On Stargate SG-1, why in the world did they name the bad guys

[leftofthedial]

Goo-ah-ooold or whatever it is? What a weird, unweildy name, with no resonance whatsoever?

Does anyone know?

What happened to cool bad-guy names like Romulan or Klingon or republican?

[JitterbugPerfume]

1. they are old news

the new bad guys are religious zealots called the Ori

[JitterbugPerfume]

2. ALL HAIL THE ORI

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

3. Because...

Romulan, Klingon, the Empire, Cylons, the Shadows, Drakh, Jem'Hadar, the Founders, the Borg, Reavers, and all
the other cool names were all taken.
:shrug:

[oneighty]

4. Yes indeed

they were.

180

[YellowRubberDuckie]

5. Actually, when SG-1 started, there were no such things as REAVERS.

They came WAAAAY after...those guys. :evilgrin:
Duckie

[leftofthedial]

11. plus, no two cast members pronounce it the same way

you can tell they learn their lines without the other actors present

if they really worked together, they would mostly say it the same, with a few idiosyncracies to make the characters interesting. Instead, they all sound like they are saying a completely different word most of the time.

Bogus.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

13. I totally forgot about about that.

So is it "gooould" or "go-AH-ooold"?
'or "go-ULD"?

Just another example of the shoddy production of the show. How it got eight seasons
(with a ninth conformed) is beyond me.

And has anyone else noticed how many episodes will just end without any denouement?
They just...end. End on an awkward line that makes little sense, doesn't even
lead into next weeks episode, or even hint that I should stay tuned. That would work on a show that has a contiguous storyline,
but Stargate SG-1 is primarily an episodic show so I'm left hanging at the end.

[khashka]

15. Yeah, that always bugged me.

Didn't they have cast read throughs? Did nobody notice this? Did no one ever say "It's pronounced like this..."?

Sheesh!

Khash.

[ZombieNixon]

6. Because precious few SF writers have had even a basic linguistics lesson.

Otherwise, they might abandon the pretense that the infernal apostrophe is some kind of obscure vowel or consonant (it's not), and just spell it out. Check it, "Goa'uld" neither looks nor sounds threatening, where as something along the lines of "Qo'uuld," while sounding almost identical, looks a bit eviller.

Who's to say alien languages sound anything like human languages? If we ever meet aliens, we might be lucky to even be able to distiguish the individual sounds they make ("excuse me, was that 'Rroooaaaghhh!' or 'Wroaaaaggh!'").

And because TV is essentially media for idiots (guilty as all we smart DUers are), never will you see a TV alien named "Blävwøzlh" or "Ngù@".

Sorry, it's just that phony SF xenolinguistics piss me off! :grr:

[baldguy]

8. And how come all the aliens we seem to meet on teevee

speak perfect, American-accented English?

[ZombieNixon]

9. Ooooh...don't get me started on that!

I should share an ironic twist to this I developed. I'm writing a 14-book SF epic for fun (I got drunk once and went crazy on a story outline I wrote once), part of which is heavily involved in linguistics. There are seven primary languages involved, all of which are related. I generated a lexicon and applied a few series of sound changes to generate the daughter languages. Get this, one of them turned up with a vocabulary, half of which resembled a slightly garbled, misspelled English wordlist. Examples:
"Vortex" means "birthright"
"Apokalypse" (sic) means "demon"
"Lax" means "dignity"
"At" means "fall"
"Diamond" means "time"
and so on...
and in a twist that is frankly slightly creepy, compare the word "tolkian," meaning "Lord of Speech" to the name of J.R.R. Tolkien, the father of conlanging.

So, in my world, aliens legitimately speak (half or so of) perfect American-accented English. :D

[BreweryYardRat]

10. I've heard the explanation Stargate's producers used.

It was along the lines of "We didn't want to devote half of every episode to the team learning yet another language."

At least they were honest...

[leftofthedial]

12. Unless they are Ricardo Montalban

and then you keep waiting for him to say "rich Coreeenthian leather"

or maybe they are British

[TheBaldyMan]

19. in Stars Wars the goodies had american accents and the baddies

had British/English accents. Even the goodies played by british actors were dubbed. The exception to this was Darth Vader. e.g. General Dodonna and Wedge would both have had scottish accents.

[leftofthedial]

17. yeah

what you said

I think

Seriously, one is what one can think. An evil super race could only become that if their language and their names for themselves allowed it. You have to start with the "race" you are modeling and make their "language" (if they even have language as we know it) real. It's asking too much though from a disposable medium primarily targeted at precisely the people who don't want to think.

[Guy Fawkes]

7. Hollowed are the Ori!

[DS1]

14. Because Q-Bert was already taken

[leftofthedial]

18. THAT explains it

I knew there was a reason

[ET Awful]

16. It's the Gould, and it's a little known secret that they are all descended

from this guy: