Triaxiansilk.com

Well I know I kind of started something pretty intense over the last few days. Let's see if this is calmer, I hope so. Some of us like to write about Trip learning to speak Vulcan. Here's a question... Would he "Sound" like the Trip we all know and love speaking a language that is not his native language? I don't mean his actual vioce or accent, more the way he speaks. He did tell Hoshi languages were not easy for him at all. So I'm of the opinion the way he talks would alter considerably if he was speaking Vulcan very formal and stiff. Thoughts? Maybe some of our multi-lingual friends would share their opinions.

I don't get it. How can you not talk like yourself when you're speaking any language (assuming you know it well enough to express yourself)?

As some one who learned a couple of languages, your mouth is formed to pronounce words like in your native tongue. I remember my Japanese teachers telling me to soften my g-sound. The Dutch "g" is great when you speak Hebrew or Arabic, but not when you speak Japanese. Also in a language you used a certain rythym. I remember a TnT story by Asso and when I read it, I could clearly hear his Italian rythym (which suited the story very well).
So yes, Trips accent would be heard in Vulcan.
On the other hand, if you are surrounded by people who speak a certain language and you are what we call "baptized" in a language for a period of time, your accent could start to fade and you start to speak the language as the people around you. The bond may also have some effect. I don't think, however, you ever are going to speak Vulcan without any accent. The mother language always stays dominant.
Small remark: my vision of Vulcan is that you have several dialects (related to provinces) and a casual and formal Vulcan. I think T'Pols family would speak formal Vulcan, while Kov may speak more casual Vulcan and most likely with a certain dialect. I don't think the whole planet speaks one type of Vulcan. I can imagine Trip is more comfortable with the casual Vulcan.

Alelou OK let me try to be clearer I thought this might be an issue I'm an idiot.

I know people who speak multiple languages, and they change how they speak, phrasing, emphesis, and so forth depending on which language they use. The language they are least comfortable with they tend to speak very formally and proper. What I am wondering is would Trip do this when speaking Vulcan?

Panyasan Thanks for the tips. I don't think I want him to have too many problems with pronunciation due to the "cool vulcan mojo" aspect I will bring into it later. But I am taking notes.

Warpgirl - how you speak a language has also to do with your personality. If you are a outgoing person with lots of humour like Trip, you will pick up the casual language much easier. If you are a diplomat-type like Archer tries to be - you are going to be a bit formal. It also depends on the occassion: a peace conference is different then drinks with Vulcan friends.

Well so far in my own head, thanks to "cool Vulcan mojo" he's very fluent in about six months after finding out he's bonded. Hey I like to play with things. But he doesn't particularly like speaking it. He knows he's speaking correctly, that he can be understood, but he's not comfortable. He doesn't feel like he can be colorful speaking it. I have a feeling it will develop but for now he finds it awkward even though he's doing it right.

Personal observation, I know a lady who was born in Hungry and and raised speaking Hungarian, when she learned English it was hard because while she is the sweetest, most loving, nurturing person in the world, she sometimes sounds, abrupt rude and downright mean! Nothing is farther from the truth, but she still thinks in Hungarian. She's always saying, "that would sound nicer in Hungarian." But because of that her English is often very stiff and formal.

I speak 4 languages other than my native language of Dutch and I speak each one with a more or less pronounced Dutch accent... including English, Italian, Spanish and Chinese.

Y'all have never heard anything until you hear Chinese spoken with a germanic accent. My Chinese friends think it hilarious.

Vulcan is a very gutteral language as it was spoken in the original series. The Vulcan of Trip's time sounded too... um... clean. It didn't sound that difficult. I would bet it would be easy to learn, logical in its conjugations and probably designed to be easy to remember... in other words waaaaay easier to learn than English which makes no sense at all.

I doubt that Trip would drop sounds in Vulcan. Local accents have little to do with how you speak another language. You imitate what you hear usually. It would be cool to figure out if Vulcans had regional dialects. I have a hard time understanding some accents even though we are all basically speaking the same basic language. It's not so much how you sound when you talk but what you hear that you imitate.


peg

A lot of how you sound and whether you are formal or informal depends on how you learn and also how much you speak and where. If he were to learn on Vulcan by immersion he might develop a less formal vocab but if he learns from T'Pol/bond or lessons on the computer I'd think it would be more formal. Same thing with the accent. If he speaks to real people in real situations the accent might lessen but other than that it would most likely be the same as in English.

In my experience, unless a person is born with a true gift for languages any language learned as an adult will be influenced by the languages the person grew up with. For example, I learned French in grade school and high school. It came very naturally and I spent some time immersed in southern France as a high school student. I therefore speak French with an American-tinged southern French accent. I then learned (very little) Spanish as an adult. I also speak Spanish with an American-tinged southern French accent.

Trip, I have always assumed, spoke only English and maybe read some German if he was really into the history of aeropace engineering. (Early rocketry science was German.) So he'd speak any languages he learned as an adult with a pronounced Southern US English accent no matter how fluent he was. As he got more fluent he might get less stilted and more comfortable with usual turns of phrase, but he'd still sound like Trip. At least I think so.

The only time I wrote Trip speaking Vulcan effortlessly and without an accent was in my story Charlie. My intent was to imply that his language skill was a carry over from his new body's previous owner, Charles Tucker IV the clone, who'd learned Vulcan in childhood.

This is rather off topic, but I really don't like the idea of the bond being a superhighway from T'Pol to Trip where everything Vulcan is laid out for him, including the language. I like the idea of him working and studying to learn the language. That was what made "Miscommunication" so charming. Here poor Trip is struggling to learn Vulcan and T'Pol thinks he's fooling around with another woman. In my mind, I see Trip as learning Vulcan slowly, understanding more than speaking at first, and over time, becoming fluent.

I can happily go either way as a reader, but I wouldn't want to give up "Miscommunication" for anything!

I must admit I lack the patience of those writers who happily delve into the building blocks of the Vulcan language. If I have to look up more than five or six terms, I'll just change the plot. (I get irritated everytime I have to use Panar just because I can never remember where the damned apostrophe goes.)

Well, I'm going to say yes and no. The Vulcan language will be so different that Trip will be forced to speak it fairly correctly or risk being misunderstood. Still, there will be a tinge of an accent. I do like the idea of him working to do it, and I like the idea that he is able to do it. And why not? He is very smart and very motivated (by T'Pol). Kevin had stories in which, aside from smiling sometime, Trip practically transformed into a Vulcan after living a long time on a Vulcan ship. I was totally OK with that. It is part of him viewing others as like himself. He always got along well with aliens.

Well he did tell Hoshi languages were definitely not in his area of expertice. I love Miscommunication and I do like to see Trip work for it. However since he told Hoshi not his thing, I wanted to give him help. As for the Vulcan I'm still working out the perfect formatting, however I like to post the list of words at the begining of the chapter with definitions nobody should have to look up anything.

The question hit me as kind of crunked, but here goes:

As I learned in my linguistics class this fall, generally when you learn second (or third or whatever) languages after childhood, the new language you learn is always going to be affected by the phoneme system of your native language. Only people who truly immerse themselves in the other language's culture for years and years ever manage to lose their accents, and even then, not all of them do.

So yes, Trip is still gonna sound like Trip, even if he attains a level of fluency.

ETA: It's Cool Vulcan Mojo (TM)

Wow, this is an international crowd, isn't it? My French is pretty heavily laden with an American accent.

Backing up what you said, Aquarius, I once read an article about Henry Kissinger's younger brother. He's only a few years younger - but he has no accent when he speaks English because he hadn't reached the threshold you are talking about when the family moved to the US. Yes, there are people who are capable of learning a language with no accent as adults but they are rare.