I knew the name I wanted to give, and the etymology for it. From a fictitious-milieu pov, it creates an interesting test in creator's ethics.
- If you create fictitious names for mass consumption in English, is there an ethical obligation to be authentic?
By this, I mean that you can obviously be identical to English (e.g. if you call it a "cat", readers shall assume it's the same as an Earth housecat), or completely original (e.g. Rice vampires, Pern dragons, any SF). But what if you surreptitiously give a mis-definition of a word, or a mis-etymology of a name, which contradicts the real world? That's ... harmless if everybody suspends judgment, and doesn't take your work seriously. But still ... do you want to be known for promulgating something incorrect?
IMHO, it'd be kind of nifty if people read a novel that oh-by-the-way explained a tricky feature of quantum chromodynamics (because it's crucial to the locked-room mystery) ... and all of it was actually technically correct. Readers might actually learn something as a byproduct, which could last well beyond that one fictional work. (Niven's Ringworld math, everything by Robert L. Forward, and Diane Duane's explanation of Star Trek impulse drive as gravitational collapse + surfing on the gravity waves, exploit this: sometimes nailing the details is the best way to blow the reader's mind.) The alternative is that you feed them something false, it works for that story ... and it persists in a subset of impressionable minds, and clouds the issue in unforeseeable ways. (Or: they realize it's hogwash, and equate you with a hogwasher.) I'd just rather spend my gaming time clearing (mental) fog, instead of blowing new smoke.
- I first formulated this issue in an eCCG we maintained, where I wrote flavor text. Some spells are real Earth words in the dictionary, e.g. Harmattan is a hot wind that blows from the desert to the sea, and Ergotism is a poisoning of the central nervous system that comes from eating wheat tainted with a fungal blight, whose symptoms are almost exactly like the witchcraft-accused in the Salem witch trials. First thing I did with any word I don't recognize is look it up in OED. If it exists, I preserve that meaning. I shall not attempt to use my soapbox to redefine English.
That means I can't just redefine Arabic, either. This is relevant because real-world star names come to us from antiquity:
Historically (but not in games) only a comparatively few of the stars visible to the naked eye have been given names. Sometimes a single star can have multiple names. Sometimes the same name is used for more than one star. None of this is unusual when you consider that we have been naming them for thousands of years and have only recently been cataloging star names.
For the curious, try plowing through Richard Hinckley Allen's "Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning" (it has defeated me). Star names come to us from different timeslices of human history. Each civilization is as a pane of glass, with their own star names written upon it. Stack all those slices to represent history, and some star names leak through from each slice, most get blocked off, some wind and bounce and get munged like pachinko balls. What we see today is the haphazard and wondrous way in which those names percolated through all subsequent eras. So we get some Greek, some Arabic, some Indian, etc. (The prevalence of "Al" in star names, e.g. Algol, Almath, Altair, is from Arabic "al __", meaning roughly "the".) And a single star's name can show linguistic drift. (My star is a case in point!!)
For the (real-world) star whose name I chose:
- Richard Hinkley Allen conjectured (whimsically?) that the root word was Arabic Ibt armpit (because that's where the star looks like it sits in its constellation, haha), with phonetic drift to Bet/Beid/Beit. Furthermore, he tried to shoehorn the meaning of the name to armpit of the giant, but the giant in Arabic is al Jabbar (which is exactly why Lew Alcindor chose it).
- This is now discredited; current canon (i.e. best guess) is that the root word was Yad hand, which in Arabic has two tiny dots. In the Middle Ages, an underpaid monk typo'd it to one dot, which changes the consonant, and the word to Bad. Somehow that copy stuck like a mutated meme, and (it must have) dominated all subsequent European compilations of star names.
- After further drift through German, it is today officially standardized (by IAU?) as Betelgeuse, which is still durn close to the original pronunciation. N.B. In this standard form, it appears in the GC2 list of star names. As you know, Betelgeuse really does sit at the upper-right "shoulder" of Orion (it appears at the upper-left because he's facing toward us, to swing his club at Taurus) ... or his "armpit" if you squint and dream a bit.
I chose to submit its original form, because I think it's cool that a piece of the Arabic pane of star-naming glass persist into 2014 and beyond. Hence:
- Yad al Jauza hand of the central one
although it seems that "al-Jauza" is now simply considered to be a proper name for "Orion". Say it fast (with the monk's typo) and you can hear how it must have drifted to "beteljooz(ah)".
Plan B would have been Hinckley Allen's Ibt al Jabbar armpit of the giant. But that's simply something fictitious (not matching anything in the real world), so it wouldn't be interesting in any way to make it persist beyond the scope of this one game. Yad al Jauza is doubly cool because it's (we think) true: that's really how the name originated, and we (as the Terran race!) have not yet forgotten.
So now I always pronounce it that way at star parties :) And recite some of the above, hehe.
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