naming

The Naming of Everything

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If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant;
if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be thought remains unthought;
if what must be thought is not thought, then what must be done remains undone;
if this remains undone, apprehension of truth and beauty will deteriorate;
if apprehension goes astray, the people will act poorly in helpless confusion.

Hence there must be neither arbitrariness or ambiguity in what is said.
This matters above everything.

Aurí Péng, philosopher of Ochale, quoted in the charter of the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology

Author’s note: This is inspired/based on a quotation from K’ung-fu-tzu, on the Rectification of Names (see The Analects of Confucius, book 13, verse 3, for the original), modified in accordance with the then state of Imperial philosophy. I think it fits quite well.

Trope-a-Day: Naming Your Colony World

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Naming Your Colony World: Examples of most of them exist in various places, although the Imperial Grand Survey works really hard to discourage people from naming anything New Anything, to the point of refusing to register the names, on the grounds that in deep time, eventually naming things New New New New New Whatever is too damn silly for words.

Beyond that, most of them are literary or mythological references, with a smattering of egopoli and symbolic names.  Numbered names are generally reserved for unexplored systems (most of them beyond the periphery of the Associated Worlds), and star names are generally not found per se, although generally, settled systems tend to be referred to, even on star charts, by the name of the primary settled world/main habitat in the system, rather than that of the star; which is not to say that the star doesn’t retain its own name separate from that of the world in formal usage, of course.