tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Apr 10 06:23:55 1996
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Re: KLBC & vocabulary
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: KLBC & vocabulary
- Date: Wed, 10 Apr 96 09:23:41 EDT
- In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 9 Apr 1996 13:45:01 -0700. <[email protected]>
[email protected] writes:
\ No, because Terra (the original spelling) is the right name for Earth,
\ Qo'nos is the right name of the Klingon Home World. In most Scifi stories
\ Earth is called Terra, I think it comes from Terra Firma (firm ground???).
Other way around. Terra is simply the Latin word for "earth" or
"ground"; "firma" means "hard" or "firm" (although the usual English
gloss of "terra firma" is "*solid* ground").
The tendency in more recent SF seems to be to stick with "Earth" for
our home planet, which is fine by me. If your characters are speaking
English, they should use the English name; and even if you're
supposedly back-translating from whatever language they're really
speaking, traslating it as "Terra" seems needlessly high-falutin'.
Unless, of course, everyone is supposed to have adopted Latin as the
planetary language by the time of your story. :) Anyway, in whatever
language, the name of our planet translates as "dirt" (well, "dirt
globe" in the case of Esperanto). Saying it in Latin doesn't make it
more dignified, even if the medical profession believes otherwise.
However, Terra does yield more readily to part-of-speech munging, and
"Terran" does somehow seem more dignified than "Earther". (It's bad
enough having to be either a "United Statesian" or falsely claiming
citizenship of an entire continent or two by saying "American" -
"Earther" on top of that is too much). Also, getting back to
tlhIngan Hol (finally), "earth" would be hard to transliterate;
{'ertlh} violates the consonant clustering rules, and sticking in an
extra vowel to fix it would yield an unrecognizable result
({'eratlh}?). So assuming that at least some people in the Federation
use Terra/n instead of Earth/er, it makes sense that the Klingons would
pick that form.
End of ramble. Back to tlhIngan Hol.
--
Mark J. Reed
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