Subject: On Names.
Author:
Posted on: 2013-06-11 22:42:00 UTC

The question you need to answer (for yourself) is who is giving the names? To swap from aliens to countries for a moment, you have three main variants:

1/ They gave themselves a name and everyone else uses it to the best of their ability. France and Portugal fit this category, at least in European languages.

2/ The viewpoint species gave them a name which is used by the viewpoint species, and accepted by the aliens as a translation. Germany springs to mind here (since it's Deutchland to a German and Allemagne to the French... and obviously Germany to us).

3/ A combination of the above two, with the viewpoint species attempting to 'normalise' the actual name. I'm thinking Switzerland from 'die Schweiz'. Most places in our world, this comes about through colonisation (Switzerland being a big exception).

Your names look like they're all given by humans, probably before they were able to translate the alien languages. Knowing the human species, I suspect there would be massive agitation to switch to using 'the traditional cultural names rather than those foisted on them by Terrestrial Imperialism'. Here's what I would do (and, actually, have done):

If the aliens speak in sound, and that sound can be reasonably written in the Latin alphabet, transliterate their own name for their species. My example is the Gr-kra-kro, who are apparently three-legged blue reptiles. I also have the Sh'krrform, who are also reptillian, and whose name is probably a corruption of their actual name for themselves (with that 'form' likely coming from 'frrrrm' or something).

Of course, some of these names could be massively corrupted or coopted into English. My planet Marigold must have its own name, and its inhabitants are humanoid, but I figure humans heard something that sounded vaguely English (Barricoln, perhaps?) and just latched onto it. There probably is a movement to switch to the proper name (and to stop calling the inhabitants 'Goldies', since it's a racial slur...)

On the flip side, if you have some really alien species, in that they're either unwilling to actually talk to us at all (ie, implacably hostile), or don't use sound to communicate, humans would have to invent names for them. My Arcadians are technicolour fountains of tentacles who communicate through the motion of those tentacles - it's completely unwritable, so we called their planet Arcadia, and them after it. They don't seem to mind.

And:

Should I just come up with some random word for the name?

Heavens, no. If humans are naming things, we tend to choose something with meaning. Often we name things after their discoverer, or after some property of it (neutrino, anyone?). So a human-given name would have some form of meaning.

A name given by a species to itself, on the other hand, will probably have no meaning any more ('human' just means, y'know, us), but will come out of the linguistic background. We would never have called ourselves 'Karcadasonarians', because we don't like long nouns. Equally, we couldn't have named ourselves H't'prrgs, because we can't pronounce it. If a species' language has lots of hissing (as is common for reptilian aliens), their name for themselves will probably be full of Ses - they wouldn't call themselves Krogs. If a species habitually smashes words together to add meaning to them, they may have a 27-syllable name for themselves - 'we who rose from the mountains east of the great desert and drove our flocks before us to the fertile lands we claim as our own and built our cities on'. Maybe their name even changes with time.

And, of course, what is our name for our own species? The world agrees on 'Homo sapiens sapiens', but are we humans, or dynol (Welsh), or čovjek (Bosnian)...? Maybe the flying reptiles of Kssrkt call their species Ssst'krss, but their cousins in St'kssh say they're called K'tsskr...

hS

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