Seriously? How is Vulcan grammar THAT bad?

[Nerys Ghemor]

Am I the only person who is completely annoyed by the awful grammar employed by the Vulcans in episodes like "Amok Time"? Seriously, once I studied German and took that knowledge to understand exactly what is wrong with this sentence, I can't hear it without hearing absolute ignorance on the part of the scriptwriters.

Here's one example.

T'Pau: "And thee are called?"

Wow. Just wow. We have three separate things wrong with this four-word sentence.

First off, the pronoun is in the wrong case. That's the accusative case, not the nominative. (Technically in English that would be the objective case, but in the language English descended from, that's the accusative.) The effect is as jarring as saying, "And me am called..." Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Second, even if we got the pronoun fixed to the nominative form, which is "thou," there's still the fact that the subject and the verb aren't agreeing here. "Thou are" is as wrong as saying "you is." It's "thou art."

Third--and I admit this one part is understandable since English did the exact opposite of most languages and lost the informal address instead of the formal, the fact remains that if we are trying to show these Vulcans using formal ritual address, "thou" is the LAST thing you want to use to convey that fact. "Thou" is what you would use in the past with your family, close friends, and God. It is not what you would use to address people in formal circumstances. That was what "you" was for, until "you" took over both functions.

But the other two mistakes are just egregious. Why on Earth would the writers do something so blatantly wrong? Either the Vulcans or the Universal Translator come off looking very bad here.

 

[Agenda]

Am I the only person who is completely annoyed by the awful grammar employed by the Vulcans in episodes like "Amok Time"?

Most likely.

 

[DrTaylor]

Maybe in Vulcan that would be the correct grammar?

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

We would be translating from Vulcan into English, hypothetically--but how could the translation be that butchered??

 

[Alienesse]

I've done some research and apparently, "thee" can be used in the Nominative case, but it's very rare and particular to Quakers.

At any rate, I think the writers were merely trying to convey here the fact that Vulcans are aliens and the unusual grammar is only a linguistic mark of their "unearthly" nature.

 

[sevenstars]

"thee" can be used in the Nominative case, but it's very rare and particular to Quakers.

Yep, based entirely on my casual knowledge of fictional Quakers, I'd agree with that. I'm betting the writers lifted it right out of something like "Friendly Persuasion."

And I do find it jarring, most of the time! It totally conflicts with my KJV sense of thees and thous. Somehow, it was less jarring, though, coming from Vulcans. Go figure.

As for the familiar form, I get the feeling everyone on Vulcan is so junior to T'Pau that they're all classed as children. That includes Spock, and it certainly includes his human friends, who age-wise may be practically adolescents, in Vulcan terms. Plus, well... they're human...

 

[Nardpuncher]

Am I the only person who is completely annoyed by the awful grammar employed by the Vulcans in episodes like "Amok Time"?

Most likely.

Perfect!

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

Could be worse, they could all talk like Yoda.

 

[Pauln6]

It was a universal translation probably from a formal, older form of Vulcan used by priestesses at formal occasions - like mass being read in Latin at some catholic ceremonies. Many languages have different grammatical rules to English. Presumably the translator can be programmed to be situation specific - so somebody reading Shakespeare out loud would not find it automatically translated into modern English.

"I metaphorically and verbally admonish you from the Judai-christian afterlife punishment zone."

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Or maybe T'Pau's just bad at English. (In ENT, she was probably speaking through the Universal Translator, but by the time TOS rolls around, she's so anti-human that she won't use it.)

 

[Servo]

We would be translating from Vulcan into English, hypothetically--but how could the translation be that butchered??

Have you ever used Google Translator?

 

[Gojira]

It makes them sound more alien, so I think that was what the writers were going for. So from that view the "bad grammar" works.

 

[Anwar]

It's a combination of making them sound more alien, that and T'Pau having that accent as well.

I think the reason modern sci-fi shows don't do it anymore is because it became too popular after Star Wars with Yoda's speech patterns and now it just comes off as silly.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Nit-picking, you are.

 

[zar]

Or maybe T'Pau's just bad at English. (In ENT, she was probably speaking through the Universal Translator, but by the time TOS rolls around, she's so anti-human that she won't use it.)

The aliens didn't need universal translators to speak, the humans just needed them to listen. So actually learning to speak English, albeit with bad grammar, is less anti-human than simply speaking her native Vulcan and letting it be translated.

Nit-picking, you are.

That's actually correct grammar.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Nit picking, thee are.

 

[AJBryant]

Am I the only person who is completely annoyed by the awful grammar employed by the Vulcans in episodes like "Amok Time"?

Nope. Every time I see it, I grind my teeth.

Someone SERIOUSLY dropped the grammatical ball in that one.

 

[Timo]

It does have a nice if unintended effect on me: it sounds like our heroes are listening to a foreign language and imposing their own values on it, then drawing the conclusion that the speaker is of limited intelligence of education - when actually the opposite is true. An effect familiar from having people interviewed in English when that's not their native language; they sound stilted and simplistic, up to the point of their very intelligent and intriguing message being lost.

That's going with the theory that T'Pau was actually being a lady and speaking English for the benefit of her guests (or being a bitch and speaking that primitive language in order to humiliate Spock), of course. Universal translators in TOS must have been the versatile two-way devices they are in all the other Trek shows, unless we want to believe that all the universe natively speaks English. But just as in the rest of Trek, the devices would appear to have an off switch...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timewalker]

Am I the only person who is completely annoyed by the awful grammar employed by the Vulcans in episodes like "Amok Time"?

No, there appears to be one other person in this thread. I can't speak for the rest of the planet, however.

I've done some research and apparently, "thee" can be used in the Nominative case, but it's very rare and particular to Quakers.

At any rate, I think the writers were merely trying to convey here the fact that Vulcans are aliens and the unusual grammar is only a linguistic mark of their "unearthly" nature.

Vulcans are not German, they don't believe in God (the human version), and they are not Quakers. It's possible they may have found an old Google Translator file they used to learn English. Of all the things to nit-pick about, this is surely among the most trivial.

 

[Potemkin_Prod]

Perhaps the silliest complaint I've ever heard about an episode...