gamma quadrant

[StarfleetCommand74656]

why are gamma quadrant natives happy with the Federation classing them as the gamma (third) quadrant? To them it would be the Alpha Quadrant!

[Founder]

Strange that I never saw this topic here. I would have answered it a while ago.

This question has been asked about all of the quadrants. People often wonder why the Romulans and Klingons allow the Federation to call themselves the Alpha quadrant, while they get the Beta quadrant.

Same thing with the Dominion in the Gamma quadrant.

I also saw this question being asked in regards to Voyager and how they tell everyone in the Delta quadrant that they're headed towards the Alpha quadrant.

I'm not sure what the answer is for all of the species, but for some I'd imagine they may have their own system of mapping the galaxy and they don't do it in quadrants. So for them, they don't care what some alien species claims about them living in (insert quadrant name) quadrant. I guess for others they simply don't care.

From an out-of-universe answer, it would get rather tedious if every alien species the Defiant and Voyager ran into constantly complained about the quadrant issue.

Good question, though.

[voyager7]

This is a very good question.

The communication between alien species is possible through UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR(even between Humans, Klingons, Romulans).

May be the universal translator does the trick of converting the Beta or Delta or Gamma quadrant to the appropriate name in their language.

[calvin]

reminds me of something a read off wikipedia recently (you'll find that i cite wikipedia a lot) regarding the UK's Union Jack, which is an amalgam of the St. George's Cross (England) and the St. Andrew's Cross (Scotland), and later overlaid with the St. Patrick's cross (Ireland's flag).

i found it humorous that this symbol of national unity actually upset some Scots, who complained that the Scottish flag was "underneath" the English flag, despite the fact that this choice was merely a design decision; you can't put the St. George's Cross underneath the St. Andrew's Cross for the simple reason that the St. Andrew's Cross is a negative image.

blind nationalism is such an outdated and counterproductive attitude as it turns the concept of national pride on its head, inverting a source of unity into something that's culturally divisive.

i would hope that by the time a species becomes a space-faring society, that they'd put aside such petty ethnocentrism. otherwise we'd have to do away with sequential naming conventions altogether.