Possibly ignorant question

Yes the Ferengi in little Green Men could not understand English, but it went further than that.... The humans sounded like that they were underwater.

How they "hear" may be dependant on air pressure, so it's lucky that that was factored into the universal translator after Spock figured out that the whale probe was trying to talk to it's friends 10 thousand leagues under the sea.

 

You clean your bidet with lasagna?

 

In my head canon, I imagine them speaking an invented language called Standard, short for Federation Standard. It’s like a super language, easily learnable, extremely descriptive and adaptable, and pronounceable by nearly every species with vocal abilities.

I wonder if they can actually learn Linguacode too, the computer or mathematical language(?) mentioned in TVH that, I think, is decipherable by any intelligent species.

Then they learn the numerical computer language we see on all Federation computer screens.

Then the main language of their memberworld. For us, it would be Anglish, the American English language of the future, which could also include plenty of Mandarin in it and other future influences.

Then maybe a bit of whatever language was popular in the nation-state you grew up in (i.e. Chekov’s Russian or Picard’s French). In fact, I wonder if earlier generations (like Robert April’s) spoke Standard, then Anglish, as their primary languages, but, with the UT becoming more ubiquitous, later generations (like Picard’s) could skip the Anglish and do Standard, then French, as their primary languages.

Then finally they might also pick up a “foreign” language. Either one popular on many worlds inside the Federation (i.e. “Andorii,” or whatever the “Anglish” version of Andorianese is), or a popular one from outside the Federation (i.e. Klingonese).

That’s a lot of languages, but it’s also DA FUTUR(!), in which they’ll probably be a lot smarter than us anyway. Look at how quickly they were abIe to bring Uhura back up to speed when Nomad(?) erased her entire memory. Also, in the real world, we may all have chips in our brains in a hundred years and be able to speak hundreds of languages with barely a thought.

 

Something called Federation standard in the main language of Earth. I assume it’s English.

 

Not a Red Dwarf fan, I take it?

 

I have seen old fan publications refer to the language they are printed in as "Terrangelo".

English is currently the language of International Air Travel, for example. So I can easily forsee a future where English (or something very like it) is the common language of Earth's space agency even if it isn't the dominant language of Earth.

 

It's English! Probably each country still retains it's own language but for work in space or any other contacts it's gotta be English!
JB

 

It might be called English but nothing we could understand anyway

 

English has a strong case for ending up as the world standard. It is already quite global, and is relatively easy to learn. It's not tonal, which can be very hard to pick up if you didn't grow up with it, it doesn't have declension and the verb constructions are pretty simple.

 

Yes. It means 'Could you send for the hall porter? There appears to be a frog in my bidet.'

How about this one? "La mango estis bonega! Dlej korajin gratulonjn' al la kuristo."

 

The meal was splendid. My hearty congratulations to the chef.

 

Wrong, actually. Totally, utterly, and completely wrong.

 

Actually, that video makes the opposite case.
TOS is closer to the present day than the writing of Robinson Carusoe, and end of the Dominion War is closer to the present day than Shakespeare's death. So Khan and Captain Christopher should find Kirk easilly understandable so long as he focuses on being formal and they all avoid recent (from their point of view) slang.
Picard's crew would have a harder time with those examples, but should have about the same relationship with Zephram Cochrane and Lilly.

 

Linguistic Drift has slowed to a crawl since the invention of sound recording 150 years ago.... But once machines start pulling sentences telepathically from our brains before we have even learnt to speak, and broadcasting sanitised and codified English into the brains of those listening, we are looking at a dead stop.

Can people hear strong UT transmissions, across farther distances when they should be outside earshot?

Even if individual people start to drift... the Universal translator will auto-correct and isolate their unique mannerisms killing the lifefulness of the language.

 

English is probably one of the worst languages you could pick to be a universal one. But it's probably wasn't ever PICKED. It just became the defacto one.

However, if there is a non-English universal language then I propose it be Toki Pona.

When in doubt, it came from a slaver stasis box. Zefram Cochrane probably found warp drive in one and just didn't tell anyone.

 

English is probably one of the more fluid languages. Too thouse peeple wee muste sounde lyke howe Chaucer soundes too us.

 

I've always read that English is one of the hardest languages to learn due to it having multiple words that mean different things! The only reason it is so widely used is probably because the British explorers established so many colonies around the world and those places have influenced their neighbours to some degree!
JB

 

English doesn't have multiple words that mean the same thing. That would be ridiculous, and the redundant words would fall out of usage.
English has words that mean subtly different things.
And that allowed it to have grown into a tangled mess. Which is not the same as a snarled mess, though similar.

I believe it was Isaac Asimov who said he was thankful to have English as his native language because otherwise he'd never have been able to learn it properly.

None of that recommends English as a Universal Language. No, for that you have different criteria, and "easy to learn" is probably among them.
Which is how you wind up with languages like the one my brother uses in his fantasy campaign, which he describes thusly,"It is nearly impossible to communicate how beautiful a painting is, but easy to communicate how much it's worth."

 

No matter how we native English speakers congratulate ourselves on mastering its intricacies, it actually has a lot of streamlined/simplified features that make it easier for adults to learn. No noun gender, no declension (except pronouns). And conjugation? I go, you go, she goes, we go, they go. That's pretty easy.

As I understand it, English was considerably dumbed-down about a thousand years ago through the bi-lingual households of Viking settlers and their English wives.

 

Yeah, it’s much easier than, say, Latin.

ROMANES EUNT DOMUS!