Alien Ship Names?

[Profit Centre Alpha]

How did the Boron and the Split know about Terran fish & animals? How did the Teladi know about Earth birds? Peregrine, Falcon, Crane, et cetera. Do they have ospreys on Ianamus Zura? The Paranid, I can understand. They read our history and they like the Greeks.

[Gibbo]

Probably the same as what we did for Latin. Many of our words have a direct link to Latin. It's just a translation that suits us. Ask a Split about Earth animals and they'll beat you to death with your own arms. They'll have their own animals which will no doubt have similarities, but to us the Split name for the animal would sound like a coughing fit.

[TwinChops]

They (maybe) dont, its the auto translater wich translates the names for us.

[eMYNOCK]

Originally posted by TwinChops:

They (maybe) dont, its the auto translater wich translates the names for us.

Its Betty who uses the Argonopedia.
Make a guess who might have come up with fancy Fishy or Oceanic Stuff for Borons, Greek Mythology for 3-Eyed Math and Bio-Engineers, dangerous Animals for the short tempered Split and Avians for the greedy Lizard like Teladi.

i'll cut it short, it was the Argons... and they aparently had a digital or a full physical Enzyclopedia with them when they got Cut off from Earth.

Not to mention, all Species, physiically speak the same language in official, aka Trade and Diplomatic, capacities.

[Gibbo]

Can you imagine the Split animals though? I bet the Paranid have some terrifying ones as well. They evolved those hind legs for a reason. To run lol. Very quickly. Be cool to see some of their animals being delivered on stations. A Split T-Rex in a crate being unloaded would be fun to watch. Perhaps they could escape sometimes and get vapourised like that nice lady who tells you any unchained animals will be vapourised on sight. New crew as well. Animal control. Watch them run around with big nets and tranq guns.

[eMYNOCK]

oh.. the Split Phyton Name, if you translate it literally, is Gangrene Chaser... and i assure you.. you do not want to meet the Apex Predator on the Split Homeworld.. what would be a Ghok... a literal acid spweing, bioluminicent, nocturnal, giant Bug.

its a shame that so much lore is and was hidden in the BBS System back in X2 and early X3 until it got dropped entirely.

[Lem0n]

oh

[Sphinx of Black Quartz]

Originally posted by eMYNOCK:

oh.. the Split Phyton Name, if you translate it literally, is Gangrene Chaser... and i assure you.. you do not want to meet the Apex Predator on the Split Homeworld.. what would be a Ghok... a literal acid spweing, bioluminicent, nocturnal, giant Bug.

its a shame that so much lore is and was hidden in the BBS System back in X2 and early X3 until it got dropped entirely.

Why all the other Community species went to space: "We shall explore the unknown!"

Why the Split went to space: "Our planet is frelling TERRIFYING, let's get the hell out of here."

[Axeface]

In Rebirth they started thinking about these kind of things, I wish they had continued. It's all good having a universal language just like 'common' in dnd, but it would be nice if they started exploring the races properly.

[Doom]

Originally posted by Profit Centre Alpha:

How did the Boron and the Split know about Terran fish & animals? How did the Teladi know about Earth birds? Peregrine, Falcon, Crane, et cetera. Do they have ospreys on Ianamus Zura? The Paranid, I can understand. They read our history and they like the Greeks.

I'd assume it is localized translation. Rattlesnake could be Z'str'p'tkrt'rt, and Dolphin could be Bafi La Lipi Mo. It could also be like Nato aircraft designation (Su-57 --> Felon), Let's not forget that Paranid and Borons use communication incompatible with humans (Pheromones in Borons and Paranide triplet-speech). Like boron script written down would probably look like Ditema tsa dinoko...

[Sphinx of Black Quartz]

Originally posted by Doom:

Originally posted by Profit Centre Alpha:

How did the Boron and the Split know about Terran fish & animals? How did the Teladi know about Earth birds? Peregrine, Falcon, Crane, et cetera. Do they have ospreys on Ianamus Zura? The Paranid, I can understand. They read our history and they like the Greeks.

I'd assume it is localized translation. Rattlesnake could be Z'str'p'tkrt'rt, and Dolphin could be Bafi La Lipi Mo. It could also be like Nato aircraft designation (Su-57 --> Felon), Let's not forget that Paranid and Borons use communication incompatible with humans (Pheromones in Borons and Paranide triplet-speech). Like boron script written down would probably look like Ditema tsa dinoko...

Boron: "Our name for the vessel is not pronounceable in your speech, but it refers to a large, sleek, warm-blooded sea creature that births live offspring."

Argon: "We'll call it the 'Orca'. They're massive predatory aquatic mammals native to Earth."

Boron: "Goodness gracious me! How terrible! Our creatures are gentle herbivores!"

Argon: "Yeah well we don't speak pheromone-cloud, and 'Orca' sounds cool. So we're calling it Orca."

[Erei]

I always assumed the universe is not in English (or whatever language you use to play the game). It's translated for the player. You have lots of writing in Japanese ( Ithink ?) and there are no reasons why Splits or Paranid would speak english between them.
Kinda like the Lord of the Rings. It's (lorewise) translated into English by Tolkien. Frodo actual name is Maura.
I assume it's like our own world. Where they speak their own native language and another more common for inter species communication. Like non English native speaker speaks their own native language and English on the internet/with foreigners. Like myself. Which also explain why Splits speaks weird, their native language grammatical structure is very different I guess.
Ingame I suspect the "common language" is either Japanese or Teladi. Japanese took over Earth and Terran/Argon are everywhere, while Teladi are space trader so it would make sense their language would be the "trade language".

Doesn't explain why "aliens" have modern day numeral written on their module/thrusters/whatever tho.


As such, the name are possibly an approximation for you to understand. The player know what an Orca is. Not so much about some giant predator whale from Nishala.
Either that or it's like Japanese plane for the US during WWII. The US didn't know the name of the plane, or didn't want to speak their japanese name, so they gave them names. Or translated it.For example, the G4m, a common bomber, was called "Betty" by the US, but it was actually officially named "Ichishiki rikujō kōgeki ki, Isshikirikukō" and commonly called "Hamaki" by the japanese pilots.
Meanwhile the infamous Zero was called Zero in japanese to, but zero is "Reisen" in japanese. In this case it was a translation.

The fact every aliens follow a convention to name their ship exactly like Terran do (like Greek mythology stuff for Paranid or sea creatures for Borons) would indicate it's the later.

[Doom]

Originally posted by Erei:

You have lots of writing in Japanese ( Ithink ?)

That's garbled script based on Japanese, and in couple of places it is mirrored.

From encyclopedia:

The official language of the Argon Federation is a simplified of Japanese known as "Neo-Ancient Japanese"; it is also commonly used as a trading tongue by non-Argon members
of the Federation. In addition, most Argon still speak English, many natively.

[SievertChaser]

Originally posted by Doom:

Originally posted by Erei:

You have lots of writing in Japanese ( Ithink ?)

That's garbled script based on Japanese, and in couple of places it is mirrored.

From encyclopedia:

The official language of the Argon Federation is a simplified of Japanese known as "Neo-Ancient Japanese"; it is also commonly used as a trading tongue by non-Argon members
of the Federation. In addition, most Argon still speak English, many natively.

Does this make the X series, alongside Cyberpunk, a relic of the times when people (mainly Americans) were worried Japan would take over the world?

[Doom]

Originally posted by SievertChaser:

Does this make the X series, alongside Cyberpunk, a relic of the times when people (mainly Americans) were worried Japan would take over the world?

That's an interesting angle to look at it, I've not considered it. Like in cyberpunk you'd usually have a japanese corp and street samurai. But if we think about it, it originates from 1980s-1990s and there was a lot of fascination with Japan at the time. Hmm. Anyway.

This is canon in this game:

Japan was among the first nations to emerge from the crisis. Unlike the United States, the European Union and mainland China, it had chosen to protect its scientific base (though not without cost) and emerged as a nascent superpower.

A simplified dialect of Japanese. ♥♥♥-pidgin, quickly spread across the planet, swiftly replacing Latin, French and English as the universal scientific language. Anyone who wanted to study science now had no choice but to study Japanese as well.

It is unsurprising, then, that Japan became the next victim of star-fever. That it occurred entirely by accident is mere coincidence. In the year 2022, a completely unknown student at the University of Tokyo named Ashizava Kazuko made a breakthrough that would change the world with his discovery of some unknown solutions to Einstein's theories.

2022 in their timeline.

I highly recommend to read encyclopedia, by the way.

[Erei]

Originally posted by SievertChaser:

Does this make the X series, alongside Cyberpunk, a relic of the times when people (mainly Americans) were worried Japan would take over the world?

Cyberpunk is an allegory of the US society of the time, and more and more today. As per its author. I think the japan stuff is for flavor, more than a fear or anything. Japanese stuff was quite popular in the US by then. But you can ask Mike Pondsmith, its creator.
The author took inspirations from other stuff for the rest of its world building. For example, the Soviet are back with a vengeance in Russia. meanwhile Africa can into space, as they have the major space company based in Nairobi (Orbital Air, which is featured partly in the CP77 DLC).
In the lore, Japan didn't take over. As it happens, it's one of the major corps for Night City, which is the main place for most of the content (and most notably the recent videogame).

However, the rest of the world is drastically different. Militech rule the USA most notably, but then you have Biotechnica (EU) which can be said to rule the world because they control the entirety of modern fuel resource (the CHOOH) and the majority of food production worldwide.


For X universe, I think it was mostly to use the 1970-1980's early anime/comics design. I don't know for the previous games, but X4 terran have a big inspiration for their design in general.