683 Species of Humanity

[Butters]

In the Wounded Sky, Diane mentions the 683 species of humanity that exist in our universe. What does that refer to? Does it include the various non terrestrial humans scattered across the various worlds as seen in TOS?

 

[Christopher]

I believe Duane used "humanity" to refer to humanoids in general -- or perhaps even to sentient species in general, regardless of shape, using the term in more of a moral sense (i.e. what beings have the same personhood and rights that we presume for humans) than a taxonomic one.

 

[Valenti]

Why, there's no other Human races out there that may or may not come from Earth? TOS was abound with races that for all intents and purposes certainly looked Human. Are you saying they weren't?

 

[Butters]

I was hopeful this was the tip of a litverse iceberg. Always been intrigued by the ubiquitous English speaking alien humans that populate the galaxy. It gives Trek an antiquarian dimension that’s never really explored, on screen at least.

 

[Christopher]

Why, there's no other Human races out there that may or may not come from Earth? TOS was abound with races that for all intents and purposes certainly looked Human. Are you saying they weren't?

No, I'm saying that's not what Diane Duane meant when she wrote about the "humanities" in the galaxy. She made this clear in her very first Trek novel, The Wounded Sky: "It was chiefly on the observation deck that Jim realized the term 'humanities' was no euphemism, no non-discriminatory fiction -- though he rarely put the statement to himself just that way." (p. 120)

It's even more explicit in My Enemy, My Ally (p. 150 in the original, p. 119 in The Bloodwing Voyages):

Now, though, Ael looked around this bewildering collection of aliens -- all these Terrans and Tellarites and Andorians and Sulamids and three kinds of Denebians, and whatnot else -- and was bewildered. Four hundred kinds of 'humanity,' the ship's library computers called them. She found that bizarre. There was only one kind of humanity, everybody knew that. But to judge from the way these people worked together, one would think they didn't know it...

So Duane was not talking about literal humans. In her version of the Trek universe, the Federation referred to all sentient species, including nonhumanoids such as Sulamids and Denebians, as "humanities" as a non-discriminatory usage (even though it's actually profoundly ethnocentric -- see Spock's reaction to "Everybody's human" in TUC).

 

[Leto_II]

So Duane was not talking about literal humans. In her version of the Trek universe, the Federation referred to all sentient species, including nonhumanoids such as Sulamids and Denebians, as "humanities" as a non-discriminatory usage (even though it's actually profoundly ethnocentric -- see Spock's reaction to "Everybody's human" in TUC).

And also Azetbur's reaction to Chekov's "inalienable human rights"-line in that same film.

 

[Valenti]

Yea, I really liked that scene, but not for nothing, but would have liked it if the Klingons were just another branch of Humanity or vice versa or an offshoot like the Romulans were to the Vulcans, Just my two cents.

 

[JD]

I was hopeful this was the tip of a litverse iceberg. Always been intrigued by the ubiquitous English speaking alien humans that populate the galaxy. It gives Trek an antiquarian dimension that’s never really explored, on screen at least.

Technically they aren't speaking English, we're just hearing the translation through the Universal Translator.
This brings up a thought for me, would aliens who serve on mostly human crewed ships learn English, as a precaution in case the universal translators suddenly fail?

 

[Christopher]

Technically they aren't speaking English, we're just hearing the translation through the Universal Translator.

Except in "Bread and Circuses," where for some reason the dialogue explicitly established that the natives were speaking 20th-century American English -- perhaps because there was printed English text seen in the episode in the magazine, signage, etc. so the translator couldn't account for that.

This brings up a thought for me, would aliens who serve on mostly human crewed ships learn English, as a precaution in case the universal translators suddenly fail?

I've always assumed they are speaking English. Relying entirely on translators would be absurd, not only because of the failure hazard, but because no machine translation is ever fully exact and reliable. I never bought the implication of "Little Green Men" that Quark, Rom, and Nog hadn't yet learned English and relied on their translators; I assumed their malfunctioning translators were just scrambling the English the humans were speaking. After all, they'd had years to learn the language of the station's new administrators.

 

[JD]

Actually it just dawned on that Spock would have had to have been speaking English in The Voyage Home since he spoke to Gillian with no problem while they were back in 1986.

 

[Christopher]

Actually it just dawned on that Spock would have had to have been speaking English in The Voyage Home since he spoke to Gillian with no problem while they were back in 1986.

Plus he grew up with an English-speaking mother. (And foster sister, though it doesn't seem like they were close.) So of course it was a bilingual household.

Besides, if English is the lingua franca of the Federation, then it naturally follows that Federation members grow up learning to speak it along with their local language. Just as, for instance, Hispanic people living in the United States learn Spanish to speak at home and in the neighborhood and English to speak when interacting outside their community, or how people in Hong Kong learn Cantonese at home and Mandarin and/or English for more public or official or business use. It makes no sense that anyone born and raised in the Federation would not be bilingual, English and Vulcan or English and Andorii or whatever. That's just how a lingua franca works.

 

[David cgc]

Actually it just dawned on that Spock would have had to have been speaking English in The Voyage Home since he spoke to Gillian with no problem while they were back in 1986.

I've read interviews where Nimoy talked about how, while he didn't exactly give Spock an accent, he did try to speak in a very precise, clipped way, thinking Spock probably learned English off a computer rather than growing up speaking it with a community of native speakers.

 

[thribs]

Races related to the Preservers maybe.

 

[Desert Kris]

In the Wounded Sky, Diane mentions the 683 species of humanity that exist in our universe. What does that refer to? Does it include the various non terrestrial humans scattered across the various worlds as seen in TOS?

I was hopeful this was the tip of a litverse iceberg. Always been intrigued by the ubiquitous English speaking alien humans that populate the galaxy. It gives Trek an antiquarian dimension that’s never really explored, on screen at least.

When I read The Wounded Sky and came across the idea, it combined with my thoughts dwelling on the tagline for TMP that goes "The Human Adventure is Just Beginning." It's a line that I like, even as it clashes with TMP taking the direction of making alien races more alien than they were before, like how the Klingons are visually re-conceptualized. On the one hand the aliens in TOS basically are an exploration of humans problems and capabilities, yet on the other the first movie is pushing them in a direction that tests how relatable we can still find them if they are more strange than they were before.

I wondered about if the concept in The Wounded Sky had something to do with Preservers scattering humans all over the galaxy and so forth. And I admit feeling a little disappointed too, that there's nothing deeper being hinted at, that there's a larger story, that it's merely the case of the word "humanity" being used as synonymous with "sentient" or "people".

As much as I like The Wounded Sky, a part of me wishes that she hadn't confused the issue, that lead me to combine her idea with that tagline. But at the end of the day I'll still take TWS as it is.