Re: Vulcan names
Rob Zook 
Wed, 07 Oct 1998 21:15:13 -0500

At 07:53 PM 10/7/98 -0500, Ryan McReynolds wrote:
>Rob Zook wrote:
>> 
>> Well, what I meant is why do you see the need for a masculine and
>> femanine T? What about the name Tuvok seems so masculine or
>> femanine?
>
>I think that Sorik is assuming that, because Tuvok is male, his name
>must be masculine.

That's what I suspect also, and that's the assumption I think we should
discuss a little more. I don't think a modern dialect should have any
defined lexical or morphological gender. I think that having specifically
female or male naming conventions would encourage sexism. Not to a great
degree. That alone would certainly not _cause_ sexism, but any
prevalent sexism attitudes would not be discuraged by those conventions.
So, I think that would keep the language reformers after Surak's time 
from retaining any of those forms. I think that any new names after
Surak's time would not have an specific gender to them. At least not
necessarily. So Tuvok could work perfectly well as a female name just
as Saavik does.

I propose that the selection of names we have do not display any
universal or planet wide naming conventions. Perhaps local, or perhaps
only coincidental due to the small sample of names we have to work with. 
For example, on the surface there seems to be some femanine or masculine 
names. We have Spock and T'Pau, Sarek, Surak and T'Lar, and T'Pring.

But we also have Saavik, Valeris, and Salek all female, none of whom 
follow the seeming T'- female name rule. So certainly there is no
absolute T' rule for female names - otherwise we would see no exceptions.

Some have suggested that the T' is added when the betrothal occurs. But 
we have no canon reference for that. So the T' maybe either coincidental 
or purely a local custom.

I don't have any real serious show stopping problems with genderized
names (especially since names usually come from older dialects and
thus need not follow any modern Vulcan rules), but I do think we should
discuss it more so this assumption does not remain unconscious anymore.


Rob Z.