this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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If you haven't read The Last Human by Zack Jordan, I highly recommend it. In between chapters, the reader is treated to excerpts from an Asmovian encyclopedia that explains the rules of the intergalactic society that the sole remaining human, the main character, has to navigate.
As part of joining the trillion-species-strong network, a species must fill out a form to dictate the nouns and adjectives for your species, home star, homeworld, sexual divisions (where applicable), and so on. It's noted in the book that since there are so many species already assigned values in the database, the encyclopedia warns that names like Earth, dirt, mud, moon, star, sol, and home are already taken, and are constantly rejected in proposals.
That's a fun theory, but it does ignore that local languages are all different. For example, the name Canada comes from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word "kanata", meaning 'village' or 'settlement'. And it was misunderstood as the name of the area.
Many alien species naming their planets after dirt seems likely enough, but their word for it sounding like "Earth" in English is pretty low. We've got plenty of variations across languages even on our own planet: https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/earth
A bunch of hosers were sittin' 'round the fire drinkin' beers. One of 'em said, "ya know, we should name our country, eh?"
"Oh yah, we should. How ya reckon we should do that?"
"Oh, it's easy! We take all the letters of the alphabet, write 'em on pieces of paper, and stick 'em all in a hat. Then we draw 'em out and see what our name is!"
"Oh, that's a great idea! I've got some paper right here donchaknow!"
So, they wrote all the letters of the alphabet on pieces of paper and threw 'em in a toque.
"All right, what's the first letter?"
"C, eh?"
"What's the next letter?"
"N, eh?"
"What the next letter?"
"D, eh?"
"OK, that seems long enough"
Thank you kind stranger. This will make it even easier to make my favorite "fuck English" joke. https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/pineapple
Seriously, virtually everyone calls it some variation of Ananas, but along comes English and they are just like... Hmmm, obviously this should be names Pineapple and we should mock anyone who desires it on a pizza.
In the book, the word you give is the translation into galactic standard, which is one uniform language. Earth would be translated into the same word as soil and dirt, and perhaps a few synnonyms could be pulled before the concept itself was milked dry.
I think the way you would have to handle it is translate the sound of "Earth" to be spelled with the uniform language. Humans borrow words from other languages all the time.
Though the more I think about it, the likelyhood of alien species even communicating with sound isn't a guarantee either. So whatever universal language would have to be pretty complex, with potentially more than just sound and letter representations.
The book also claims that music is extraordinarily rare, with most species finding rhythm and melody indestinguishable from noise. I think the point is that the galactic consciousness that runs it all universally translates for purposes of intercommunication. What is heard or understood is more the concept of what was said than the phonetic content therein. It wasn't that such and such syllables made up the word "human," it was that the concept of human needed a universal concept to tie to the thing itself. For example, a matriarchal insectoid species who canabalizes any mate is known by the concept of "widow" as a species. Not the word, the idea that the galactic mind would push as a conceptual thought in whatever manner of communication a species might communicate in, which itself might or might not be verbal or phonetic.
I guess the meaning of "Earth" would translate to the conceptual thought of "Home Planet"?
If that's how their language works, then I feel like it must be near impossible to add new vocabulary without stringing multiple concepts together. I'm not sure how you could merge conceptual thoughts together like you can words/sounds. We'd end up on a planet named "Blue, Green, Dirt, Water, Bipedal, Planet" or whatever minimal combination ends up being unique.
Could be an issue for some kind of universal translator that has a hard time with proper boundaries that are also regular nouns.