Did this conversation ever happen in the Star Trek universe?

Cafe Society
41

Otherwise we’d hear talk about “sahlar power” as an alternative energy. It’s pronounced “sole” in American English at least, since that’s how it’s pronounced in Latin where it comes from. Remember that “Sol”, “Luna”, and “Terra” are the Latin words for the Sun, Moon, and Earth. You also get the word “terra” in “terra-cotta” which is Latin for “baked earth”.

But “Sol”, “Luna”, and “Terra” make sense as the adjectives “solar”, “lunar”, and “terrestrial” are common adjectives in everyday language. It’s not a huge stretch and it’s not just sci-fi geeks liking the sound of those terms, they’re integrated into common speech pretty deeply.

Now, “Terran” is pretty much a sci-fi invention, true.

42

In Vulcan (ian?) language, it translates of “Home of the true logic people.” And the Romulan name for their planet translates as “Home of the true Vulcans, not those pacifistic jerks”. :slight_smile:

43

In some 1950s SF, Greek was used for derivative terms:

Terrans study geography and geology
Martians study areography and areology.
Venerians study cytheriography and cytheriology.

Luna was the proper noun, but Selenites study selenography and selenology.

44

Which gets into the interesting question of why of all the major planets Uranus got stuck with a Greek-derived name, instead of the Latin equivalent which would have been Caelus.

45

Because the namer was a teenage boy.

And one day, he knew, that they’d discover that there are rings around Uranus. And snickering would commence!

46

It’s funny, because according to this article, it was first proposed to be called “Georgium Sidus” by William Herschel, the astronomer credited with discovering it. King George III had sent a large pension to Herschel following his discovery, but it was pointed out that naming celestial bodies after celebrities never “stuck”, and also “sidus” would refer to a star and not a planet. Herschel then started calling it “The Georgian Planet” which yeah, sounded pretty awful.

Others suggested that the planet be named “Neptune”, but that didn’t happen obviously, because that name went to the next planet instead. One other popular idea that took hold was to just name it “Herschel” after the man who discovered it, and it was referred to that name by many astronomers for years. (Could you imagine if the planets were named Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and HERSCHEL?!)

Johan Elert Bode, who later would be the namesake of “Bode’s Law”, was the person who suggested the name “Uranus”. Uranus in Greek mythology was the father of Cronus (who the Romans named “Saturn”), and Cronus was a titan who gave birth to Zeus (“Jupiter” in Roman mythology). And that made a certain kind of sense that appealed to astronomers… Heading out from Earth, you have Mars (Ares in Greek mythology), whose father was Jupiter, whose father was Saturn, whose father was Uranus. And for that matter, Mercury and Venus were also children of Jupiter. (You have to skip Earth in this metaphor, but of course, it’s not like astronomers discovered the planet everybody was already standing on.) It kind of turned the solar system into a family tree, where each planet’s namesake god was descended from the next one.

The controversy over the name lasted a long time. For years the name of the planet was variously referred to as “Georgian Planet”, “Herschel”, and “Uranus”. In particular, the English were very attached to “Georgian” (after all, he was their king) and the French were fond of “Herschel”.

It wasn’t until after the discovery of Neptune in 1846 that the scientific community fully settled on Uranus, so the naming controversy lasted almost 70 years. (Note that the element “Uranium” was named in support of Bode’s naming of the planet Uranus, clearly this was a major political thing in the scientific community of the day.)

As to why Uranus and not Caelus? The answer is kind of silly (and maybe a bit apocryphal) but apparently Bode didn’t know that Caelus was the Roman name of the deity. Note that technically, Uranus is Ouranos in Greek, and “Uranus” was the Romanization of the name. Bode apparently thought that the Romanization of the name was the actual Roman name of the god, and thus made it consistent with other planetary names. You’d think that over the 70 years they debated the name, someone would have pointed out the error, but whatever.

47

And if you head north, just past San Luis Obispo US-101 ascends the Grade Grade (The Cuesta Grade).

48

IIRC, there was an episode of Babylon 5 where Londo Mollari reminisced about the events that led to the Earth vs Minbar war, and commented “Why did they name their planet for dirt?”

49

I thought it was Ni’Var.

50

That one too! I’m sure the Vulcans have as many names for their planet that we do for Earth :wink:

51

Fascinating (pun intended) that ST presumed that alien races would always speak a single language. All Vulcans speak Vulcan! All Klingons speak Klingon! All Terrans speak… :thinking:

52

Nit necessarily THAT weird, maybe. Considering the evolutionary distances involved*, Kilngon, Vulcan, and Terran could each refer to entire language groups, but all human languages are closer to one another than to any alien language, and same for Vulcan languages, etc.

To someone coming from an entirely different language group as their background, the differences would be minor. Like trying to tell apart individual insects of the same species.

*I think Panspermia is canon in Star Trek, right? So they’re all vaguely related, but less so than us and a banana or us and a blue-green algae)

53
54

“Federation Standard” :-/

55

Earth had gone through some crazy stuff over the centuries of history between modern day and the time of the original Star Trek series. There were the Eugenics Wars (Khan was heavily involved with those) followed by a global civil war of sorts and then finally culminating in World War III, which resulted in genocide and nuclear holocaust. Something like 30% of the entire planet’s population was killed off. A decade after the war ended, Cochran developed the first prototype warp drive and Vulcans made contact with Earth, and began to share their technology and other teachings. In the aftermath of all of that stuff, it would be no surprise if there was some sort of homogenization of Earth culture. Clearly there are some linguistic changes, as we see accents (Scotty and Chekov in particular in the original show) but it appears that English was adopted as an official language. Remember too that Jean Luc Picard was French, but spoke English and had no French accent because by the time he was born the French language was no longer actively spoken.

In Star Trek: Enterprise, which was set long before the original series and represented Earth’s first attempt at deep space exploration (and was even set before the founding of the Federation), they had to bring a translator onto their ship (Hoshi Sato) to help them figure out how to communicate with other species. There was a translation computer (provided by the Vulcans), but it was not sufficient to properly translate between English and the language of every alien species they encountered, so she often had to use her own linguistic skills, and in particular she was stated to be the first human fluent in Klingon language. She was raised as a polyglot and could speak many Earth languages (and was a language teacher before her time on the ship) but I got the impression that languages were learned more for historical reasons, and less because it was an actual necessity on Earth by that point.

So if Earth had pretty much formed one nation and had one language, then it made sense that most other planets were like that as well.

56

Yes, according to ST:TNG.

I believe in Season 2 of Picard, this was explained on the basis that his family fled France for England during WWII and only returned when Picard was a child. Did TNG separately specify that French was a dead language? I haven’t seen every episode, so honest question.

Also, Chekov had a Russian accent so presumably Russian was still spoken on Earth at the time of TOS? Is it also fair to assume that Russian was his first language given his accent? This has gotten me thinking about the relationships between accents and languages, interesting stuff.

57

Pretty much. Season 1, Episode 4 of TNG (Code of Honor) Picard says that French is “completely obscure” by the beginning of the 24th Century. They may have retconned that in Picard, but that was a story point very early on in the series.

Though maybe it’s not a retcon. I don’t see the two explanations necessarily being contradictory. Perhaps his family is ethnically French but spent much of its time in England before returning to France, and the French language isn’t really spoken anymore.

58

My head canon when it comes to language / accents, is that most post-Earth human colonies probably spoke ony one, or at least, very few languages, whatever passes for Federation Standard nowadays. If founding a new colony, especially in the comparatively early days, ease of communication would be a priority, and passing down a rare language to your descendents would be of minimum (but not zero) value. Trade and instersellar communication keeping the language from evolving into countless dialects thankfully.

Earth though, still holds to it’s traditions, and may in fact play them up more to show returning colonists and tourists their roots. So, in the greater human colonized sphere, other languages are certainly obscure, possibly only preserved by records/technology, but those coming from Earth would likely be much more likely to maintain, preserve, and even use such.

Again, entirely in my head.

59

In the present day real world, I’ve met people born and raised in France, who one would think, to hear them, that they were from England. They just learned to speak English really well, without an accent (at least, “without an accent” with respect to their English teachers, who were of course English).

60

Interesting. Going to watch that one tonight. :+1:

Lived in Europe for several years (I’m American, btw) and it was neat to meet Italians, French, German, etc. who spoke fluent or semi-fluent English as a second language because you could surmise the nationality from whom they learned based on their accents.