Do you talk more like a Yankee or a Southerner? (US)

[Asso]

... I guess it was the clothes that made the queen.)

Not only the queen, I think.

[Alelou]

(Kinda like Queen Amidala did in SW I: The Phantom Menace. I guess it was the clothes that made the queen.)

Oh jeez. I just realized that all this time I've thought of her as Queen Amygdala. (Not pronounced like the brain stem, though.) Hee!

They sure could have had more fun with accents on Enterprise, I'll grant you that. On the other hand, then you can run into abominations like the way the actors talked when they turned into bird people in Extinction. That episode was probably pretty damned good on paper but the way it was played made me giggle in all the wrong places. What was Levar thinking?????

[Lady Rainbow]

They sure could have had more fun with accents on Enterprise, I'll grant you that. On the other hand, then you can run into abominations like the way the actors talked when they turned into bird people in Extinction. That episode was probably pretty damned good on paper but the way it was played made me giggle in all the wrong places. What was Levar thinking?????

Yeah. How a character talks and their mannerisms can make or break that character. If it's too outrageous, believability goes out the window. I think I remember watching an interview with John Billingsley during season 1. He said that no one had given him any background on Phlox's character and he thought that maybe Phlox came from an avian civilization. So when he did his dialogue, he punctuated it with "SQUAWK!" And the director actually asked him, "What the he** are you DOING????"

One of my beefs about ST in general was that for a "United Earth" and a multi-species Federation, almost everyone speaks w/a North American accent. (except for the characters from the UK like Malcolm and Scotty. And I KNOW Picard's supposed to be French, but HE had a Brit accent. Ditto Deanna Troi. And Chekov. "Nuclear wessels". ARGH! ).

Even the Vulcans and the Andorians and the guys from the Delta Quadrant. Maybe that's just he linguist in me, but...

[okay, linguistic rant over. Whew. Sorry. I get a bit too passionate about these things.]

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

^ I suppose the Universal Translator was programmed by a Yankee!

[Alelou]

^ I suppose the Universal Translator was programmed by a Yankee!

Yup, that's got to be it.

I love the way our primitive aliens aren't supposed to notice that some sort of translator is in use. In reality, one would have to expect SOME lag -- enough to cause a quite noticeable lip synching problem. I also love how it still miraculously works even in places where our heroes have already been stripped of everything else, as in The Communicator and presumably Canamar too.

Having said all that, realistically dealing with the linguistic problems faced by trying to converse with aliens is definitely not something I'd recommend for any TV show that needs to hold an audience. So Super!Hoshi is a good thing.

[CX]

American show, American actors, American audience, go figure.

[thecursor]

One of my beefs about ST in general was that for a "United Earth" and a multi-species Federation, almost everyone speaks w/a North American accent. (except for the characters from the UK like Malcolm and Scotty. And I KNOW Picard's supposed to be French, but HE had a Brit accent. Ditto Deanna Troi. And Chekov. "Nuclear wessels". ARGH! ).

I always thought the rule of thumb was "anybody human is speaking English or at least 'Terran', and anybody not human is speaking their own language translated through the subcutaneous translator implanted under the skin of all Starfleet officers." Although why that's true on Enterprise too never seems to make sense since the translator seems to be really new and the idea of putting one under your skin in the 24th century freaks me out. Clearly it isn't attached to their chest comms because they can still understand each other none the less.

I always thought a good "not done" episode for DS9 would be one where the translator stops working and suddenly all the Bajoran officers can't understand the human ones and Dax is completely unintelligible.

[Elessar]

One of my beefs about ST in general was that for a "United Earth" and a multi-species Federation, almost everyone speaks w/a North American accent. (except for the characters from the UK like Malcolm and Scotty. And I KNOW Picard's supposed to be French, but HE had a Brit accent. Ditto Deanna Troi. And Chekov. "Nuclear wessels". ARGH! ).

I always thought the rule of thumb was "anybody human is speaking English or at least 'Terran', and anybody not human is speaking their own language translated through the subcutaneous translator implanted under the skin of all Starfleet officers." Although why that's true on Enterprise too never seems to make sense since the translator seems to be really new and the idea of putting one under your skin in the 24th century freaks me out. Clearly it isn't attached to their chest comms because they can still understand each other none the less.

I always thought a good "not done" episode for DS9 would be one where the translator stops working and suddenly all the Bajoran officers can't understand the human ones and Dax is completely unintelligible.

Yeah, at least acknowlegding the universality of UTs once other than in "Little Green Men" when the Ferengi went back to 1947, would have been cool.

Yeah, I wonder wtf Trill would sound like!

[JadziaKathryn]

Dax presumably speaks English. After all, one would expect Starfleet Academy to conduct their classes in English, which seems to the be lingua franca of the Federation.

[Asso]

Dax presumably speaks English. After all, one would expect Starfleet Academy to conduct their classes in English, which seems to the be lingua franca of the Federation.

It would be very interesting how English language might change with the march of time, assuming - how it's very probable - that it would be the "lingua franca".

[Alelou]

English is already such a mish-mash of other languages that it's probably ideal for the job.

But English spelling ... gah! I wonder if they'd try once again to develop a truly phonetic spelling.

[evcake]

Not getting out much for the past few months, I've been reading my way through my own bookshelves, and have reached the shelf where Manly Wade Wellman's novels reside. Most of them are set in Appalchia. Interesting terms come thick and fast. "Air" or "airy" for "any," for instance. And what, exactly, is a soogin sack? The only definition I can find refers to a bed quilt.
Appalachia covers a lot of geography, obviously, but the majority of it seems to be in the South.