The Doctor Who thread

[Ultra Mackness]

We got his nickname in "The Armageddon Factor" from Drax - "Thete" short for Theta Sigma. Maybe his name/s begin "Th" and "S"? Unless theta sigma was a fraternity within the Prydonian academy, or a category for renegades from that chapter?

[GoktimusPrime]

Perhaps Thete/Theta is a reference to the Deca - the group of rebellious Time Lords that the Doctor (and the Master) were members of in his youth. Deca sounds the same as the Greek word for 'ten' (Deka), which in Greek is spelt delta-epsilon-kappa-alpha (δέκα), but in Modern Greek Delta is pronounced more like the voiced dental plosive "th" (similar to how it's pronounced in English "then, though, bother etc.); and indeed that's the sound that delta represents in the International Phonetic Alphabet (e.g. "than" is phonetically spelt /δæn/). It was pronounced more like /d/ in Classical (Ancient) Greek, but there's evidently been a consonant shift since then. Phonetically 'theta' represents the voiceless dental fricative* "th", similar to how 'th' is pronounced in English words like thought, moth, think etc.).

So maaaaaaybe Theta is a reference to the Deca (if one were to misspell it in Greek with a Theta instead of a Delta). No idea what the Sigma might represent though... that my theory is a load of Sigma-Kappa-Alpha-Tau-Alpha?

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*In some other English dialects it's a voiceless dental plosive, like in some Irish accents (listen to the way Qantas CEO Alan Joyce pronounces "thousand" - that's similar to how Theta is/was pronounced in Classical/Ancient Greek. The way most Australians pronounce it is more similar to Modern Greek.

[Ultra Mackness]

Pronunciation aside, I always found it rather perplexing that an academy on Galifrey would resort to using an alphabet from Earth of all places?!

That said I figured that the nickname, like nicknames on Earth, was given due to the Doctor's interest in this planet. Was Earth his thesis topic? Could explain why he took off in an old type 40 - the campus headline could be "Disgruntled honours student breaks in to near disused storage room. Takes equipment noone really knew or cared was there."

So then I was thinking why Theta Sigma? Time Lord society is Science and Math based. In maths (here on Earth anyway), theta is generally used to represent the unknown angle in a right triangle, capital Sigma is used to represent summation and lower case sigma to represent a standard deviation from the average. My take is that because the Doctor's views on Time Lord society were different from most other Time Lords, you could think of him as being at an angle to what is "right" in that society. Using lower case sigma, you could also think of the Doctor as not being average, in both personality and intelligence, he would be a standard deviation from the average. Hence Theta sigma.

[GoktimusPrime]

Pronunciation aside, I always found it rather perplexing that an academy on Galifrey would resort to using an alphabet from Earth of all places?!

Perhaps that Alphabet originated on Gallifrey and the Doctor or some other Time Lord gave it to the humans? Then there's Cybertron where they use Greek/Latin based names... and also names based on concepts that wouldn't even exist on Cybertron, e.g. Bumblebee, Hound etc.

Maybe they represent numbers -- in Classical Greek Theta = 9, and Sigma = 200. <shrugs>

[SMHFConvoy]

Last weeks episode was good, tonight's was even better. Let's keep that up shall we?

[KalEl]

Last weeks episode was good, tonight's was even better. Let's keep that up shall we?

agreed

[Autocon]

Bob. Thats his name