Re: Vulcan names
Saul Epstein 
Wed, 7 Oct 1998 23:27:08 -0500

Quotes from: Rob Zook <lalaith*unicom,net>
Date: Wednesday, October 7, 1998 9:15 PM
 
> At 07:53 PM 10/7/98 -0500, Ryan McReynolds wrote:
>
> > 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 propose that the selection of names we have do not display any
> universal or planet wide naming conventions.

That seems almost inevitably true, for a lot of reasons.

> 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.

Among the things worth keeping in mind is how little we know about
the nature of Vulcan names. Do they mean anything? It seems likely
they did once. How long ago?

Do Vulcans create new names sometimes? Often? Always? What governs a
new name's form? Do they have anything to do with time of birth?
Accompanying signs?

Did large numbers of people really take new names during the
Awakening? Did they make these names up? To have certain sounds, or
to have certain meanings? Or did they take existing names, for either
reason? If some old names stopped being used after the Awakening, was
it because of what they meant? Or because of some other association?

How many parts are there to a Vulcan's full name? Are parts
transmitted from one generation to the next? Altered at bond-mating?
Other milestones? How?

To what extent are titles incorporated incorporated into full names?

Does any of these questions have a single answer true of all Vulcans?
I find this extremely unlikely. Are there some shared trends among
cosmopolitan Vulcans? Almost certainly...

With regard to gender, it seems to me that even obligatory marking in
names is not necessarily sexist (though it could represent oppressive
restriction to Vulcans of ambiguous or contradictory gender). The
real demon, I think, is obligatory marking in pronouns.

Since WHL'prahla doesn't mark anything but pronouns for gender, names
with meanings would often not be marked, unless due to some special
rule for names, which is a possibility.

If sexism was a problem before the Awakening, reformers might well
have sought to end any customs that supported it. If it wasn't a
problem, it might never have occured to them to do any such thing.
This is something else we don't know about Vulcan, but it's rather
far from a linguistic focus.

Of some interest in this regard also is the long-term trend in the
Anglo-American naming tradition of certain names once considered
masculine becoming, ah, bisexual or even feminine -- sometimes due to
perceived feminine morphology (Tracy, Leslie, Darcy) but not always
(Carol). Also the contemporary fashion of giving girls boys' names.
Tyler comes to mind.

Just some fairly random thoughts...

--
from Saul Epstein
locus*planetkc,com - www,planetkc,com/locus
"Surakri' ow'phahcur the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'phahrka
     the's'hi surakecha'."
                                        -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at