They weren't playing Terrance Howard or Edward Norton, so there is no need for them to look like those actors.
Is Scotty's accent actually bad?
- Thread starter Dr Helen Noel
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Back in Caption Contest days I took the screencap for a contest and replaced all the French items with things from Yorkshire.
Weird then that the English they use hasn't changed, or is English not a living language anymore by the time of Star Trek?
Scots is a dialect of English, or several dialects of English.
Several episodes demonstrate that the language usually spoken on the Enterprise in TOS is called English. But it might actually be translated from 23rd century Stafleet English into 20th century USA English for the benefit of the audience. POosibly the 23rd Century Aberdeen Scots dialect is also different. and and they had uncertainty with how to depict it for a 20th century audience.
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Then they might as well have changed their gender or gave them completely different skin tones.
My problem is that they were completely different looking persons, but they kept the two things the U.S.A. is most fond of chaining people to the same, gender and “race” and with “race” I mean the U.S.A.'s noticeably idiosyncractic categorization thereof. Terrence Howard on a genetic level is probably more indigenously European than he is indigenously Subsaharan African, but they would have never replaced him with an indigenously European actor, for the one drop makes the difference. And I find that a tad but offensive, I must say.
Had they actually replaced Terrance Howard with a female actor that more so, say, looked ingenuously middle-eastern, truly a man randomly selected from the planet, I would rather find it interesting and a bold move.
One's heritage doesn't get washed away by the circumstances of one's birth. I'm a Jew. I'm half-Ukrainian. I'm half-Israeli. I'm also an American.
(and a proud Jewish Californian.
)
A quaint idea te U.S.A. is known for, that men born and raised there stil consider themselves “Asian” or “Irish” because their ancestors were.
I do not humor these delusions. A man born and raised in North-America is North-American, regardless of what his parents were.
There were but two countries during W.W.I. that imprisoned their own citizens based on their parents out of some supposed “doubt of loyalty”. Greater Germany, and the U.S.A.. — What fine company to find oneself in.
Why would it matter? He could be played by a dog whose face was altered by c.g.i. to make him resemble the original Sulu for al I care and I did not find any of the Kelvinverse actors to resemble the original cast to any great degree. — It was a clear case of casting entirely different persons so long as their U.S.A. conception of “race” and “gender” matched.
They look oh-so-alike
“Japanese-American” is a word Americans used to feel special. — I'll use such a word perhaps for a man born and raised in Japan who later moved to the U.S.A. who still thinks in Japanese who can more easily express himself in Japanese in English and who stil finds Japanese culture less surprising than U.S.A. culture. I for instance, see some merit to, say, calling Arnold Schwarzenegger “Austrian-American” since I saw him speak German in an interview once and it's clear that after all this time, speaking German stil comes more naturally to him than speaking English.
I'll not humor whatever delusions George Takei may or may not have about being “Japanese-American”; his parents were “Japanese-American”; he has lived in the U.S.A. his entire life.
It means “to do”, roughly, since Japanese verbs are slightly different, and it's an issue of romanization since Japanese has different sounds from English. One can, for instance, encounter the word “将軍” romanized as <syougun>, <shōgun>, <syooguṃ>, <shougun>, <syôgun> and many more, these are of course al pronounced the same in Japanese and this is the result of Japanese having different sounds from English, not really having either an /r/ nor an /l/, but something in between both. It's more often romanized as an <r>, but I find it to sound closer to an /l/, to be honest.
How nice to wake up to so many reports about your posting.
It is not up to you (or anyone else) to decide how people identify themselves. If a pregnant cat climbs into an oven, it doesn't give birth to biscuits, as the saying goes.
Moreover, this is not the topic or the forum to debate racial and cultural identities.
Consider that part of the discussion closed, and yourself on notice.
These videos are awesome! Thanks for sharing.
When I was in holiday in Scotland, the further we travelled away from Edinburg, the less my comprehension of the locals got. And I’ve got Scottish friends whom I can understand (well, before they have a few pints mind you. After that their accent gets super thick and I need sub titles )
"I dinna ken, cap'n. Dinna you?"
Where's that damned universal translator when you need it?
Shatner's mangling of "sabotage" and "telekinesis" don't count?How come we never got any Canadian accents on Star Trek?
Shatner's mangling of "sabotage" and "telekinesis" don't count?
That makes me wonder, what did Bill sound like before he became an actor? And how hard did he have to work on squeezing the Canadian out of his inflections?
Well, I haven't seen this on here yet, so ... 
Well, I haven't seen this on here yet, so ...
OMG that's hilarious. Robin was so funny. What a shame and what a loss for us.
This is an issue I've had with various Star Trek shows. Some character in an episode of one of the shows will bust out talking in some Earth language other than English, and it will be like other characters can't understand them. Shouldn't the Universal Translator make it all understandable anyway? The UT only works for alien languages, not other Earth languages?
Sometimes it's just a TV show playing with TV show tropes.
We know from Metamorphosis that the translator has a telepathic component. I imagine it works the same as the TARDIS telepathic circuits in Doctor Who. When Donna tried to speak Latin to some one in Pompei, he didn't understand her.
Just wanted to point out that not all Scottish people sound like Craig Ferguson. If anyone has seen the (excellent) show Shetland, several of the characters there (all played by Scots actors) sound quite a bit like Doohan as Scotty. So, for that matter, does Ewan McGregor, who has been giving plenty of interviews lately for obvious reasons. I seem to remember that no one wanted Doohan to lay it on too thick.
Even Ferguson admits he no longer sounds Scottish. Cf:
I'm sure there are Cockneys who sound like Dick Van Dyke, too.
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