Are all Stargate addresses pronounceable in Ancient?

Question

The Ancient outpost Taonas Proclarush was on the planet Proclarush, which had the gate address , which O'Neill pronounced "Proclarush", followed by "at" which was how ancients pronounced the glyph for the point-of-origin.

Can all other gate addresses be pronounced in this fashion? And if so, how can they have meaningful names, since the glyphs represent coordinates in space? Also, won't the names change with stellar drift? How come Proclarush had the same gate address after all those millennia?

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 25 '12 at 16:19

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The gates have a correlative update system which prevents stellar drift from rendering the addresses invalid.

And it would be simple to create a simple sound for each of the standard glyphs (excluding point of origin) that would make a pronouncable word. Most of them would not be real words, but some could be (even those that actually are words could be nonsensical).

It's unlikely that the name was a prediction of the eventual fate of the planet. Much more likely is that when Teunas was lost in the fire, they changed the sounds tied to the address to memorialize it.

answered Feb 25 '12 at 16:19

Jeff

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But then how did the addresses on the Abydos cartouche become invalid and had to be compensated for stellar drift? – HNL Feb 26 '12 at 01:12
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@HNL - Only the dialing computer at the SGC had to compensate for stellar drift "manually"; the dial-home-devices (DHDs) used by the majority of other star gates had a networked approach. – Bevan Feb 26 '12 at 03:32
@Bevan I'm an idiot. Of course you're correct. That explains everything. The gate system maps the original address to the new address internally and human users never see it. So the pronunciation "proclarush" remains. – HNL Feb 26 '12 at 05:37

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 25 '12 at 20:25

I would say that is doubtful that all addresses could be pronounced. I was under the impression that in the original movie universe the symbols represented constellations, but that would not make sense if the ancients could foresee and plan for stellar drift. If they were letters of the ancients' alphabet then I find it very unlikely linguistically that all addresses make up readable names.

One explanation for this though could be that the gate symbols were like consonants and the vowel sounds were just sort of made up or accepted convention. An example of this can be seen in a modern biblical scholarship debate:

The ancient Jewish scribes that recorded much of the old testament used the letters yod, hay, vav, hay to represent the most sacred form of the name of God. In English this is often abbreviated YHVH and is called the tetragrammaton. One of the big problems this made for the modern Judeo-Christian scholars is that we have no way of knowing how this was originally pronounced. This is where both of the pronunciations YaHWeH and JeHoVaH come from. Because there were no vowels in ancient Hebrew we are left to guess, but these are two accepted pronunciations for a word that technically isn't readable.

My point is that it could similarly have been possible that only some of the sounds in the word proclarush may have been represented in the accepted pronunciation. This is definitely a case where suspension of disbelief is required, because based on the number of gate symbols and possible combinations, we would have a far greater number of gate addresses than there are words in the English language. It's quite unbelievable to suggest that those all formed proper words in any humanoid spoken language.

I won't even start on the whole English-speaking universes thing, cause that's a whole different can of worms.

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 01 '14 at 15:32

While the SGC has chosen to use a coded form for identifying planets (P3X-989, where they met Harlan in Tin Man for example) the Ancients who built the gates assigned a syllable to each of the gate symbols - allowing the gate address to be pronounced. Thus, just as an SGC member would ask you to dial P3X-989, an Ancient would be able to ask you to dial Proclarush Taonas and expect you to understand what symbols to dial. The meaning of the words came later, after what happened to the planet where the gate was located. Since the planet had a defence Chair, it is logical to assume that at one time there was a significant population to protect. The loss of one of the first colonised planets was remembered, and likely passed down by the Ancients - stories of the ancient land of Proclarush, lost in fire, led to the word entering the language.
As a side note, the SGC coding of the planet either might not be using a direct one-to-one assignment to gate symbols, despite having six symbol codes, since they always seem to start with P, or else they only ever travel to one particular strip of the galaxy.

P was for Planet in think I recall that one gate was on a moon and had an M prefix — Neuromancer, Jul 31 '18 at 18:59

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 31 '18 at 05:32

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Well, if you think about it, the Address for Proclarush has SIX syllables, like an address has six stellar coordinates and any of the 39 (or 36 for ATL or Universe Gates) as the point of origin

Pro-Cla-Rush-Ta-On-As-ORIGIN

edited Jul 31 '18 at 05:32

Edlothiad

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answered Jun 12 '15 at 11:57

Deadllama

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Are all Stargate addresses pronounceable in Ancient?

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