Beastiary rules of naming

[krilain]

Hello,

I open a topic about a detail of the game design concerning aliens names.

After a while, when alien bestiary will have grown up, I'm affraid we will encounter the risk of having some feeling of a lack of unity in the naming. I checked, and there exists only 2 single naming styles today :

• a condensated one
• an explicit one

My first proposal would be to apply the condensated version to the whole alien bestary. The explicit naming is necessary at UFOpedia, or as a small description behing the original name, but alone it doesnt bring to much originality.

For you see that the naming job has already and miraculously been done for the main alien units, here is rebuilt the actual naming dictionnary :

Shevaar     ---->   She-varan (varan - any of various large tropical carnivorous lizards of Africa and Asia and Australia - www.thefreedictionary.com/Varan)

Ortnok       ---->  Orthodox knocker  - <here my explanation is that orthodox is something near of straightforward, or direct. And knocker is something that recalls knock-out. The all evocates a kind of uppercut alien (so to say not upper cute!).>

Taman       ----> Tall man  - <Taman is effectively small and tall. I'm sure that without the necessity of making the characters fit one map level height max, the taman would be further tall.>

The other aliens units are named by a non-condensated definition. Just as a first proposal here my try to put them in the dictionnary.

Alien tank              could be ---->       the Alitank

Blood spider      could be ---->    the Blospied
(if I rely on Shevaar, 2 first appearing vowels in the second part of the explicit name are put together)


Hovernet            ----- Hovnet

Here are all my linguistics 2-cents.

[H-Hour]

You should read the autopsy reports for the aliens. Many of them explain how the names came about. Names for aliens that have not yet been implemented are no more than place-holders.

[krilain]

You should read the autopsy reports for the aliens. Many of them explain how the names came about. Names for aliens that have not yet been implemented are no more than place-holders.

Damn, do you mean that I will have to fix this text bug

For the little history, you must know that I came first on this forum for it, and I left the problem behind me when I heard about changing the system language, which is not a fix I would like to do.

The second point is that I've always thought that the "big picture" could contain a smaller picture + bitmap text . I never proposed it since I was affraid it would appear not pro at all as a fix.


I still wonder if there is a rule for forming names, and what is it if eventually I wanted to name a new character myself...

[Anarch Cassius]

Well Taman is explained but the reports says no one knows where Ortnok came from and Sheevar just don't say.

Is it supposed to be a corruption of Shee Varan? Sidhe Varan? A otherworldy lizard.

[geever]

Well Taman is explained but the reports says no one knows where Ortnok came from and Sheevar just don't say.

Is it supposed to be a corruption of Shee Varan? Sidhe Varan? A otherworldy lizard.

Actually there is no Sheevar in UFOAI...
 
-geever

[Anarch Cassius]

Heh, sorry for the spelling error you know what I mean.

I wasn't really sure how to pronounce it and have been assuming it was Shēvaar. Is it pronounced Shĕvaar? Does anyone know what it means?

[krilain]

Well Taman is explained but the reports says no one knows where Ortnok came from and Sheevar just don't say.

Is it supposed to be a corruption of Shee Varan? Sidhe Varan? A otherworldy lizard.

According to the UFO text file, Taman was a contraction of some indian short sentence meaning approximatively "evil man".

But this is not presented as a general rule. Or the general rule is that at the Phallanx they give the names relatively to a sound the named alien came by any maneer to evocate... Should we take it as a basis ? But in this case there should be some sound emited by the Ortnok and the Shevaar and so on. Why not ? It seems able to work.

[Anarch Cassius]

I think Phalanx is adopting the common name. That is to say whatever the troops start calling them tends to stick. With the Taman it was a corrupted Indian word, no one knows were Ortnok came from but it was probably meant to remind on of ogres. Bloodspider is again what the troops call them (though the more closely resemble mites or ticks).

Shevaar isn't explained and I can't think of any obvious meanings so I've been trying to figure it out.

[krilain]

Shevaar still remains for me a She-varaant, and so to say a female ... The Shevaar is really sexy, don't you agree

[Rodmar]

I agree that preliminary research reports should be corrected so that alien names are better explained.

The same way "Taman" is explained as being a corruption of a local naming in the introduction text, "Ortnok" and "Shevaar" should be introduced by a way or another in their respective preliminary (not completed) research report.

Taman are mute (except when they are hurt). But "Ortnok" could simply come from the perceived sound they occasionally emit: kind of a crude, mumbled "Ort-Nock". Perhaps, this mumbling could be occasionally played whenever Ortnoks are near.

In the same idea, "Shevaar" could comes from a hissing warcry they occasionally emit when they deal a deathblow with a melee weapon: "Shhh'vaar". Both of these sounds would be the ones that would haunt the survivors of the first encounters, after all (along with the hissing of charged plasma bolts).

Remember too that the Kerr Blade was named (by troopers) from the sound it makes when shredding through human cloth and tissues.

Also, "Bloodspider" is obviously the kind of surname soldiers would have put on these strange, and yet familiar looking robots.
Preliminary research report should introduce this name too: "Based on its general form and the way it spills gore, our men named it "Bloody Spider" or "Bloodspider" or simply "Spider", whereas any biologist would agrees that the form is not that of a true arachnoid."

Imo, "Hovernet" stands for "Hovering Hornet", based on the buzzing sound it emits when hovering, and on "hovercraft", again according to the first troopers who encountered this robot.

By the way, it's pretty the same with the naming of the UFOs, except that this time, the surname comes from the pilots and the air commanders (we thought they were Fighter and Bomber crafts because of their lethality in the sky, and after due analysis they are mere armed scouts and assault barges).