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Sep. 13th, 2006 06:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficIn essence, each planet has two designations: the six symbols you use to get there and the seventh symbol that’s planet specific. It would have been possible to design a system where you dialled six symbols for the destination and six for the origin (though if you dialled an origin of six symbols for another planet, could you remotely open a wormhole? The world may never know). Or, heck, the stargates could have been designed to assume that the gate you’re dialling from is the gate of origin. But that would be too easy.
In the show, on more than one occasion, it’s been shown that if you move a stargate from one planet to another, you can dial out using the new planet as the planet of origin, even though the gate wouldn’t have a symbol on it specific to that planet. This would imply that the 37th symbol just means "origin," and the fact that it’s different on every planet is just window-dressing.
Now back to the "Lost City" where Jack gives the syllables for two gate addresses. I’ve already pointed out the problem with "sh." The other one he says is "at" – in reference to the Earth symbol. This makes no sense. There are 36 symbols on every gate, but there are as many wildcard symbols as gates in the system. I think it’s fair to assume that there are more of these symbols than there are possible syllables (with earth phonemes, at least), so it would not make sense to have syllables attached to planet-specific symbols.
Unless "at" just means "origin," just like (as I said above) the wild-card symbol just means "origin."
On another note, there’s a problem with my hypothesis that SGC uses an alpha-numeric system to designate stargate symbols. On numerous occasions, we’ve seen SG-1 members write out gate symbols to show to each other. Since these are presumably hard to draw recognisably, it would make more since for them to use the alpha-numeric designation if they had one worked out. I’m going to chalk this up to writers being flashy. If Daniel had shown up in "There But for the Grace of God" with a crumpled note with letters and numbers on it, it would hardly have been as interesting as him having gate symbols.
Again – do I think any writer on the show has ever thought about this? No. I’m just having fun poking holes in their world-building.
In the show, on more than one occasion, it’s been shown that if you move a stargate from one planet to another, you can dial out using the new planet as the planet of origin, even though the gate wouldn’t have a symbol on it specific to that planet. This would imply that the 37th symbol just means "origin," and the fact that it’s different on every planet is just window-dressing.
Now back to the "Lost City" where Jack gives the syllables for two gate addresses. I’ve already pointed out the problem with "sh." The other one he says is "at" – in reference to the Earth symbol. This makes no sense. There are 36 symbols on every gate, but there are as many wildcard symbols as gates in the system. I think it’s fair to assume that there are more of these symbols than there are possible syllables (with earth phonemes, at least), so it would not make sense to have syllables attached to planet-specific symbols.
Unless "at" just means "origin," just like (as I said above) the wild-card symbol just means "origin."
On another note, there’s a problem with my hypothesis that SGC uses an alpha-numeric system to designate stargate symbols. On numerous occasions, we’ve seen SG-1 members write out gate symbols to show to each other. Since these are presumably hard to draw recognisably, it would make more since for them to use the alpha-numeric designation if they had one worked out. I’m going to chalk this up to writers being flashy. If Daniel had shown up in "There But for the Grace of God" with a crumpled note with letters and numbers on it, it would hardly have been as interesting as him having gate symbols.
Again – do I think any writer on the show has ever thought about this? No. I’m just having fun poking holes in their world-building.