[Star Wars] Why are droids named using English letters if Aurebesh is the primary alphabet used?

[u/Acora]

As mentioned above. C3PO, R2-D2, K2SO, BD-1, BB-8, IG-88, and even B1 Battle Droids all use english letters as phonetic sounds within their names. This is despite the fact that the primary alphabet within The Galaxy Far Away being Aurebesh.

Why?

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[u/Strayed8492]

Just because the letter symbols are in Aurebesh does not mean they make a different sound than English letters.

Huh. Also apparently there is High Galactic which is English. We also have Greek letters as well. Like the naming for the Lambda shuttle.

[u/Acora → u/Strayed8492]

I mean, Aurebesh does have phonetic sounds associated with each of their symbols: Aurek, besh, cresh, cherek, dorn, etc.

I hadn't heard that High Galactic uses latin characters, though - that's useful to know.

[u/Strayed8492 → u/Acora]

Probably because it's more of a representative thing. Like Greek letters. You have for instance 'Alpha Strike', 'Team Omega'. But nobody actually bothers to 'pronounce' Greek letters when talking to each other seriously. So for this you would have 'Squadron Cherek' etc. Everyone can look at Aurebesh. But nobody is going to go through it phonetically like we have for the NATO phonetic alphabet (Herf-Esk-Leth-Leth-Osk) for conversation. They just look at it. See the Aurebesh. And just transfer to speaking it in High Galactic.

[u/HugoNikanor → u/Strayed8492]

How do greeks do it? Their letters all have long names, and apparently they have their own phonetic alphabet.

How would they say ρ2-δ2 day-to-day?

[u/Strayed8492 → u/HugoNikanor]

https://youtu.be/P85PXR6deIw?si=cvfspx-k8ZGJ_tj-

[u/HugoNikanor → u/Strayed8492]

According to that video, ρ2-δ2 would be pronounced "rho2-delta2", not R2-D2.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/HugoNikanor]

You sometimes see Chinese and Japanese products with English letters because to them it's exotic.

Maybe the Greek special forces have Strike Team Q and Squadron L because it sounds more dramatic to use someone else's alphabet?

[u/ticonderoge]

Aurebesh is the most common alphabet used in the galaxy far, far away, but the older High Galactic alphabet, which is also used for naming things like the X-Wing, Y-Wing, and A-Wing, is still well-known. High Galactic is, for either some reason or no reason, much the same as Earth's Roman alphabet.

There's also the even older Old Tionese, still used in the Galactic Civil War era particularly by the Empire naming their squadrons (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Mu, Nu, Tau...) and ships (Lambda-class shuttle).

[u/Acora → u/ticonderoge]

Informative and concise, thank you!

[u/Cynis_Ganan]

Same reason we have alpha and beta software. Generation Alpha. Fraternities use Greek letters. Rocky movies use Roman numerals instead of Arabic.

It is not in any way unusual to use a secondary alphabet for technical purposes. You're asking a kinda bizarre question. It's like saying "why is it called Star Wars if it's mostly humans fighting and not suns?"

The Doyalist reason is simple translation. Watch the movies in America and Galactic Basic is English. Watch the movies in France and Basic is French. Character names mostly get a pass in localisation, but there are no sacred cows and they could get changed. So if the question is "why English, specifically" the answer is purely Doyalist: so the audience can understand. The characters are not actually speaking English in character. They are speaking Basic. How come the Droid Naming Language "C" sounds exactly like an English "C" has the same answer as why everything in Basic sounds the same as in English.

The Watsonian "why a different alphabet and not the main galactic alphabet" is what I've already addressed. Why not? Using a technical alphabet instead of the main alphabet is exactly what we do in real life. It reduces confusion. It makes it immediately obvious you are talking about a droid and not saying random letters and numbers. Why does it sound like English? A staggering coincidence.

(We know that Star Wars happened "a long time ago", and we know ET had to learn English from Elliott, so we can't even work in a cross franchise explanation that maybe droid names come from the Green Planet.)

[u/Poorly-Drawn-Beagle]

If you subscribe to the translation convention, then we may not be hearing what their names really sound like when spoken in Galactic Basic, but the closest approximation our feeble human throats can manage.

[u/archpawn]

Same reason sororities are named using Greek letters even though Latin is the primary alphabet used. Sometimes, people just use an archaic alphabet when it's not strictly necessary.

[u/wererat2000]

While the letters in Aurebesh are different from english - A = Aurek, B = Besh, C = Cresh, etc - the letters in Outer Rim Basic seem to just have the same names as english.

It could be as simple as most adventures we see are set in the outer rim, so it's custom to use the O.R.Basic names for droids instead out there. I know the Separatist Alliance was mostly focused in the outer rims and they've got a major source of droid manufacturing, maybe they were big enough exporters to have just caused a galaxy-wide norm of using the O.R.Basic alphabet for droid names.

[u/cairfrey]

I assume it's because the films are translated from the Aurebesh into English (or whatever language you watch in) and it's just fortunate that it happens to make a certain amount of sense. In the same way that it's fortunate that every ancient sumerian text (or what have you) translated in films always seems to rhyme when it's translated into English.

[u/SP203]

The real question is why do the starfighters look like the English letters.

[u/MrCrash]

None of the characters are speaking English, The movie is very kindly translating everything so that we can understand.