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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Nitpicking Star Trek planet names

Star Trek planet names are unrealistic. All Trek fans are nitpickers, but I don't think this has been discussed. The planets all have names easily rendered in English, like Toros or Ligan. Human languages unrelated to English (Yup'ik, Vietnamese, Salish, whatever) have sounds difficult to reproduce in English and spellings that are often impossible to render accurately in English. (Vietnam's westernized alphabet can have a half-dozen different accent marks around a single letter.) Galactic Standard seems to have no problem expressing planet names - which always sound the same when spoken by the planet's natives. Earth cultures often do not even use the same word for their homeland as foreigners use. There should be some difficult and varied pronunciations when you get to alien names.

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