That's basically how I've always pronounced it.
"Caitian" is pronounced...
- Thread starter Ensign Ogahd Ahmganadai
- Start date
That's basically how I've always pronounced it.
But not Kee-shan, or you'd get this guy on the bridge:
Beetle-Jews
That would be "saaaba-taaaz"
The name Betelgeuse is apparently a French rendering of an earlier Latin mangling of old Arabic nomenclature. Vernacular English doesn't accurately render French phonemes, but the common English pronunciation that is closest to the French would probably be bɛtəldʒuːz.
Kor
It always bugged me a little how you pronounce Latin as English when using English. I mean, I totally get it. But ever since I learned the classical Latin way of pronouncing things, I always do it that way in my head but say it with modern English pronunciation in my head. Like how "Caesar" was actually pronounced very much like the German "Kaiser."
I have an interest in the Bible and there are a lot of Greek and Latin names in there. The differing pronunciations always both sound in my brain together. For instance, if I see the name of the city of Galatia, I think both the English "ga-LAY-shuh" and the classical "gal-uh-TEE-uh" in the same moment.
Oddly enough I've never imagined "Caitian" as anything other than "KAY-shun."
--Alex
Back in the 1980's when my friends and I played he FASA RPG we all pronounced it as Kay-shan (and were quite popular as security characters due to the DEX bonus!).
I have always wondered if the writers initially thought of Catian, but put the extra "i" in there as was a bit too obvious for a species name?
I have always wondered if the writers initially thought of Catian, but put the extra "i" in there as was a bit too obvious for a species name?
Too obvious for a property that named its Space Romans the 'Romulans'?
(But yeah, that's about what I figured happened.)
I think one of my Latin teachers (yes, I went to one of the few high schools that still requires Latin) told my class once that we don't actually know for sure how the Romans pronounced their language, that the Latin pronunciations we use are based on medieval Church Latin or something. Certainly there must've been a bunch of regional dialects, at least. It was a big empire (and half of it spoke Greek officially instead of Latin).
That's not the same thing as just arbitrarily adding letters, though, because it's derived from Romulus and Remus, the mythological twin founders of the city of Rome. The equivalent would be if they'd named M'Ress's species the Sekmetians or Basteti or something like that.
Well, he was a Captain. Where else would he be? However, all those ping-pong balls could be problematic.But not Kee-shan, or you'd get this guy on the bridge:
Let me start by saying I definitely agree with that guy. And I would add that Latin as a language still used in liturgy and (until relatively recently) academia, has evolved from the days of Julius Caesar. But we can be pretty confident about how it was pronounced in classical times thanks guys like Quintilian (who hated the Greek "K" because it was exactly the same as "C" and therefore redundant--suggesting it was never used for the "S" sound), Virgil's poetic meter (indicating length of syllables by the poetic structure), other contemporary writings where the more learned author is making fun of or directly correcting the pronunciation of Latin spoken by the vulgar masses, Germanic borrowings of classical Latin words and comparison by way of reverse engineering the Romantic daughter languages. Latin spelling is also a good clue, after all, the Latin alphabet was devised originally to spell Latin words, so doubled consonants (for instance) were probably pronounced differently than single ones, and so on.
Now, without the aid of the Guardian of Forever, or some similar time travel shenanigans, we'll never really know what they sounded like. But linguists do have a lot of threads from which to weave a pretty compelling reconstruction from.
--Alex
The Caitians are from the constellation Lynx, too
...But are they from a planet pronounced "Kate"? Orbiting a star pronounced "Kate"? Both? (The Bajoran Way!)
Or is Caitian just a species name, unrelated to location? (The Human Way!)
Something in between? A planet named Cait but not pronounced Kate? A planet with a native name that is not the same as the human pejorative for it?
Timo Saloniemi
Or is Caitian just a species name, unrelated to location? (The Human Way!)
Something in between? A planet named Cait but not pronounced Kate? A planet with a native name that is not the same as the human pejorative for it?
Timo Saloniemi
C
C57D
Guest
Oh the heady days of the FASA game. My Players numbered a very DEXterous (and so high AP) Security Chief Caitian too.
Shame that it seems there's no love for it on ST forums anymore!
Last edited by a moderator:
That's actually how I always thought it would be pronounced. But then again, I'm not a native speaker, so what do I know … ?Ka-Eat-Ee-An
APPLAUSE.
Like "vacation" without the "va".
A chemist would tell you that "cation," the name for a positively charged ion, is pronounced with three syllables, just as is "anion" (the negatively charged version of the same atom).
On the other hand, "onion," an odoriferous vegetable, only gets two syllables.
On the other hand, "onion," an odoriferous vegetable, only gets two syllables.
Similar threads
