What's In A Name?

[Bry_Sinclair]

In the S.C.E. ebooks after Mor glasch Tev was introduced, I've always wondered what the "glasch" means, why its in the middle of his name and whats with the lower case?

Though I don't know what it means I've got into the habit of naming my Tellarites in a similar manner.

Anyone got any ideas or hints?

 

[Deranged Nasat]

The full significance of Tellarite naming conventions hasn't been spelled out yet, but throughout the novel continuity Tellarites have been given names like Tev's, ever since his introduction. "Name connective Name", usually one or two syllables for all three components.

My speculation: The third name is pretty clearly the equivalent of a family name, both in terms of what it tells us about the person in question and how it's used in the context of most social interactions. In Watching the Clock we meet a Tellarite married couple who share a third name, and Enterprise's Ambassador Gral (who was addressed as such) has received the full name Gora bim Gral. Likewise, Mor glasch Tev is addressed as "(rank) Tev", for instance. As for the others, it seems the first of the three names is an individual name. As for the connective second word, which of course is not capitalized, I like to assume it's not a name as such but rather tells us the role that the particular Tellarite plays within the structure of the family (or herd, or whatever Tellarites have). There are quite a few connectives, but not that many - lots of duplication, far more so than we see with the other two parts of the names. We've had glasch, glov, chim, jav, bav, lorin, bim, blasch - most of these more than once, some quite frequently. The Balkars, that married couple from Watching the Clock, have intriguingly similar connectives - bav and jav. Are those intended to complement each other? Husband and wife who together form a unit at a particular position within the family tree? Alternatively, it could be the country or region in which they originate, or the tribe they belong to, etc.

 

[DS9Continuing]

^^^

Listen to the Nasat. He's good at this stuff.

.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

I always listen to Nasat, the one time I didn't...<shudders>

 

[Christopher]

In the S.C.E. ebooks after Mor glasch Tev was introduced, I've always wondered what the "glasch" means, why its in the middle of his name and whats with the lower case?

Well, I'm the person who invented that Tellarite naming convention for Aftermath, and my authoritative answer is:

I have no bloomin' idea.

I was tired of aliens who only had one name -- it doesn't seem very practical in a population as large as a multiplanetary civilization -- so when I was told to introduce a new character named Tev, I decided to add more to his name, and somehow came up with "Mor glasch," which seemed suitably exotic and fitting for Tellarites. But I never really settled on an explanation for the lower-case middle name. I suppose I was influenced by Dutch names like "van Rijn" or "ter Horst" or "de Vries." Apparently those connectors are called tussenvoegsels and are usually prepositions in place names, meaning things like "of," "at," "over," "from," etc. Just as "Leonardo da Vinci" means "Leonardo from [the town of] Vinci." I suppose the Tellarite middle names could be similar in meaning, though perhaps not identical. As Deranged Nasat says, I did give two married Tellarites similar connectors in Watching the Clock, bav Balkar and jav Balkar; I was thinking that maybe there could be a connection between the two, that maybe they represent something similar to "Mr." and "Mrs.," but I left it open-ended.

Until then, though, I'd only used "glasch" as a connector. It was other writers who came up with the "chim" and "bim" and so on, and you'd have to ask them if they had any ideas about what those meant.

 

[Lonemagpie]

there are too many variations for them just to mean of or from, but how about if they're they're the equivalent of traditional family employments or something - like the Welsh colloquialisms of "Jones the Baker, Jones the Milk, Jones the Miner..."

So it could be First Name, "the whatever he, she or the family is known for," Family Name...

 

[Christopher]

Or they could have various different meanings. I'm not fond of the tendency to assume that alien worlds only have one language or one naming pattern apiece. I'm definitely not a fan of the way the books over the past decade have "normalized" the names of Andorian characters like Pava and Shran to fit the convention created for the DS9 post-finale novels. If Earth has dozens of different languages and naming conventions, why can't an alien world? Maybe one particular culture and its language could dominate and people might tend to adapt their names to its conventions, like the way movie star Chan Kong-sang calls himself Jackie Chan (or the way NX-01's communications officer goes by Hoshi Sato per Western name order rather than Sato Hoshi per Japanese convention). But even in such "normalized" names, there could be different meanings underlying them, different origins cloaked by the normalization.

So there could be several different languages on Tellar that use middle names of various different meanings, and they just get their orthography normalized to fit the dominant convention of not capitalizing them (or whatever the equivalent of capitalization is in the dominant Tellarite writing system).

 

[Lonemagpie]

There could be any number of languages, but then why would they all include that middle word?

 

[Christopher]

There could be any number of languages, but then why would they all include that middle word?

Not all, but many, at least the ones we've seen. And as I said, it could be a case of standardization, names from a variety of cultures being modified to fit the dominant language. Maybe some languages have middle names that get adapted to fit that pattern, and others don't but have the middle names added. Or maybe there are still Tellarites who don't use the middle name at all, like any Tellarite character who appeared before I came up with the naming pattern in Aftermath.

 

[DEWLine]

You're not alone in this suspicion. I can't see the other sapient species of the Trek-'verses not still having at least dozens of actively used languages - written, spoken, gestural, pheronomal, etc. - of their own either.

 

[F. King Daniel]

It's the Tellarite version of Kirsten motherfucking Beyer.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Some interesting ideas here, and its good to hear from the creator of the name that he has no clue what their significance is

I always like to play about with alien names and try and make the differ from what has been established either on screen or in books (which is why Silverfin's Chief Engineer is Elak ko'Parr th'Shaan, keeping the gender prefix but giving him just a simple name, whilst others onboard have the long name which is shortened).

When it comes to naming humans, I have tried to get 'foreign' names among the crew utilising naming conventions common in other areas of the planet.

Seeing as how understanding Tellarite names isn't a crucial plot element, I doubt I'll come up with an explanation. I was just curious if there was one or what others had thought up to explain it.

 

[captcalhoun]

i just figured it was some funky Tellarite cultural thing and never paid it any more attention.

i just find it interesting that a lot of the Tellarite names are short, gutteral sounds. even moreso than Klingon names considering Klingonese' gutteral sound in general.

 

[rfmcdpei]

You're not alone in this suspicion. I can't see the other sapient species of the Trek-'verses not still having at least dozens of actively used languages - written, spoken, gestural, pheronomal, etc. - of their own either.

Pretty much. I can think of two exceptions.

1. Civilizations that have very long histories of unity. By all accounts, Bajor has been a unified civilization at a relatively high degree of technology for tens of millennia, if not longer. Even with Bajor's caste system to encourage perhaps certain specialized vocabularies for different groups, I'd be very surprised if a standard Bajoran wasn't spoken uniformly all over Bajor (and likely its offworld colonies, too).

2. Civilizations that have gone through bottlenecks. All the various iterations of Romulan history have the settlement of Romulus by Vulcanoids be a desperate attempt by the tens of thousands of survivor of a much larger expedition that barely made it to the Eisn system before the generation starships gave way, after which further winnowing occurred via disease and conflict. It's believable to me that the eventually flourishing Romulan civilization is pretty homogeneous; even there are more than the three dialects of Romulan that NuTrek Uhura recognizes, I'd be surprised if there was much more diversity.

These two categories aren't mutually exclusive, i.e. Romulan civilization seems to have been politically unified from an early period.

 

[Christopher]

^I think that's oversimplifying. Even a politically or culturally unified civilization can have enclaves of diversity within it. Indeed, the larger the population you're talking about, the more inevitable that becomes. Even if the ruling state actively tried to eradicate other languages, as many states have done, their speakers continue to use and teach them in secret, not willing to see their cultures eradicated. We see this with the past US government's failed attempts to eradicate Native American language and culture.

After all, it is a huge mistake to think that it's in any way normal for people to be monolingual. Americans make that assumption because most of us only speak one language, but we're the exception, not the rule. Most human beings on this planet speak at least two languages. It's very common for people to use one language as a lingua franca in public interactions, at work, etc. and then go home and use another language with their family and local community. Even where there is a single dominant language that everyone speaks and uses to communicate universally, there are still multiple other languages used by various subcultures within the whole.

Maybe this is what we're seeing when the books take diverse Andorian name forms and make them conform to the standard from the novels. Maybe the novel form of the name is the one in the Andorian lingua franca, the dominant tongue, and the form used in the original episode or comic or whatever is the native form of that character's name, the one they think of themselves by and use within their family and linguistic community.

 

[Stevil2001]

In The Tears of Eridanus, I made a deliberate effort to use Andorian names outside the normal pattern of the novels, to imply some cultural diversity.

On the other hand, I retconned a preexisting name to fit the scheme ("Threllvon-da" to "th'Rellvonda"), on the basis that they were Anglicized using different schemes.