Seriously? How is Vulcan grammar THAT bad?

It's a shame that Theodore Sturgeon didn't have this forum to turn to for writing tips.

 

Silliest? Please. You haven't been paying attention, Potemkin, because - trust me on this - we can get much, much sillier than this. Or maybe you just hang out in classier threads than I do. Because I have personally argued on more than one occasion with more than one person about the cultural significance, or lack thereof, of the TOS micro-mini skirt, so I know all about silly.

Anyway, the plain fact is that Nerys Ghemor (oops - Nerys Dukat, to use her Halloween screen name) makes a pretty good point, which is: If you're going to make someone sound formal and old-fashioned by using a formal and old-fashioned form of English, why not do so correctly? Thou would sound just as antique but would be a lot closer to correct, so why not use it?

And the answer is that the people who wrote the dialogue knew so little about KJV-era English that they just faked it, and they did so rather badly, and they were so poorly informed that they probably didn't realize how badly they were doing it...kind of like when people do a baaaaaaad Southern (Southern U.S., that is) accent.

That said, it doesn't bother me that much - I've noticed it and I'm not crazy about it, but I can usually ignore it - probably because T'Pau's accent camouflages some of the worst errors. Also, I do wonder if her are was meant to be art and we just can't quite pick up the -t sound through Celia Lovsky's accent? I'm going to pretend that is the case, anyway! Why, yes, I have heard of retconning. ;-)

 

Dude, you complete me.

 

I didn't say Vulcans were German. I was only suggesting that the writers may have drawn on this bit of Quaker English to lend an "alien" air to the English spoken by the Vulcans.

 

Well, it just seems silly to complain about Vulcan/English grammar on the basis that the writers were insufficiently knowledgeable about German, Quakers, or the King James Bible.

I can think of many more obvious things to nit-pick about that episode; how many of us are serious linguists?

 

Is it all Vulcan grammar in the episode, or just T'pau's?

 

It bugs me too.

I'll bet Sturgeon had it right (or not at all) and somebody else Thee'd it up in the script.


EDIT - I just read a post I missed by Timewalker: people used to be REAL familiar with King James speak. Writers certainly would have been. It was THE English Bible til the RSV came out in the 50s, and then only in more liberal mainline denominations. People knew those words.

 

Somthing between the two.

Stonn and T'Pring speak in normal 2oth century English without any thee's and thy's, but Spock uses them:

SPOCK: I burn, T'Pau. My eyes are flame. My heart is flame. Thee has the power, T'Pau. In the name of my fathers, forbid. Forbid! T'Pau--I plead with thee! I beg!

 

And, as long as we're being silly nitpickers, why is T’Pau the only Vulcan who speaks English with an Austrian accent?

 

Nope. It's crap. Especially given that one is meant to assume that it is being translated, and translators would not translate the Vulcan equivalent of "usted" as "thou," unless it also translates "bathroom" as "jakes" and when in text mode refer to a "representative legislature" as a "congreʃʃ."

This bothers me more than the others. I don't mind the grammatical mistakes (I didn't know they were wrong until you pointed them out ), but I am bothered by the popular misconception that thou is formal, and carries more weight.

Like I asked once, why is Thor such a dick to everybody?

 

And on what do we base the assumption that we're hearing Vulcan translated into English by machines? The “universal translator” appeared only once in Trek TOS -- in “Metamorphosis.” It was never mentioned in any other episode. The ubiquity of universal translators is a post-TOS concept.

I always assumed that, for story purposes, everyone simply spoke English.

BTW, the old-fashioned long “s” (which modern readers frequently mistake for an “f”) was never used as the final letter of a word.

 

Even Vulcan has a north.

 

Crimson Executioner--

(By the way, love the Halloween title. Presumably from Bloody Pit of Horror?)

See, I was actually trying to find a close up picture of the Constitution to test the thing with the esh (ʃ), and gave up too easily. I saw someone use it in "aʃʃaʃʃinate," and called it a day.

One is meant to assume they're speaking Vulcan because 1)they're Vulcan, 2)on Vulcan, 3)performing a Vulcan legal and religious ceremony. It would be like an American attending a wedding in Chongqing and expecting the proceedings to go down in English. Maybe the parts where they have a role would be explained in English, but the whole thing was being done in English.

Aside, of course, from the fact that anyone who learned English well enough to speak it would have to know English rather well to even realize we originally had a formal/informal dichotomy, and "you" is not the only second-person pronoun that ever existed, and anyone who knew the language that well would know also that we no longer employ the others, and would use the language correctly for fear of being confused with a pompous ass or an Asgardian. (Have you ever heard a Spanish-speaker use "thou art" when they would have used "tu eres," had they been speaking in their native tongue?)

It's also puts a faintly imperialistic cast, where Earthlings don't even know how Vulcans have sex, but Vulcans speak the dominant aliens' language so fluently that they deign to use archaic pronoun sets (at least as well as an educated native speaker, which is to say, still not very well, but with a basic grasp of meaning if not declension).

I think it's safe to assume that invisible translators exist, Metamorphosis notwithstanding. Otherwise far too many people know English, including people who would have had no way of ever learning English.

On the other hand, they have to be told what koon-ut-kal-i-fee means. Then again, if that's in their translator database, McCoy is even more inept than the episode already paints him, because that and all related terms would be common knowledge, and would probably be taught to schoolchildren.

And yeah, this is a lot of thought just to cover the obvious facts that no one involved in the production of the episode (which has far more glaring issues anyway) spoke a fake language.

 

Maybe Pauln6 lives in Slovenia.

No, I didn't get it either.

 

I just want to say that I love Myasishchev's nalloween name!

 

I think it's a reference to Dr Who - in one episode, a character asks the Doctor why he sounds like he's from northern Britain (accent-wise) if he's an alien, and he replies with 'Lots of planets have a north'

 

Right. Like the bit in Mel Brooks’ History of the World -- Part 1 where the very modern-sounding black guy says he’s from Ethiopia. When asked “Which part?” he replies, “126th Street.”

 

Oh God, I nominate this for "Sentence of the Week." I'm so stealing this.

 

Thanks.

It was either that or Zombie Lenin, but I couldn't find a good still from that episode of the Simpsons.