Good God, how has this thread escaped my attention?
IMO, since they have already been given a naming scene, that of the Mycenians/Minoans, we should use that. How do you say "people" in Minoan? How do you say "Home" (for the planet), and how do you say "sun" (for their home star)?
Thar we go, problem solved.
That's what
you think...
We don't know how you say "people" in Minoan. We don't know how you say "Home", or "Sun". We don't know s**t about what the Minoans called things, because the Minoan language is more than a dead language. It is
lost.
We 've read
Mycenian clay tablets (which aren't more than palace archives), but that's because Myceneans were Greeks, and spoke Greek. They just used another writing system. So, all Ventris (the guy who deciphered their script) had to do (and it wasn't easy) was to match the early Mycenean symbols with greek syllables, and voila! he could read Mycenean.
But Minoans
weren't Greeks, although they lived in the island of Crete (which, today, belongs to Greece). They spoke a
completely different language: they probably weren't even Indo-European. So we have
absolutely no idea how they called things.
It's relatively safe to assume that the great palaces (Knossos, Phaistos, Malia and Zakros -pronounced Know-SOS, Phae -STOS, MA-lea and ZA-cross) were called that, because we found those names in Mycenean tablets (in the lines of: "Imports from Knossos: Two spears and two talents of bronze") and because during the antiquity these places retained their name. It's also noteworthy that these names have absolutely no known meaning in Greek, which is a testament to their pre-Greek origin.
What really bugs me (since I'm both Greek and an archaeologist) is the fact that the ASW team used the modern Greek names of pretty much every mycenean, cycladic and minoan archaeological site to name their ships. The minoans
most certainly did not call the settlement 'Akrotiri'. That means 'Cape' in modern Greek, and only refers to
where the site lies: in a cape, in the island of Santorini. 'Apesokari' means 'Never-corrupted-Grace', and refers to the church of Madonna Apesokari, which was near the site. And so on. And so forth.
I realize that since we have no idea what the Minoans called these sites, the ASW team (and those who had to deal with the Ancients before them) had to do with what they could get. I certainly have nothing better to suggest, if they insist in using Minoan-relative designations.
But this is QFT:
This campaign, however, is about Ancients fighting Shivans, and there's really no basis to use Minoan naming scheme, any more than any other naming scheme. Ship wise you could go with something similar as the Japanese used in WW2 - Navy Type Zero fighter etc. But I do oppose using Minoan names just because terrans designated Knossos device as "Knossos" thousands of years after Ancients had died.
EDIT: 200 posts.