Worldbuilding

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What would inorganic species call themselves? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by T156@lemmy.world to c/worldbuilding@lemmy.world

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I've been using "mechanoid" as a classification (similar to humanoid, etc), but a friend pointed out that it's both too generic, and that said inorganics might just consider it biology, with organics being the weird outlier.

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[–] T156@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

Linguistically, whatever they name themselves in their own language would just translate to whatever we call them in our languages because that’s usually what we do. I think this would be especially true if the alien language is physically impossible to vocalize as a human.

Fair point. I was rather thinking about it from more of a human categorisation point of view. If they're not all mechanical, or weren't constructed, I can definitely see some limits with using "mechanoid" as a descriptor.

Like how you could categorise a lot of mammals as organoid, but it lacks the nuances compared to having other words like mammalian or humanoid.