I was playing Star Wars Battlefront II earlier, and as I was blasting some X and Y wing craft to pieces (yes, I was playing as the Empire, you rebel scum), I seemed to recall that they use a different alphabet than we do, as occasionally shown on control panels in the various films. So does their alphabet coincidentally have X and Y characters like ours, or did I find an inconsistancy in the SW universe? If so, I’m the first, right?
SW Battlefront II is quite a lot of fun, btw. If you liked the first one, you’ll probably LOVE it. Space battles, plus you can play occasionally as a Jedi/Sith. Great fun wading into a group of enemies and lightsabring the bastards. You know, if I would have somehow been able to play this game after I saw Star Wars the first time (back when it was first released), it would have been weeks or months before I saw daylight again.
The BASIC alphabet does have letters that vaguely resemble the wing configurations of the X-wing and Y-wings. (One of the conceits of Star Wars is that when we hear people speaking English they’re actually talking “BASIC,” a constructed language like esperanto.) So “Y-Wings” aren’t really “Y-Wings,” but translated into English from whatever that would be in BASIC - A compound word made up of the name of whatever glyph resembles a “Y” plus the word for “wing.”
On the other hand, there were some instances of the Roman alphabet being used in the original films, before they were all replaced with more “Star-Warsy” fonts.
Battlefront II really is fantastic. (I wish the capital ships fired at each other, though.) If we had tech like that when I was ten, I’d probably still be a virgin today. Slightly more absorbing than the Kenner playsets.
By the way, they also talk in minutes and seconds, and have turns of phrases that resemble ours so closely, at some point you have to dismiss any pretense and accept it’s just movie logic.
So why do I keep seeing C3PO and R2D2 spelled “Threepio” and “Artoo?” It seems like they’re trying to say (retroactively) that their names aren’t actual modern numbers and letters, just alien names that happen to sound like English. Is my interpretation correct? Where did “Artoo” and “Threepio” come from?
I think that’s just to make their names look more like names, and not serial numbers. Artoo sounds more like a cute side-kick than R2. It’s an artifact of the characterization, not the setting.
<geekmode> The planet Kessel, where spice is mined, is right next to the Maw, a huge collection of black holes. In order to escape from any pursuers after spice smugglers, it is a good idea (well, ish) to take a route along the outskirts of the Maw as it’s the quickest route to escape the planet’s (and the Maw’s) gravity well, which once passed allows you to go to hyperspace. When Han claims to have made the run in less than that, he’s saying that such is his great skill as a pilot, that he is able to make the run from Kessel, past the Maw, out of the gravity well, within 12 (i seem to recall) parsecs, a route which while shorter is also closer to the Maw - he’s saying he can fly so well that he can risk going nearer to the black holes, and so can take the shorter route. </geekmode>
Of course, that explanation was made up after the films - it’s pretty definite that it was a mistake on Lucas’s part at the time.
Nope – and there’s nothing retroactive about it. The names appeared both ways on trading cards, action figure packages, novelizations and comic books from the very start. (And are rendered that way in the original scripts.)
Most of us thought that Obi Wan was a clone, because he had a droid-like name (“OB-1.”) Then again, I can remember some kids arguing that Stormtroopers were droids, because they had little backpacks marked “oil.”
I’m glad they do. I freakin hate that Farscape / Battlestar Galactica universe thing where everything translates into English EXCEPT profanities and units of measure.
Now just wait a gorram minute. Everything in unchanged English is boring. With the addition of just a few frakking words, we can get the sense of “not-our-world.” Is it so frelling hard to do that? Dong ma?
Now now, don’t you go including *Firefly *in that list. The 'Verse is internally consistent in that its slang is supposed to be derived from English. “Gorram” is a corruption of “goddamn,” not a conveniently similar-sounding replacement like “frack.”
