Stargate triviums.

[unbibium]

I can only remember Teal'c laughing once, and that was more a bit of demented laughter when some snakehead was about to hand him back to Apophis.

Incidentally, who decides how to spell "Teal'c", and how come so many Goa'uld words have apostrophes in them?

Also, how many times has General Hammond been offworld? I can think of two times: the first time was when he was trying to bust SG-1 out of prison, and the second time was to supervise some big mission but I don't quite remember what it was.

Comments

Stargate triviums

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

"how come so many Goa'uld words have apostrophes in them?"

I've seen a few Stargate episodes, and I don't recall them using glottal stops frequently, but maybe I've missed it. Perhaps they're contractions? In full it might be something like "Goacastle-could".

[maureenans.livejournal.com]

Hammond is not supposed to go through the stargate, he is supposed to get court-martialed if he does. this has (obviously) not stopped him.

and I think Danny likes the apostrophes.

Re: Stargate triviums

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

A dorm buddy and I had this discussion when the movie originally came out. We were both somewhat of Linguistics nerds at the time-- he still is from what I hear. The reason, at least in the case of vowels, is that you can run lots of vowels together in a name and use apostrophies to prevent the vowels from diphthonging.

Diphthong (http://www.unicode.org/glossary/#digraph). A pair of vowels that are considered a single vowel for the purpose of phonemic distinction. One of the two vowels is more prominent than the other. In writing systems, diphthongs are sometimes written with one symbol, and sometimes with more than one symbol (for example, with a digraph).

(Also, spot the 2 digraphs and a trigraph in "diphthong.")

In re: the movie we were discussing the name Sha'uri, which wouldn't sound very good if read by an English speaker sans apostrophe: Shauri. "Shorey," maybe? Not good. So a quick glottal stop is go. (They definitely used a glottal stop in the movie, but in the show, "Goa'uld" is usually spoken with diphthong: goowahoold-- that may depend on the actor/speaker.)

But the addition of apostrophes in SF names tends to be a memetic disease, hence while Goa'uld makes sense at least as far as the above need, Teal'c would sound just like Tealk or Tealc or Teelk. Also, I watch the show when I can, so I know that in Goa'uld, the u is pronouced [oo], but as English speakers go, there's nothing in the word to indicate that: Goa'ulde might do the trick, and would Welshing the name to be Goa'wld. Which-all means that Froggy is correct that it's a contraction of a countryside village-name. Q.E.D. and good eye, Froggy!

Re: Stargate triviums

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

O'Neill just says "GOOLD".

O'Neill. There's another unnecessary apostrophe.

Re: Stargate triviums

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

This thread got me reading the IMDB Stargate page, and on the Trivia page it notes that this is the third character in a Roland Emmerich movie to have that name, or a homonym thereof. As for apostrophes in that ethnic name, it's a good thing the Scots aren't called M'cAvoy or whatnot.

Re: Stargate triviums

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

That said, the TV O'Neil is MacGyver, who (character and actor) was from Minnesota and while he doesn't have half the accent he used to, he's probably not going to have the same attention to special vowel sounds as Teal'c does, who pronounces everything exactingly, just like all aliens.

Re: Stargate triviums

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I do remember the episode where he got Standard Sci-Fi Rapid Aging Disease, he sounded a little more "regional" all of a sudden.