Romulans are from Romulus and Remii (pronounced Remus)
Bajorans are from Bajor.
So…
Humans are from Huma?
NO! They’re from Earth, silly.
True, not all species names follow this no brain approach. Klingons, Vorta, JemH’addar are nicely named apart from their planet of origin, or their home planet remains unknown. But, far too often, the species and home planet are closely linked as proper nouns. Let’s see some variety!
btw, none of the series are exempt from this foolishness, but TNG was the worst by far.
Not that odd. Think about it: French are from France, Brazilians are from Brazil, Indonesians are from Indonesia. So most peoples are named after their homelands. But you also have Dutch from the Netherlands and Americans from the US (a bit of a stretch I know).
In Klingon, we’re Terrangon (or Terragon… something like that.), and we’re occasionally referred to as Terrans in the ‘common speach’.
I don’t THINK the Trill homeworld is called Trill, Trillia, or anything like that.
And did you think that maybe, in some cases, the planets are named after the species (in the tradition of England, or Deutchland), rather than the other way around? (I present Ferengenar as a possible case of this.)
And, the Klingons are the only ones we know anything major about their native language (we hear the odd word of Vulcan or Bajoran, but there’s no dictionaries for them) - it’s likely that in many of the cases they have a Human/Earth style dichotomy in their language which ‘Common’ ignores.
The actual citizens of Huma have filed a huge civil suit against all Earth citizens charging copyright infringement over the term “Human,” non-payment of royalties for use of the term and, most recently, cybersquattting.
This actually brings up what, IMO, is the biggest flaw in all the Star Trek series. The 'Planet as Country" syndrome. In fact, in most episodes it was more like ‘Planet as City (or even village)’! The idea that you could:[ul][li]talk about[/li][li]negotiate with[/li][li]explore[/ul]etc. an entire planet as though it were one thing. It’s absolutely and ridiculously impossible! Its just a kludge to the fact that Roddenberry conceived ST as “Wagontrail to the Stars…”[/li]
I’m still a big ST fan though.
Just finished watching “The Trouble with Tribbles”, the Klingon first officer stirring it up in the bar refers to humans as “Earthers.”
But Humans are guilty of leaning towards their own culture linguistically in the Trek universe before though. What about the dinner party in ST 6, when the Klingons object to Checkov’s use of the term “inalienable human rights” IIRC.
Besides as way of a “treksplanation” look on it as a glitch in the universal translator
A fairly literal Deus Ex Machina- the Translators. It doesn’t matter what we REALLY say, or what THEY really say, it all gets put into the magic language machine and comes out being their own word for themselves.
Either that or the elder space-faring species know of a race that came before humans from Earth, or a place called Huma that Humans lived before they moved to Earth and had a societal collapse and are just keeping quiet about it.
You can tell I’ve thought about this before, can’t you? I think deep thoughts, I do.
While I understand that criticism, I’ve always believed that that was a fairly credible effect of interstellar travel and the discovery of alien life. Eventually, the entire planet will form one block, often against a common enemy. Within Trek continuity, this is even adressed in “First Contact”: Earth was divided by war until the time of first contact, when all humans sort of realized they were basically the same race and began to see themselves not in term of nations, but in terms of planet. A couple of hundred years of space travel should be enough time to provide for a planet with one government, one language, etc. Nothing impossible there.
What does bother me about the universal translator, though: if everything gets translated, how come Klingons can just throw in a Klingon word in the middle of an English (universal language) sentence without it being automatically translated?
It’s called Trill. And Jadzia Dax is the hottest babe in the Universe.
Anyway, I don’t think the planet-species names are that big a stretch. For all we know, Cardassia was named by some future human astronomer before we ever met the Cardassians, and so that’s just what we call them in Future-English. In Cardassian, it’s a completely different name.
Sometimes, it’s not even the planet that has a name. Like Cardassia. Its name is actually Cardassia Prime, suggesting that it’s the major planet of the star Cardassia.
Same thing with Talosians. Their planet is Talos IV, the fourth planet of the star Talos.
By that convention, we would be named Solans or Sunners.
I think that would just be like languages on Earth that can’t always be fully translated into other languages, either because of differences in grammar or nouns that noone has a comparison for. Yes I have thought about this a lot
