vulcan naming conventions are inconsistent, but the surakian tradition is generally two-syllable names, men’s s____k, women’s t’p___. so, yeah, t’pose is a completely reasonable english transliteration of a traditional vulcan woman’s name
to expand on this a little, the original memos actually say that vulcan mens’ names should be five letters, s???k. this is where you get “shrek is a vulcan name” discourse.
however, that doesn’t really scan. vulcan names aren’t meant to be written with the latin alphabet, after all, and vulcan script looks like this —
— if you can find anything that’s clearly a letter here, never mind delineating five of them, you’re a better man than me.
rather, i’d like to suggest the typical transliteration of a vulcan man’s personal name will most likely fit a {C}CVC.vc format, transliterated S[VC.v]k, assuming a traditionally minded family as well as modernity not fucking with pronunciation too much—remember young diot coke, born 1379? her name written today would probably be denise cook.
assume for a moment that surak is a good example of a traditional name; sarek, then, is uncorrupted in modernity. [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] and [ˌsaɹˈɛk], i guess? ipa will be the death of me one day and i’m absolute shit at vowels. but both of these names are S[VC.v]k, if you’ll accept some very ad hoc use of standard symbols.
there are names that don’t fit this model, though. spock; tuvok; stonn. we’ll throw shrek in here too.
tuvok is the easiest one to consolidate, of course: CCVC.vc, and the name [ˌstʊvˈɒk] drops its /s/ over time to simply [ˌtʊvˈɒk]
spock, stonn, and shrek are single-syllable, five-letter romanizations. immediately a problem becomes apparent, though; spock’s romanized /ck/ is the same as what is elsewhere romanized simply /k/ — the generalization of {C}CVC.vc as “five letters” throws off what would otherwise be romanized as “spok”; similarly, stonn is… presumably not displaying gemination, as romanizations typically drop it (see óðinn -> odin or the names of the dwarves in lotr for examples of consonant reduplication denoting gemination being dropped); as such we should probably see his name romanized as “ston”.
spock and stonn, normalized as spok and ston, are both CCVC. shrek is CCVC as well; remember /sh/ is /ʃ/ in ipa. so you have, in order, [spɒk], [stɒn], and [ʃɹɛk].
i would argue that spock and shrek are names which, over time, experienced vowel reduction; they’re not invalid names, they simply aren’t the original forms of them. diot and denise.
spock, then, would be derived from the name [ˌsʊpˈɒk]. the vowel loses prominence until it’s no longer pronounced at all, or only barely pronounced.
possibly this is due to a slight complication of the guidelines; not simply {C}CVC.vc, but {C}C’VC.vc. that is, not [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] but [ˌs’ʊɹˈʌk]; not [ˌsaɹˈɛk] but [ˌs’aɹˈɛk]. [ˌst’ʊvˈɒk] becomes [ˌt’ʊvˈɒk]*, and spock maybe originally was [ˌs’ʊpˈɒk].
see, /p/ really loves turning into /p’/; it probably happens in your speech all the time. so [ˌs’ʊpˈɒk] maybe gets functionally pronounced as [ˌs’ʊp’ˈɒk], and that’s a lot of ejectives in one syllable, so down the line it becomes simply [sp’ɒk].
shrek experiences a similar, but not identical, vowel reduction, with the likely protoform [ˌʃ’ʊɹˈɛk] becoming [ʃ’ɹɛk].
stonn is a bit of an odd case, obviously, as it doesn’t end in /k/ at all. i might argue that it’s diminuitive; like naming your kid joe or joey instead of joseph, you might name your kid [st’ɒn] instead of [ˌst’ɒnˈɛk]. this may be especially common if it’s typical vulcan pronunciation is actually [st’ɒŋ] and indicative of a dialect shifting word-final /k/ to /ŋ/; in a dialect where [ˌst’ɒŋˈɛk] is being pronounced [ˌst’ɒŋˈɛŋ] anyway, fuck your _# /ŋ/, who needs it? thus, stonn still feels complete as a name despite technically being a diminuitive.
*note that ipa /t’/ and the element /t’/ in traditional vulcan women’s names are not the same thing; /t’/ designates what in ipa is written /tʔ/ or /t’ʔ/. t’pose is [tʔpoʊz] or [t’ʔpoʊz] and, structurally, i suppose, C’.CCVC, where women’s names are likely constructed C’.CC{C}V{_C}; that is, T’P[{C}V{_C}], allowing t’pau ([t’ʔpaʊ]), t’pring ([t’ʔpɹɪŋ]), t’pose ([t’ʔpoʊz]).
if none of that made any sense, don’t worry, it’s not you it’s that ipa is the actual worst. the tl;dr is basically,
traditional—that is, common and to some degree often culturallyexpected—vulcan men’s personal names are usually (but not necessarily always) derived from a pattern where there are two syllables; the stress is on the first syllable, which starts with ejective S or S and another ejective consonant, has a vowel sound, and then ends with another consonant; the second syllable starts with a vowel and ends with a K.
because of certain traits of languages as they change—a tendency for P to become ejective (“pop”), vowels to “weaken” over time, and the last K in a word to often become a kind of N(g) sound—i think it’s reasonable to say that “spock” is the modern version of a name you could transliterate as “supok”, “stonn” is a nickname for “stonek”, and “shrek” is a valid vulcan name but its original form was probably “sharek”.
additionally, because many names follow a pattern that goes “S, vowel, consonant, vowel, K”, a general rule that expects five-letter vulcan men’s names caused spock and stonn’s names to be spelled so that they would have five letters, despite an inconsistency with spelling rules which would in-universe suggest “spok” and “ston”, respectively.
A Middleground 