I love it when the accents are spelled phonetically. It makes them feel in character.
Writing Chekov and Scotty
- Thread starter JonLuck Pickerd
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I love it when the accents are spelled phonetically. It makes them feel in character.
I don't really mind it as long as the author doesn't go overboard.
For Scott, I like to do "dinna" and "cannae" and such, because I think "don't" and "cannot" dinna quite catch the flavor closely enough.
In A Choice of Catastrophes, the first time Chekov said "captain," the narration added "In his Russian accent, it came out 'keptin.'" Which I thought nicely reminded the reader without being annoying! (The editor must have disagreed, because it was taken out of the final draft.)
Actually, I developed a cheat to simulate that: putting Kirk's dialogue tags into the middle of his sentences. "Well, gentlemen," said Kirk, "what are we waiting for?"
In A Choice of Catastrophes, the first time Chekov said "captain," the narration added "In his Russian accent, it came out 'keptin.'" Which I thought nicely reminded the reader without being annoying! (The editor must have disagreed, because it was taken out of the final draft.)
Actually, I developed a cheat to simulate that: putting Kirk's dialogue tags into the middle of his sentences. "Well, gentlemen," said Kirk, "what are we waiting for?"
I like it though Scotty's can be hard to understand sometimes
sorry about this this was an accident
Might have something to do with the fact that Soctty's accent is almost universally regarded as one of the worst fake Scots accents in television history.
I think a little bit is great. As someone who never got "into" TOS, I appreciate having Scotty's accent inserted just a bit, each time he speaks. Phrases like "...one o' my ships" and "Aye." a great. But when a sentence needs to be read aloud a few times to be intelligible, that's a bit much. Peter David's Scotty in NF:Restoration was a bit much.
If there's just a little bit of writing accents phonetically, I don't mind, but if there's too much, it becomes hard to read. When reading, I read words and don't "reassemble" separate sounds, so when reading "funny" written words, it takes more effort and more time to actually read them. If too much text is written like that, I have to start reading out loud to hear myself speaking to understand what I'm reading.
What I find weird (as a non-native Engllish speaker) is that foreigners almost always speak with heavy accents of their own languages and with perfect grammar at the same time. I don't have a heavy Polish accent, but my grammar sucks. For me, a little bit of "funny" grammar would add more realism to a character than his/her "over-funny" accent (though, I realise that writing books filled with grammar errors might not be welcomed).
What I find weird (as a non-native Engllish speaker) is that foreigners almost always speak with heavy accents of their own languages and with perfect grammar at the same time. I don't have a heavy Polish accent, but my grammar sucks. For me, a little bit of "funny" grammar would add more realism to a character than his/her "over-funny" accent (though, I realise that writing books filled with grammar errors might not be welcomed
).
You often find that accents are indicated as more pronounced during times of tension, if that happens. As in real life.
I rather like the examples of accents, although I do realize that's being a bit ethnocentric of me. (Greg Cox - I vote for "keptin.")
But yes, it can definitely be overdone. IIRC, one of the reasons I never finished Spock, Messiah! was that I couldn't get passed Chekov's broken English.
But yes, it can definitely be overdone. IIRC, one of the reasons I never finished Spock, Messiah! was that I couldn't get passed Chekov's broken English.
Not when a character has the accent one chapter, the next one no accent, and then has an accent again. I know one book has Scotty doing that, but I just can't remember the title.
My own inclination would've been to write Chekov's accent phonetically, "wery vell" and all that, but Marco Palmieri's preference was apparently not to render Chekov's accent in print, and so I learned not to do it. The main exception, which is unlikely ever to see print, was in Seek a Newer World; since the 2009 film made a point of playing up Chekov's accent, I did include it there to fit the tone. I also tried to reflect the other Russianisms present in Yelchin-Chekov's speech, like occasionally omitting the definite article.
As for Scotty, I do include some bits of his accent like "dinna" or "I'm thinkin' o' doin' that" or that sort of thing, but I try not to do it to excess.
I've seen that done to an extent, and I've done it myself at times -- trying to match a realistic Shatner speech pattern rather than a caricature, though. In Ex Machina, there was even a bit where I included that Shatnerism of pursing his lips and drawing out the "W" sound at the beginning of a sentence. I rendered it as, "W . . . we're working on sorting that out."
(I've never gotten why people mock Shatner's hesitations in speech. What he's doing is pretending his character is making up the words as he goes, thinking before he speaks, rather than just reciting memorized lines. I think it makes his speech more realistic. If you listen to real people speaking off the cuff, they tend to pause and stutter even more.)
As for Scotty, I do include some bits of his accent like "dinna" or "I'm thinkin' o' doin' that" or that sort of thing, but I try not to do it to excess.
I've seen that done to an extent, and I've done it myself at times -- trying to match a realistic Shatner speech pattern rather than a caricature, though. In Ex Machina, there was even a bit where I included that Shatnerism of pursing his lips and drawing out the "W" sound at the beginning of a sentence. I rendered it as, "W . . . we're working on sorting that out."
(I've never gotten why people mock Shatner's hesitations in speech. What he's doing is pretending his character is making up the words as he goes, thinking before he speaks, rather than just reciting memorized lines. I think it makes his speech more realistic. If you listen to real people speaking off the cuff, they tend to pause and stutter even more.)
I agree. I never personally saw it either. I think it's more a part of the character than anything, and since Kirk is a rather prominent character, that we see Shatner as Kirk more than any of his other characters, that it gets posited on Shatner himself, not to mention that if one plays a character for as long as Shatner has, part of it would naturally rub off on them. Here's the thing. If you watch war movies from that era, one thing you can notice is that military leaders have a similar speech style, I think it's likely that Shatner was trying to emulate that as an actor portraying a leader himself, and it's likely a thing that was done to show off decisiveness, especially in the heat of battle.
^I don't know, I think it is something Shatner does in general, not just as Kirk. I mean, as I said, his goal is to be naturalistic, to make it seem he's making it up as he goes. I recall him saying things about trying to make it seem like he's surprised by his own words, something like that -- discovering them as they come out.
On the subject of writing Shatnerian pauses into dialogue: There's an issue of Marvel's Star Trek Unlimited comic, written by Andy Mangels & Mike Martin, which involves Picard's Enterprise revisiting Iotia from "A Piece of the Action" a century later and finding they've remodeled their society based on Starfleet and have a romanticized image of Kirk. There's this one character whose speech balloons are broken up rather oddly, and it took me a while to get it, but I finally realized that the breaks between speech balloons were meant to represent Kirk-style pauses, and that this character was trying to talk like Kirk. What's fun about it is that nobody ever actually explains that's what he's doing; it's just presented as is and left up to the reader to notice and eventually go "Aha!" about.
On the subject of writing Shatnerian pauses into dialogue: There's an issue of Marvel's Star Trek Unlimited comic, written by Andy Mangels & Mike Martin, which involves Picard's Enterprise revisiting Iotia from "A Piece of the Action" a century later and finding they've remodeled their society based on Starfleet and have a romanticized image of Kirk. There's this one character whose speech balloons are broken up rather oddly, and it took me a while to get it, but I finally realized that the breaks between speech balloons were meant to represent Kirk-style pauses, and that this character was trying to talk like Kirk. What's fun about it is that nobody ever actually explains that's what he's doing; it's just presented as is and left up to the reader to notice and eventually go "Aha!" about.
In a mostly unrelated and decidedly self-centred off-topic, we are currently playing an adventure based on that comic book with my Star Trek RPG group. It's a lot of fun.
Personally, I've never noticed Kirk's/Shatner's speech pattern as it is mocked by impersonators. Probably, as Christopher has described it, because it's simply natural.
That said, one particular character who I have noticed talks like that, although not as bad as the Kirk impersonators, is Archer. Again, though, he talks that way because it's natural, with a careful choice of words so as not to offend, provoke, whatever.
That said, one particular character who I have noticed talks like that, although not as bad as the Kirk impersonators, is Archer. Again, though, he talks that way because it's natural, with a careful choice of words so as not to offend, provoke, whatever.
Yeah, Scott Bakula's delivery is painfully stilted to my ear. He actually does talk the way caricaturists claim Shatner talks.
Instead of using accents, it would be more interesting to have characters like Chekov speak in their mother language at times.
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