talked about the land as the place they lived on, and so a word meaning "the land" ended up being extended to apply to the planet once the idea of it as a planet took hold. But there could be other reasoning chains. A culture's word for their entire world might translate as "Everywhere." Or "Under-sky." Or something else.

Indeed, even in the limited and familiar example of English speaking culture, there are two completely different reasoning chains for the two synonyms used by English speakers to refer to our planet, "earth" and "the world." "World" derives from "wer," the old English word for man/human. Thus, the world is simply the place of men or humans. The word "world" was used for centuries to encompass the entirety of physical reality; water, land, sky and (once it was understood) outer space. But in the 1600s and 1700s, as it became popularly understood in English speaking cultures that humans live on a planet, the word "world" gradually became synonymous with this planet Earth. Other words became the preferred references to the entirety of physical reality, namely "universe" and "cosmos" (the latter deriving from the plural of the Greek word for "world").

So it strikes me as the same kind of logic problem as assuming that a species' name for themselves would mean "people of our planet," like Vulcans from Vulcan or Sontarans from Sontara or whatever.

In fact, in the case of the English word "world," the exact opposite chain of verbal logic was applied. The species' name for their planet became "planet of our people." But these two opposing chains of logic would, of course, produce similarly similar names for a people and their planet.

The problem is that it's too basic. We always assume that everyone everywhere will think exactly like us, and then we actually go find out and discover that they actually went in a totally different direction that never occurred to us.

Sometimes. But it's worth noting that the exact opposite is sometimes true. Ancient people in the near East and Europe referred to the other side of the world as the Antipodes, a phrase that eventually came to encompass the unexplored Western Hemisphere for pre-Columbian Europeans. The prevailing wisdom was that if any intelligent life existed in the Antipodes, it was not human life as Europeans knew it. Why should it be, on the other side of the world, where everything worked differently. Except it was.

 

[Christopher]

"World" derives from "wer," the old English word for man/human. Thus, the world is simply the place of men or humans. The word "world" was used for centuries to encompass the entirety of physical reality; water, land, sky and (once it was understood) outer space. But in the 1600s and 1700s, as it became popularly understood in English speaking cultures that humans live on a planet, the word "world" gradually became synonymous with this planet Earth...
In fact, in the case of the English word "world," the exact opposite chain of verbal logic was applied. The species' name for their planet became "planet of our people." But these two opposing chains of logic would, of course, produce similarly similar names for a people and their planet.Sometimes.

That's fascinating -- I didn't know that. So there could be a logic in a species and their planet having connected names after all -- although preferably not just "Blankia" and "Blankians."

But it's worth noting that the exact opposite is sometimes true. Ancient people in the near East and Europe referred to the other side of the world as the Antipodes, a phrase that eventually came to encompass the unexplored Western Hemisphere for pre-Columbian Europeans. The prevailing wisdom was that if any intelligent life existed in the Antipodes, it was not human life as Europeans knew it. Why should it be, on the other side of the world, where everything worked differently. Except it was.

Yet later on, after explorers had found humans on every other continent they visited (excluding Antarctica), you had something like Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and a Trip Around It, in which the characters (and the author) took it for granted that they'd find a humanoid civilization on the Moon as if it were just another continent to be conquered. And that default expectation that life on other worlds would be human was found in plenty of science fiction for decades thereafter, and is still found in some mass-media works even though it's largely a discredited trope.

 

[KelisThePoet]

Well, it's worth remembering that the tradition of men-in-the-moon stories is very old and has its roots in things like the Latin satire of Lucian, who begins a fanciful tale (titled "A True Story") of travels to the moon among other places by writing something to the effect of, I'll tell you one true thing at the beginning of this story, which is that everything in it is a lie (I've always wondered if this is where Mudd and/or his writers got the line).

Many later moon stories draw deliberately and self-consciously on this tradition, for fun and sometimes in order to make commentary on people and cultures closer to home, so their writers weren't necessarily making sincere guesses about what's actually on the moon. Verne, in particular, while intensely interested in the details and discourse of real science, is always meta-fictional and playful in his writing. From the Earth to the Moon begins with a group of comical cannon builders using the precedent of Edgar Allen Poe stories to justify their lunar project, then demanding that a nearby theater company change its offering from Much Ado About Nothing to As You Like It, so as to better reflect the spirit of their endeavor.

More generally, in old and new science fiction, you often find human or human-like life on other planets, not because the writers are making an error, but because realism is not their intention.

 

[Christopher]

More generally, in old and new science fiction, you often find human or human-like life on other planets, not because the writers are making an error, but because realism is not their intention.

It's unfair to generalize like that. We're talking about many works from many authors over many eras, so any attempt to impose only a single blanket explanation on all of them is doomed from the start. People are not that uniform.

And we aren't even talking about "error," or about writers' motivations. We're talking about the assumptions that cultures in general make about other worlds. That's more about the audiences than the authors, since if authors choose to portray alien worlds and their inhabitants a certain way, it's because they expect that portrayal to feel valid to their audience. The point is that, for at least a portion of fairly recent human history, the culture was inclined to accept the idea that aliens on other worlds would look like humans. And not just in fiction -- you can find plenty of nonfictional speculation about how alien evolution would "inevitably" produce a humanoid form, not to mention UFO beliefs about humanoid aliens of various types from idealized humans to the modern "Grays." People tend to default to the expectation that all reality fits within their existing assumptions. Sometimes they don't even recognize how their assumptions are blinding them.

Anyway, I think we're both saying that different cultures and groups can see things in different ways; you said "the exact opposite is sometimes true," which of course means that sometimes it isn't. And that's my whole point in this little digression: that it's unwise to assume every alien culture would think the same way or follow the same logic in coming up with a name for their world.

 

[Spot261]

I think this is exactly it. When an alien says "delta quadrant" they probably just said something like "this area" in their own language and it was translated into Delta Quadrant.

This, the odds on identical astrocartopgraphical systems are astronomically small, but we have seen that the universal translator is really quite intelligent and seems not to require literal word for word translations. It would have to be anyway to account for the vast array of (often completely unknown) grammatical systems it is expected to cope with so it hardly seems a stretch to imagine it can deal with the idea behind a sentence rather than the words in concrete terms.

When DQ aliens seemingly refer to the DQ, they probably mean something more akin to "our bit of the galaxy which is far away from yours" rather than "the specific quarter of the galaxy whose dividing lines are universally agreed upon to the precise millimetre"

 

[Voth commando1]

This, the odds on identical astrocartopgraphical systems are astronomically small, but we have seen that the universal translator is really quite intelligent and seems not to require literal word for word translations. It would have to be anyway to account for the vast array of (often completely unknown) grammatical systems it is expected to cope with so it hardly seems a stretch to imagine it can deal with the idea behind a sentence rather than the words in concrete terms.

When DQ aliens seemingly refer to the DQ, they probably mean something more akin to "our bit of the galaxy which is far away from yours" rather than "the specific quarter of the galaxy whose dividing lines are universally agreed upon to the precise millimetre"

Recall Think Tank the villain alien says "What you call the Delta Quadrant." Implying he was getting that from a translator.

 

[Spot261]

Recall Think Tank the villain alien says "What you call the Delta Quadrant." Implying he was getting that from a translator.

Yeah that fits

 

[KelisThePoet]

It's unfair to generalize like that. We're talking about many works from many authors over many eras, so any attempt to impose only a single blanket explanation on all of them is doomed from the start. People are not that uniform.

I think you're misunderstanding what I meant. I wasn't generalizing or imposing a single blanket explanation. I said "often," not "always," but I'm not really tied to a level of frequency. I was just trying to point out that some authors sometimes choose to put humans and humanoids (and human perspectives/measurements/terms) on alien planets for reasons that are not related to their real assumptions or the real assumptions of their audiences. Not all fiction is realistic, nor is all fiction a straight reflection of larger cultural beliefs and assumptions. Some writers are idiosyncratic. Some like to play. Some get the audience to play along with them, despite the audience's cultural preconceptions--or else they play to the common audience preconception that much fiction is about accepting absurd stories at face value for the sake of a good time.

It's kind of a pet peeve of mine that many people generalize about most if not all unrealistic fiction as falling short of some mark, when some unrealistic fiction merely aims for something else.

Case in point, when a human character in Doctor Who tells a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey that he looks human, and the Time Lord responds, "No, I don't. You look Time Lord," the writers aren't participating in some outdated and debunked cultural assumption about parallel evolution. They're making a joke (and perhaps a comment) in a show with a meta-fictional tendency. And though it's a harder, more complicated case to sell, I'd argue that something like the same thing is happening in a Trek parallel evolution story like "Bread and Circuses."

 

[Voth commando1]

Parallel earths seem campy and stupid and of course there is out of universe money reasons why they existed.

Couldn't you find an IU retcon say the preservers created alternate world's with the same people but under different scenarios and pretexts?

 

[Christopher]

I think you're misunderstanding what I meant. I wasn't generalizing or imposing a single blanket explanation. I said "often," not "always," but I'm not really tied to a level of frequency. I was just trying to point out that some authors sometimes choose to put humans and humanoids (and human perspectives/measurements/terms) on alien planets for reasons that are not related to their real assumptions or the real assumptions of their audiences.

But that's missing the point I was making. I was just using that as an illustration of how cultural preconceptions work. It's human nature to expect everything to be like what we're used to, until we gain experience of things that are different from what we're used to and realize we were taking things for granted that aren't necessarily inevitable. This has happened over and over. We thought Earth was the center of the Solar system, and it turned out not to be. We thought the Sun was the center of the universe, and it turned out that there is no center. We thought our planetary system was typical, came up with theories explaining how it was the only way any planetary system was likely to form, but now we know it's actually atypical. And, as I said, you can find plenty of scientific articles over the decades arguing from a supposedly rational and fact-based standpoint that a basically humanoid form -- upright body, two arms, two legs, head with paired sensory organs on a swiveling neck -- is the only likely form for an intelligent, technological species. And I think that's just more of the same shortsightedness, confusing the only thing we have experience with for the only way things can ever be anywhere. Even here on Earth, we now know it's wrong to assume we're the only intelligent species. Whales, dolphins, octopus and squids, crows and parrots -- there's ever-growing evidence that they show signs of higher intelligence. Cephalopods are so alien that it's hard to even define how their intelligence works, let alone rate it in comparison to ours. And yet even the scientific community has been slow to recognize that, because it's hard to overcome the unthinking tendency to expect everything to conform to what we already know.

 

[KelisThePoet]

I understand the point you're making about reality, but not all fiction and not all science fiction is relevant to that point. You brought up Verne's From the Earth to the Moon to make your point, but it doesn't, because Verne wrote it the way he did for reasons completely apart from the concerns and preconceptions you're talking about. And many other journey-to-the-moon stories are equally inapplicable, at least in Western culture, because of the unique history of that particular genre.

 

[KelisThePoet]

Parallel earths seem campy and stupid and of course there is out of universe money reasons why they existed.

See, this is exactly the kind of unfair and reductive evaluation of a story that so gets on my nerves. Not all stories are good, and not all good stories are to everyone's personal liking. But rather than dismiss something with rude labels like "stupid" because it doesn't fit your narrow preconception of what fiction should do, try to understand what the writers were trying to do and appreciate that not all fiction works the same way.

 

[Christopher]

You brought up Verne's From the Earth to the Moon to make your point, but it doesn't, because Verne wrote it the way he did for reasons completely apart from the concerns and preconceptions you're talking about.

And I disagree. I've studied history in college, particularly the history of frontiers and exploration, and my position is that Verne's portrayal of the Moon therein was essentially as an eighth continent that his characters expected to colonize and rule over in the same way Europe had with the terrestrial continents. It fits neatly into the Manifest Destiny/Civilising Mission mentality of the culture and the era. You're incorrect in treating it as equivalent to more fanciful lunar-journey tales. Just because it's part of that genre doesn't automatically make it the same, because Verne did not write fantasy. He prided himself on always being as scientifically accurate as the knowledge of the time allowed, and he actively scorned H.G. Wells for inventing unrealistic and unscientific concepts for allegorical purposes. He never would have written about humanoid Lunar natives unless he believed there was good scientific basis for the conjecture.

 

[Voth commando1]

See, this is exactly the kind of unfair and reductive evaluation of a story that so gets on my nerves. Not all stories are good, and not all good stories are to everyone's personal liking. But rather than dismiss something with rude labels like "stupid" because it doesn't fit your narrow preconception of what fiction should do, try to understand what the writers were trying to do and appreciate that not all fiction works the same way.

Oh you misunderstand parallel earth's don't bother me much and there are plenty of In-Universe retcons that can be used to justify their existence.

But they do bother other people and that colors their perceptions of TOS.

 

[KelisThePoet]

The whole idea of "retconning" those stories to make their scientific premise (ostensibly) more believable runs counter to their original tone and style, in my opinion, but if doing so allows someone to enjoy the stories rather than dismiss them, it can be a fun exercise.

 

[KelisThePoet]

You're incorrect in treating [From the Earth to the Moon] as equivalent to more fanciful lunar-journey tales. Just because it's part of that genre doesn't automatically make it the same, because Verne did not write fantasy. He prided himself on always being as scientifically accurate as the knowledge of the time allowed, and he actively scorned H.G. Wells for inventing unrealistic and unscientific concepts for allegorical purposes.

I don't automatically treat From the Earth to the Moon as equivalent to other stories in the genre. Details of the plot and writing itself lead me to read it as participating in that tradition (such as the speech in the first chapter that culminates a series of scientific supports for the project with the precedent of Edgar Allen Poe). I'm also influenced by my reading of other Verne novels with similarly playful tones and approaches. And I don't read Verne as fantasy. I'd call it hard science fiction (much more so than Wells, as you note). But while Verne was always impressively rigorous in his research and use of scientific data and discourse, he was rarely naive or humorless in his application of science to the story. That's how we get a German geologist and his nephew walking to the center of the Earth (or near it) counter to (and arguing about as they go) all the accepted science in Verne's day about the heat of the planet's core. That's how we get a meteor of pure gold that almost spells the end of the world's financial markets. It's not fantasy. It's satirical whimsy artfully enriched with up-to-date science.

But people of good will can disagree on a literary interpretation, and professional Verne scholars argue back and forth over his tone. So if you have a different reading of Verne than mine, I can respect that. But I hope you still take my basic point that not all writers are realists or failed realists, that some deploy a premise whimsically and meta-fictionally (which is not the same as fantastically), even if you don't choose to categorize Verne among the latter.

 

[Christopher]

^Just forget about Verne, okay? That was never the topic anyway. It was just one example to illustrate a different topic that you're completely ignoring. We were talking about whether it made sense to expect that every alien civilization would think the same way ours has, e.g. that every name for a homeworld would translate as "Earth."

 

[KelisThePoet]

You brought him up. I like Verne. I thought I'd share what I think about him in a way I intended to be non-confrontational.

I've seen threads diverge and digress from their original topic a lot more than this one. This one is about why aliens call the Delta Quadrant the Delta Quadrant. It digressed into a discussion of what aliens might call their planet. It further digressed into a discussion of what humans have thought and written about life and other worlds. And I was trying to make a point about that digression that I believe is actually relevant to the original topic, namely that when people write sci fi, they're not always trying to be realistic with their premises much less their labels.

But if you don't want my perspective, I'm sorry I gave it.

 

[Sir Anthony Eden]

I'd have thought few species would know that there were other quadrants, certainly no nothing about where this crew are from as it's so far away and has taken an extraordinary event to catapult them all this way.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Quadrant means quarter.

Conceptually anyone can divide the Galaxy into quarters.