The lack of national diversity in the Discovery cast...

[Christopher]

1.) we are imagining what language will look like in a fictional future society. how language "works" is certainly up for debate no?

Human behavior and psychology aren't going to randomly change in the future. The way you extrapolate the future is by understanding the past and the present and projecting forward. The future isn't some magical fairyland where anything is possible, it's just the present that we haven't caught up with yet. I mean, we're in 2017. That was the distant future when Star Trek was new. And human nature hasn't changed that much; we just have a few new gadgets to play with, although not the same kind of gadgets they thought we'd have back then. (According to "Space Seed," the interplanetary sleeper ships we've been using for the past two decades are due to go obsolete next year when a faster space drive comes along.)

you think its simply impossible that a one world government who spearheads a federation of planets may lean on one language over others?

As I said, only a tyrannical, oppressive government would attempt that, and it would meet with ferocious pushback from from the cultures whose linguistic heritage was thus threatened. Study your history. Read up on the way Native American communities reacted to the US government's efforts to eradicate their languages and cultures. They'd play along superficially, but they'd privately cling to their own languages all the harder, continuing to teach them to their children and use them in secret at home. So languages and cultures that the government believed to be eradicated were actually clinging onto life as an act of defiance, and that's why they're still around today.

Also, you're persisting in the totally false assumption that having one global language would require eradicating all other languages. As I said, that has never been the case. It's not an either/or proposition, because most human beings are bilingual.

i dont think diversity in that future would like "lets make sure we have an even mix of this that and the other. i think by then everyone is accepted as equal and people have pure equal opportunity. no effort towards diverse recruitment, no walls in the way, chips simply fall where they may.

There is absolutely no way in hell that that premise could lead to a world where every language but one has ceased to exist. On the contrary, if the chips fall where they may, if there's no conscious effort to impose an unnatural monolingualism, then of course multiple languages will continue to exist. There will be a lingua franca used globally, much as English, Spanish, French, and Chinese are already used internationally today, and there will be many other languages used locally. That's the way human communication has worked for thousands of years, and it's nonsensical to expect that to suddenly change within the next measly 2-3 centuries.

 

[GeekUSACarl]

Human behavior and psychology aren't going to randomly change in the future. The way you extrapolate the future is by understanding the past and the present and projecting forward. The future isn't some magical fairyland where anything is possible, it's just the present that we haven't caught up with yet. I mean, we're in 2017. That was the distant future when Star Trek was new. And human nature hasn't changed that much; we just have a few new gadgets to play with, although not the same kind of gadgets they thought we'd have back then. (According to "Space Seed," the interplanetary sleeper ships we've been using for the past two decades are due to go obsolete next year when a faster space drive comes along.)




As I said, only a tyrannical, oppressive government would attempt that, and it would meet with ferocious pushback from from the cultures whose linguistic heritage was thus threatened. Study your history. Read up on the way Native American communities reacted to the US government's efforts to eradicate their languages and cultures. They'd play along superficially, but they'd privately cling to their own languages all the harder, continuing to teach them to their children and use them in secret at home. So languages and cultures that the government believed to be eradicated were actually clinging onto life as an act of defiance, and that's why they're still around today.

Also, you're persisting in the totally false assumption that having one global language would require eradicating all other languages. As I said, that has never been the case. It's not an either/or proposition, because most human beings are bilingual.




There is absolutely no way in hell that that premise could lead to a world where every language but one has ceased to exist. On the contrary, if the chips fall where they may, if there's no conscious effort to impose an unnatural monolingualism, then of course multiple languages will continue to exist. There will be a lingua franca used globally, much as English, Spanish, French, and Chinese are already used internationally today, and there will be many other languages used locally. That's the way human communication has worked for thousands of years, and it's nonsensical to expect that to suddenly change within the next measly 2-3 centuries.

i think youre taking a loose knowledge os psychology and social society and making some fairly absolute statements on impossibility.

you and i clearly disagree fundamentally on what is and isnt possible.

but i think the idea of a dominant language isnt far fetched. im not saying other languages would cease to exist but probably one dominant language in such a society isnt hard to imagine for me.

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

This is a pretty good point, in fact it would be the easiest thing to do as far as any diversity these days.

Maybe they simply don't care?

I'm curious now though what it would be like with Lorca having his accent.

I used to have a bit of a peeve with Hollywood regarding India. I'm mixed race; European and Indian, native of Britain (lifelong lover of many other countries too, inc. Japan) - probably like most people a dozen other tribes too if you could trace ancestry back further than 500 years. In sci-fi, you would rarely see Indians, in what was meant to be a cross section of future humans, when Indians are 1/6th the planet's population. In the 2000s, in Hollywood generally, Indian actors like 80-90% of the time were made to play Arabs, from a completely different section of Asia; people who in general look quite different to Indians, with a very different culture. India isn't even in the Middle East, and has completely different languages and philosophical traditions stretching back millennia.

1942: Sabu, America's first Indian lead, in "Arabian Nights", presumably set in Baghdad

2004: Fellow Anglo Indian, Naveen Andrews, playing an Iraqi, Sayid Jarrah

I didn't even notice at the time, since I didn't notice things like ethnicity as a kid, but Roddenberry was a cool exception. He had Indian friends in WW2, and made an effort to show Indians in Star Trek (one gets the sense that he loved India and Japan, also my two favorite foreign countries - he had a Japanese wedding) - Captain Chandra from "Court Martial", Lt Singh, 1701-D chief engineer Lt. Singh, Khan Noonien Singh, Lt. Radha, etc. You get the sense he loved world culture, especially Asia.

Tennis player Vijay Amritaj in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett Roddenberry in Japanese attire

These days I don't care that much, a human is a human, and some of my objection was rooted in illogical notions of cultural pride, since everyone else seems to harp on about identity, I felt for a while I should get in on the stupid pride game - I felt a civilization of such antiquity and magisterial achievement was getting bad treatment on film - but in hindsight it was nationalistic thinking in a kid who had been a lifelong internationalist (perhaps partly because of Star Trek's enthusiasm for world culture).

Also, honestly - I guess I'm comfortable with America and Hollywood making every film look like humanity consists of the western seaboard of the USA even though it's obviously not ideal, because we are just all one big mestizo planet at the end of the day - and maybe because we could have done a lot worse than a liberal clique of people in LA, from an entrenched democracy, leading global opinions through film. In India, another great democracy, people have their own civic tradition of dissent, protest, free journalism and humanism, but honestly looking at young middle class Indians today, they probably share a lot of their opinions with people like John Stewart, Trevor Noah, John Oliver and Bill Maher - it's like a cross fertilization.

After like 100 years of being sidelined in American cinema, in the last ten, we have Indians actually appearing regularly in American things (I'm surprised as hell) - sitcoms, sci-fi, crime drama - Battlestar Galactica, Quantico, Master of None, The Big Bang Theory, Iron Fist, Heroes, etc. I don't think I've seen a faster change in representation.

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

There is absolutely no way in hell that that premise could lead to a world where every language but one has ceased to exist. On the contrary, if the chips fall where they may, if there's no conscious effort to impose an unnatural monolingualism, then of course multiple languages will continue to exist. There will be a lingua franca used globally, much as English, Spanish, French, and Chinese are already used internationally today, and there will be many other languages used locally. That's the way human communication has worked for thousands of years, and it's nonsensical to expect that to suddenly change within the next measly 2-3 centuries.

Although I agree mostly, because the biggest dozen seem to be healthy, there has been a lot of talk of how language death is massively accelerating, due to the prevalence of massive lingua francas like English, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, French, Arabic - how useful they are compared to smaller languages - their media reach - their ease of education.

It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller. - "When Languages Die" by K David Harrison​

This is how I imagine English came to be the human standard by TNG. However, some scholars, as you may be aware, have said that language apps and so on, might decelerate the decline somewhat, as it will become much easier to conduct business and education in smaller languages. Still, it's predicted thousands will die out, along perhaps, with their myths.

 

[eschaton]

There is absolutely no way in hell that that premise could lead to a world where every language but one has ceased to exist. On the contrary, if the chips fall where they may, if there's no conscious effort to impose an unnatural monolingualism, then of course multiple languages will continue to exist. There will be a lingua franca used globally, much as English, Spanish, French, and Chinese are already used internationally today, and there will be many other languages used locally. That's the way human communication has worked for thousands of years, and it's nonsensical to expect that to suddenly change within the next measly 2-3 centuries.

I disagree. English has naturally become the mother tongue of many in places like Singapore where multiple languages were originally spoken, but none of the local languages were dominant enough to be agreed upon. Provided you have a situation where people are constantly moving around to different parts of the Earth (e.g., there aren't that many culturally homogeneous enclaves) the language spoken at home would shift to whatever the United Earth's official language was within a few generations.

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

Yeah, look at English's prevalence:

• - The United Kingdom
• - The Republic of Ireland
• - The United States of America
• - The Commonwealth of Australia
• - The Republic of South Africa
• - The European Union (98% fluency in places)
  
• - New Zealand
• - Canada
• - Singapore
• - Hong Kong
• - The Philipines
• - India (another potential 1.3 billion)
• - Pakistan
• - Bangladesh
• - Sri Lanka
  
• - Nigeria (expected to a billion people)
  
• - Many other African states
• - Many Caribbean islands

So: several of the G8, most of the world's stable democracies, two influential port cities, and three economic superpowers. I'm not saying Star Trek will happen, but I could see it happening, and as tragic as I might have found it as someone who loves history, its also in a way perfectly natural.

Okay, colonialism is bad. But after you strip away the hurt pride and so on, this is how languages have always spread and evolved. Even English, is a product of this - a creole of native Old English, combined with the French spoken by the Norman overlords, and church Latin. The language has taken on the same air of sophistication that lured people in the past toward imperial languages. And why not? Being able to communicate with each other clearly is logical, isn't it?

In Nigeria, where you have dozens of tribal languages, a foreign one is often one acceptable to all - it gives no superiority to one tribe - it comes with it's own access to the scientific and legal traditions of the language - scholarship and journalism can connect. Same again for the Philippines, where people talk about the attempt to promote Tagalog over English and Spanish, as a post-colonial reaction that perhaps wasn't necessary. In India, with millennia of language traditions and extensive literature, where each state might feel giving Hindi priority promotes one literary tradition over another, English is also, begrudgingly, a lingua franca that does the same thing as in Nigeria - it's ironically more acceptable to a detached connoisseur of Tamil culture. It definitely gives a young middle class IT worker more opportunity to connect to the global repository of human culture....

....because, for example; while anime isn't dubbed or subbed into Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, or Malayalam too often - English translations exist for almost every one of the thousands of Japanese anime and manga titles going back to Ozama Tezuka - it's all suddenly at your fingertips. You could probably find some obscure thing written in 1967 that has it's own fans.

 

[Christopher]

i think youre taking a loose knowledge os psychology and social society and making some fairly absolute statements on impossibility.

I don't generally use words like "possible" and "impossible," because the universe isn't binary. I have degrees in physics and history, both of which are fields that deal in probabilities based on known data and extrapolated patterns. It's a useless exercise in sophistry to pull out some random hypothetical and say, "Well, you can't prove it can't happen!" After all, there's no way to prove it can either, so it's a total waste of everyone's time. What's actually useful is looking at prior precedent regarding how such processes have played out in known circumstances and using those patterns to extrapolate how they might happen in a similar circumstance. A hypothesis that's supported by evidence and consistent with known patterns is more convincing than a hypothesis that posits a fundamental departure from known patterns without offering any justification for why that departure would occur.

I mean, heck, extrapolation from the known to the unknown is what science fiction is. Many science fiction futures are extrapolations from the historical past. We use past precedents as analogies for corresponding future civilizations. Personally, I've found my history degree much more useful to my science fiction writing than my physics degree, because my history studies were largely about how different cultures interact and evolve in response to their contact, how their differing worldviews and value systems come into conflict or transform each other.

but i think the idea of a dominant language isnt far fetched. im not saying other languages would cease to exist but probably one dominant language in such a society isnt hard to imagine for me.

As I've been saying all along, I'm perfectly fine with the idea of a dominant language, a lingua franca that the society as a whole uses to communicate. My own fiction, both in Star Trek and in my main original universe, is predicated on the assumption that English will be the lingua franca of future humanity, so of course I'm not opposed to that part of it. My point is simply that the existence of such a common language does not require the erasure of all other languages.

Although I agree mostly, because the biggest dozen seem to be healthy, there has been a lot of talk of how language death is massively accelerating, due to the prevalence of massive lingua francas like English, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, French, Arabic - how useful they are compared to smaller languages - their media reach - their ease of education.

It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller. - "When Languages Die" by K David Harrison​

This is how I imagine English came to be the human standard by TNG. However, some scholars, as you may be aware, have said that language apps and so on, might decelerate the decline somewhat, as it will become much easier to conduct business and education in smaller languages. Still, it's predicted thousands will die out, along perhaps, with their myths.

Unfortunately, that's probably true. But as you say, there's still a fair number of languages that remain prominent and commonly used. The number of languages in use will probably decline, yes, but the idea that there would ever be exactly one language spoken by 100% of humanity to the exclusion of any other languages is taking that to an absurd extreme.

 

[danellis]

..., a half-desi chief of security (who replaced a full desi one who was killed)..

Dare I ask what "desi" means? I thought the deceased chief of security was the caucasian brunette and that Ash Tyler, a middle eastern person, was the current one?

dJE

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

Dare I ask what "desi" means? I thought the deceased chief of security was the caucasian brunette and that Ash Tyler, a middle eastern person, was the current one?

dJE

Desi is slang for "from India/the Indian subcontinent"

Shazad Latif isn't Middle Eastern, he is Scottish and Pakistani, mixed.

Rekha Sharma was the original security officer on Discovery.

 

[Christopher]

And Rekha Sharma's parents came from Uttar Pradesh in northern India.

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

Unfortunately, that's probably true. But as you say, there's still a fair number of languages that remain prominent and commonly used. The number of languages in use will probably decline, yes, but the idea that there would ever be exactly one language spoken by 100% of humanity to the exclusion of any other languages is taking that to an absurd extreme.

It's sad. Take a language like Manipuri, with an isolated culture, and a couple of millions of speakers - it might end up being edged out by one of the large ones like Hindi - or maybe being unusually large for a non-state language, like say Welsh, it might have enough speakers to survive as this fascinating pocket language in North East India - maybe with the aid of translation apps and stuff. But those languages that have only a hundred, or thousand speakers left are suggested to be almost certainly on an irreversible path by that book - I hope anthropologists can record their oral mythologies in time at least, before the last speakers die.

Thang-Ta, Indian martial art practiced in Manipur

But in a way, if I look at it from a rational perspective, I also find it uplifting, that more and more people may be able to share and communicate easily - a culture does not necessarily have to die with a language, as most Irish people don't know the Irish language but many still have an interest in Ireland's history and literature. People simply translate old culture into the new vernacular, or make new culture in the new vernacular - it's a scary process for many - it bears the fear that they will become some lower class in somebody else's world (not unfounded, i.e. adivasis becoming permanently unemployable in some housing project), and of course some critics say that you get a McDonalds bowdlerized version of the culture if it's myths survive only as a non-living tradition - but on the upside, what I actually see when Hollywood or another industry gets its hands on a culture (say, re-interpreting Pacific myth into "Moana") is often more like a process that isn't too different from a native updating it, like say the Brother Grimm re-interpreting ancient myths for an audience that no longer understands the life of a medieval peasant - it can universalize and immortalize something that would have been lost.

You have Maori from New Zealand like Taika Watiti, Temuera Morrison, Manu Bennet, leaving their mark on Hollywood despite the size of their nation (one is the face of a million Clone Troopers for kids growing up across the world) - Samoans and Hawaiians like The Rock and Jason Momoa injecting elements of their culture into their work - really multiracial people like Keanu Reeves starring in projects like The Matrix that borrow globally. I like that, at least when its done in good faith.

 

[indranee]

I used to have a bit of a peeve with Hollywood regarding India. I'm mixed race; European and Indian, native of Britain (lifelong lover of many other countries too, inc. Japan) - probably like most people a dozen other tribes too if you could trace ancestry back further than 500 years. In sci-fi, you would rarely see Indians, in what was meant to be a cross section of future humans, when Indians are 1/6th the planet's population. In the 2000s, in Hollywood generally, Indian actors like 80-90% of the time were made to play Arabs, from a completely different section of Asia; people who in general look quite different to Indians, with a very different culture. India isn't even in the Middle East, and has completely different languages and philosophical traditions stretching back millennia.

You forgot his casting Persis Khambatta (an Indian citizen) in TMP.

I'm Indian-American and I began to watch Quantico with my brother simply because of the lead actress, but had to quit because it quickly became unwatchable. Also, my brother died suddenly two years ago and I just couldn't watch anything for a while that he and I watched together.

I get your about Roddenberry and India. I think he felt a strong connection to it.

In 1945, Roddenberry began flying for Pan American World Airways,[14] including routes from New York to Johannesburg or Calcutta, the two longest Pan Am routes at the time.

I believe he may have made some friendly connections within the city and its denizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Roddenberry

 

[DEWLine]

Getting back to the original point...

You raise an interesting question - we've managed to keep going for five "pages", despite running the risk of running in circles at times - and as noted elsewhere, there are remedies to this situation. Starship duty has its own forms of attrition, so swapping characters in and out can be a partial solution. Since this particular series is filming in Toronto - the actors playing Lieutenants Detmer and Owusekun both call that city home, wherever each of them was born and raised before - Toronto can itself provide a certain degree of remedy.

This next bit might be a "sidebar" issue...

The interview with Mr. Isaacs from Variety provided an interesting answer to the accent question re: Capt. Lorca, if I might quote a few lines:

I’ve been privileged enough to work with the [U.S. Army] Rangers at Fort Benning, and no matter where you come from in America, if you train down South where most of the bases are, you pick up some form of a Southern accent. And I wanted something that had subliminal hints at the military.

The idea of Fort Benning transforming in the fullness of time from a US Army base to a Starfleet facility has a certain logic to it.

 

[Brainsucker]

Shouldn't they be speaking Spanish then?

Yes, you're right. That's why I don't have any problem with that. The problem is just the accent. For me, it just not important.

 

[Captain pl1ngpl0ng]

Another trend in the world is that international doctoral students enrolled in science and engineering fields are typicaly looking at USA as the country to go get their education. That trend is likely to continue and also grow.

"UNESCO Science Report Towards 2030"
got some 800 pages of material which include Tracking trends in innovation and mobility the last 10 years.
In 2012 USA alone hosted nearly half of all International doctoral students.

Point being.... The lack of national diversity (in the Star Trek universe) are an illusion... I would think/guess.

 

[MacLeod]

Another trend in the world is that international doctoral students enrolled in science and engineering fields are typicaly looking at USA as the country to go get their education. That trend is likely to continue and also grow.

"UNESCO Science Report Towards 2030"
got some 800 pages of material which include Tracking trends in innovation and mobility the last 10 years.
In 2012 USA alone hosted nearly half of all International doctoral students.

Point being.... The lack of national diversity (in the Star Trek universe) are an illusion... I would think/guess.

Could that be in part due to the fact that perhaps English is the dominant language in those fields, if you look the UK comes in 2nd place with other English speaking countires such as Australia and Canada (yes I know French is spoken in parts of Canada) which means something like 67% is done in English speaking countires.

 

[Captain pl1ngpl0ng]

Could that be in part due to the fact that perhaps English is the dominant language in those fields,

Absolutely, starfleet personell would probably have some degree of education in science and engineering fields so any accent from the motherland would probably be polished off after a while.

 

[Awesome Possum]

I’d be happy with at least one trans character played by an actual trans person. I almost never get to see a character like myself on any show or movie and especially not in a positive role. Star Trek could actually be somewhat progressive again and not playing catch up.

 

[Captain pl1ngpl0ng]

especially not in a positive role

Are trans in movies mostly cast in negative roles?

 

[Awesome Possum]

Are trans in movies mostly cast in negative roles?

I can’t think of any cast in any major film role. Just cis men in makeup.

Otherwise they’re sex workers or dead bodies.