this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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In the book, the word you give is the translation into galactic standard, which is one uniform language. Earth would be translated into the same word as soil and dirt, and perhaps a few synnonyms could be pulled before the concept itself was milked dry.
I think the way you would have to handle it is translate the sound of "Earth" to be spelled with the uniform language. Humans borrow words from other languages all the time.
Though the more I think about it, the likelyhood of alien species even communicating with sound isn't a guarantee either. So whatever universal language would have to be pretty complex, with potentially more than just sound and letter representations.
The book also claims that music is extraordinarily rare, with most species finding rhythm and melody indestinguishable from noise. I think the point is that the galactic consciousness that runs it all universally translates for purposes of intercommunication. What is heard or understood is more the concept of what was said than the phonetic content therein. It wasn't that such and such syllables made up the word "human," it was that the concept of human needed a universal concept to tie to the thing itself. For example, a matriarchal insectoid species who canabalizes any mate is known by the concept of "widow" as a species. Not the word, the idea that the galactic mind would push as a conceptual thought in whatever manner of communication a species might communicate in, which itself might or might not be verbal or phonetic.
I guess the meaning of "Earth" would translate to the conceptual thought of "Home Planet"?
If that's how their language works, then I feel like it must be near impossible to add new vocabulary without stringing multiple concepts together. I'm not sure how you could merge conceptual thoughts together like you can words/sounds. We'd end up on a planet named "Blue, Green, Dirt, Water, Bipedal, Planet" or whatever minimal combination ends up being unique.