Post by auntym on Jul 17, 2013 11:51:31 GMT -6
io9.com/what-do-you-call-an-alien-from-uranus-728804752
What Do You Call an Alien From Uranus?
by Ron Miller
July 17, 2013
My first thought is a "Urinal," but that's probably wrong. What to call the inhabitants of the different planets and moons has always been a minor stumbling block for scifi authors. Here's how to do it right.
With one exception, the names of the planets are taken from those of Roman gods and goddesses. There are Greek equivalents of each name, which are sometimes used as the basis for words related to inhabitants and physical conditions on the worlds.
The names of the various moons come from many different sources. Most are named after characters in Roman or Greek mythology...but there are a lot of exceptions, The moons of Uranus, for example, are named for the most part after characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
To create an adjective meaning "pertaining to" in English, the usual practice is to add -an or -ian to a word. Other suffixes might be -ese or -ite. How these are attached depends largely on the Roman root of the name involved. (The rules are actually a little more complicated than that. If you really want to know [according to SciFi fan and scholar Philip N. Bridges], "Where the noun in question is a 'foreign' world, as are all the names of the planets, the suffix is added to the stem of the word, the stem being that part constant through the declension of the oblique cases, and which gives meaning to the word. In the case of Latin words the stem appears in the genetive singular, very often quite different from the nominative case, which fact helps to explain why there has been some difficulty in deriving correct inhabitant names." I hope that clears things up.)
The rules are easily applied to just about all the planets and their moons. The only one that's ever given anyone any qualms has been the possessive form of "Venus." Who wants to be called a "Venerian," for heaven's sake? "Venusian" is a bastardization we're probably stuck with, but at least it doesn't sound like you're talking about an embarrassing disease.
So here is what we should properly call the inhabitants of the planets (along with a few of their larger satellites):
CONTINUE READING: io9.com/what-do-you-call-an-alien-from-uranus-728804752
What Do You Call an Alien From Uranus?
by Ron Miller
July 17, 2013
My first thought is a "Urinal," but that's probably wrong. What to call the inhabitants of the different planets and moons has always been a minor stumbling block for scifi authors. Here's how to do it right.
With one exception, the names of the planets are taken from those of Roman gods and goddesses. There are Greek equivalents of each name, which are sometimes used as the basis for words related to inhabitants and physical conditions on the worlds.
The names of the various moons come from many different sources. Most are named after characters in Roman or Greek mythology...but there are a lot of exceptions, The moons of Uranus, for example, are named for the most part after characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
To create an adjective meaning "pertaining to" in English, the usual practice is to add -an or -ian to a word. Other suffixes might be -ese or -ite. How these are attached depends largely on the Roman root of the name involved. (The rules are actually a little more complicated than that. If you really want to know [according to SciFi fan and scholar Philip N. Bridges], "Where the noun in question is a 'foreign' world, as are all the names of the planets, the suffix is added to the stem of the word, the stem being that part constant through the declension of the oblique cases, and which gives meaning to the word. In the case of Latin words the stem appears in the genetive singular, very often quite different from the nominative case, which fact helps to explain why there has been some difficulty in deriving correct inhabitant names." I hope that clears things up.)
The rules are easily applied to just about all the planets and their moons. The only one that's ever given anyone any qualms has been the possessive form of "Venus." Who wants to be called a "Venerian," for heaven's sake? "Venusian" is a bastardization we're probably stuck with, but at least it doesn't sound like you're talking about an embarrassing disease.
So here is what we should properly call the inhabitants of the planets (along with a few of their larger satellites):
CONTINUE READING: io9.com/what-do-you-call-an-alien-from-uranus-728804752