They teach Latin at Starfleet Academy?

[Captain Rob]

^^ Must be the Pompeii privy.

[Timo]

Yup - the medieval times would not be the standard against which the neo-Roman wannabes would evaluate things...

You'd have to be quite the optimist to find joy in the statement "well, at least it's better than in the middle ages"!

Timo Saloniemi

[Timewalker]

Even the most traditional Society for Creative Anachronism member prefers indoor plumbing when it's available, refrigeration, and cooking on a stove! (that's a medieval-era re-creation society, btw)


Anyway, on the topic of languages and universal translators:

"Shaka, when the walls fell."

You've got the words, but NO context. Your universal translator is not much help in this kind of situation, and you don't have Deanna Troi handy to tell you what the alien is feeling. Of course we know how the episode turned out, but you've got to admit that most people would have been screwed in that situation.

[RPJOB]

The universal translater had no trouble working on the Companion. Her contexts would be even ore alien than in Darmok. Spock did have to tweak it a bit but he did so with the basic tools found on the shuttlecraft. It's not like he needed the ship's computer. It even picked up on the gender of an energy being. Quite a trick.

[Timo]

Probably the UT is helped by the fact that its users expect certain results, and the UT is quite qualified to read them. The Companion probably has no gender of any sort, but making her female meets the expectations of the users. Traduttore, traditore - translations are always lies, but nobody really minds.

Timo Saloniemi

[Psi'a Meese]

I question that the language being shared amongst a multicultural Federation is English at all. In Archer's time, maybe. But by the 23rd or the 24th century it's more likely something of a new language was developed by linguists from the five founding worlds. Perhaps rooted in Latin and other alien languages to become a Federation Standard.

It just looks like English when read from computers or starship hulls. And sounds like English when heard for our purposes of storytelling.

[T'Girl]

Esperanto ?

[Christopher]

Psi'a Meese wrote:

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I question that the language being shared amongst a multicultural Federation is English at all. In Archer's time, maybe. But by the 23rd or the 24th century it's more likely something of a new language was developed by linguists from the five founding worlds. Perhaps rooted in Latin and other alien languages to become a Federation Standard.

It just looks like English when read from computers or starship hulls. And sounds like English when heard for our purposes of storytelling.

Except that the English language has been mentioned numerous times in Trek. Captain Christopher, Khan, and Zefram Cochrane all explicitly said that Kirk and his crew spoke English. In "The Changeling," Chapel urged the mind-wiped Uhura to speak English rather than Swahili. McCoy referenced speaking "plain, non-Vulcan English" in "The Doomsday Machine." There are numerous references to English being spoken in Enterprise as well.

TNG and DS9 never explicitly mentioned the language they were speaking, but 20th- and 21st-century Americans like the trio in "The Neutral Zone" and the characters in First Contact never had any trouble with comprehending either spoken language or text used aboard the Enterprise. In Voyager, "Message in a Bottle" has the Doctor say "In English!" when he's exasperated at another character's technobabble, and "Drone" has the character "One" refer to an "English adjective" in a sentence Seven speaks to him.

[scotpens]

T'Girl wrote:

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Esperanto ?