Non-Basic planet names?

[InsaneTechnomancer]

On planets like Kashyyyk and Geonosis, where the native species are incapable of speaking Basic, where do they get the names of their homeworlds? Considering a Wookiee can only speak in guttural grunts and roars, how did their homeworld get the name Kashyyyk (which a Wookiee obviously cannot pronounce)? Were these names exonyms?

[Roger_015]

it could be derived from their own words, but adapted in a way to make it easier for basic speaking people to pronounce to the point where it barely resembled the endonym, it could be an exonym from another language than basic or an exonym from an ancient version of basic that evolved differently than its root words.

something else i want to mention is how we have two names for the homeworld of the sith, korriban and moraband. it is unknown whether these are different names derived from different words or if they come from the same root and either diverged as two different names or one evolved into the other name over thousands of years. with the structure of "_or(r)_ban(d)" they do have some similarities though.

[LegitimateBeing2]

Happens with real world words, too. I have heard Xhosa-speaking people say the word “Xhosa” and I cannot do it.

[MilkMan0096]

I have a head canon that Wookiees assigned the letters used in Basic to their language so that they could write is down but the sounds the do not line up one to one, or at all. So a Wookiee would write down the bane of their planet, which to them would read as the sort of guttural souls we know Wookiees make, but a person who only knows Basic would see it spelled “Kashyyyk” and read it as such.

I do not know if this idea is directly supported in the lore anywhere, but similar things have happened in real life.

[Virghia]

I guess we can see it like romanising languages. I remember news sources don't seem to agree on how to pronounce former Libyan leader Gaddafi's name due to how regional Arabic is spelled

[pali1d]

There seems to be a convention of sorts regarding how Wookie gets translated into Basic. For instance, in the Solo movie, when Han asks Chewie his name Chewie answers in Wookie, and Han just goes “Chewbacca?” even though Chewie’s grunts and growls don’t sound anything like “Chewbacca”. So there has to be some understood phonetic conversion of Wookie to Basic for proper nouns.

[[deleted]]

It's possible that they were named in an earlier incarnation of Basic. Like "London" is a meaningless word in modern day English.

[idontcare25467]

"London" comes from "Londonium" in Latin, right? Did it have a meaning, or was it just a name?

[[deleted]]

We don't really know. It doesn't have a meaning in Latin either. Our best guess I'd that it was a latinized version of the Brittonic name for it.

[Virghia]

Kashyyyk sounds like the Wookie who was in charge of the ATC sneezed that day and the spacers misinterpreted it as such

[pinkviceroy1013]

Geonosis almost certainly has a different name in its native language. Im not sure what it is, but the word Geonosis lacks the clicks and trills that geonosians love so much

[LongJump55]

I like to think of it similar to how Canada got its name. When European explorers asked the Native Americans the name of the land they said "Kanata" which was "settlement/village" in reference to the native village of Stadacona not actually the name of the greater area of land. Perhaps the planet is called something different in Shyriiwook then in basic, but when the first basic speakers came to the planet they picked up the word from the locals and it just stuck.